Russia's origin is not in Moscow, which didn't exist yet, but along the river routes linking the Baltic to the Black Sea. Down those rivers came the Varangians, Swedish Vikings who traded furs, wax, honey and slaves with the Byzantine Empire. The traditional chronicle says that in 862 the chieftain Rurik settled in Novgorod, and that in 882 his kinsman Oleg took Kyiv and made it the capital of a state that historians call Kievan Rus. From that name, Rus, come both Russia and the word Russian itself.
Kievan Rus was not a centralised state in the modern sense, but a federation of principalities held together by the Rurikid dynasty, trade and, in time, religion. Its decisive moment came in 988, when Prince Vladimir of Kyiv adopted Orthodox Christianity of the Byzantine rite and imposed it on his subjects through a mass baptism in the Dnieper. That choice shaped everything: the Cyrillic alphabet, the liturgy in Slavonic, the art of icons and domes, and a cultural border with Catholic Europe that can still be felt today.
Under Yaroslav the Wise (11th century) Kyiv reached its peak, with its first legal code, the Russkaya Pravda, and cathedrals modelled on Constantinople. But Rus was a body with many heads: when each grand prince died, the territory was divided among sons and nephews, and wars between cousins slowly bled its unity dry. By the time the Mongols arrived, Kievan Rus was already a patchwork of rival principalities, unable to defend itself as a whole.
In 1237 the Mongol armies of Batu, grandson of Genghis Khan, fell upon the Russian principalities. One after another they were razed: Ryazan, Vladimir, and finally Kyiv in 1240, sacked and burned until it was a shadow of the city it had been. It was the blow that closed the era of Kievan Rus and opened what Russian tradition calls the Tatar-Mongol yoke.
For about 240 years, the Russian principalities were subject to the Golden Horde, the Mongol khanate settled on the lower Volga with its capital at Sarai. There was no permanent occupation of the forested north, but there was vassalage: Russian princes had to travel to pay homage to the khan, hand over tribute and receive from him the yarlyk, the licence to rule. Whoever rebelled was crushed; whoever cooperated was rewarded. That is the setting in which a hitherto minor principality began to grow.
Moscow played that game better than anyone. Its princes became collectors of the Mongol tribute and kept a share for themselves, buying land and buying loyalties. In 1380 Prince Dmitry Donskoy defeated a Horde army at Kulikovo, the first great Russian victory, which, though it did not end Mongol rule, became a founding myth. The formal end of the yoke is dated to 1480, when Ivan III refused to keep paying tribute and the armies withdrew without a battle at the Ugra River. The isolation of those centuries, with its back turned to the European Renaissance, left a long mark on Russian political culture.
With the yoke weakened, the Grand Principality of Moscow became the core around which Russia was rebuilt. Ivan III the Great (1462-1505) tripled its territory, absorbed the wealthy merchant republic of Novgorod, stopped paying tribute to the Horde and began using the title of tsar and the Byzantine double-headed eagle. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, some monks developed the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome, heir to Orthodoxy and to empire. It was as much a political programme as a religious one.
His grandson Ivan IV, known as the Terrible, was the first to be formally crowned tsar of all Russia, on 16 January 1547, in the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin. The first part of his reign brought reforms, a new legal code and the conquest of the khanates of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556), which opened up the Volga and the road to Siberia. St Basil's Cathedral, on Red Square, was built to celebrate the capture of Kazan.
The second part was a descent into paranoia and terror. Ivan created the oprichnina, a police force and a territory under his personal control whose agents, dressed in black and on horseback, spread fear with executions, confiscations and massacres; the worst was the sack of Novgorod in 1570, with thousands dead. In 1581, in a fit of rage, he beat his own son and heir to death. His death in 1584 left the throne to a weak, childless son, and opened the door to chaos.
When the last tsar of the Rurikid dynasty died without an heir, Russia sank into the Smutnoye Vremya, the Time of Troubles (1598-1613): a crisis of famines, civil wars, impostors claiming to be the dead tsarevich and a Polish invasion that even occupied the Moscow Kremlin. It was one of the moments when the Russian state came closest to disappearing.
The way out came in 1613, when an assembly of representatives, the Zemsky Sobor, elected as tsar Mikhail Romanov, a sixteen-year-old related to the old dynasty. So began the House of Romanov, which would rule Russia for more than three centuries, until 1917. The 17th century was one of rebuilding and expansion into Siberia, whose rivers and fur-rich forests drew Cossacks and traders all the way to the Pacific.
It was also a century of internal tension: Patriarch Nikon's liturgical reform triggered the schism of the Old Believers, who resisted the changes and were persecuted for generations, and in 1670-1671 the great revolt of peasants and Cossacks led by Stenka Razin shook the south, foreshadowing the weight serfdom would carry throughout Russian history. Onto that country, still medieval in many ways, would come, at the end of the century, a tsar determined to drag it into Europe by force.
Peter I (1682-1725), Peter the Great, was the tsar who decided Russia would stop being an inward-looking eastern power. Nearly two metres tall, he travelled incognito through western Europe to learn from its shipyards and workshops, and came back obsessed with modernising his country. By decree after decree he imposed the shaving of beards, western dress, a professional army, a navy and an administration copied from European models.
His great obsession was the sea. In the long Great Northern War (1700-1721) he defeated Sweden, the dominant power in the Baltic, with the decisive victory at Poltava in 1709. On the conquered land, in the marshy Neva delta, he founded St Petersburg in 1703, his window on Europe, built with the forced labour of thousands of serfs and prisoners who died on the job. In 1712 he made it the capital, displacing Moscow. In 1721 he proclaimed himself emperor, and Russia officially became the Russian Empire.
The people paid the price of that modernisation. Peter tightened serfdom, raised taxes and conscription, and harshly crushed any resistance, including that of his own son Alexei, tortured and killed in prison after being accused of conspiracy. He left behind a Russia that was more powerful and more European on the surface, but also a deeper gulf between a westernised elite and a vast, subjugated peasant mass.
After decades of palace intrigue and coups by the guards, the throne ended up in the hands of a German princess who had come to Russia to marry the heir. Catherine II (1762-1796), Catherine the Great, overthrew her husband Peter III with the backing of the guards and ruled for thirty-four years as one of the most powerful figures in the Europe of her day. She corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, collected the art that today forms the core of the Hermitage and presented herself as an enlightened despot.
Under her reign the Russian Empire grew enormously: two wars against the Ottoman Empire gave it access to the Black Sea and Crimea (annexed in 1783), and the three partitions of Poland, together with Prussia and Austria, wiped that country off the map and added vast western territories to Russia, with millions of new subjects, among them a large part of the Jewish population that would be confined to the so-called Pale of Settlement.
The dark side of that splendour was, once again, serfdom. While the nobility enjoyed ever-growing privileges, the condition of the serfs came close to slavery. In 1773-1775 the biggest peasant uprising in Russian history broke out, led by the Cossack Pugachev, who claimed to be the deposed tsar and came to control much of the south-east before being captured and executed. Catherine responded by strengthening the power of the landowners. The unresolved problem of serfdom would pass intact into the 19th century.
In June 1812, Napoleon crossed the Niemen River at the head of the Grande Armée, some 600,000 men, the largest invading force Europe had ever seen. His aim was to bring Russia to heel and force Alexander I to enforce the Continental Blockade against Britain. Instead of giving decisive battle, the Russians fell back, laying waste to the land as they went, the scorched-earth tactic, drawing the enemy ever deeper inland.
The great battle came at Borodino, near Moscow, in September: a slaughter with tens of thousands dead in a single day and no clear winner. Napoleon entered Moscow, but found it empty and in flames: a fire, largely set on purpose, destroyed most of the city. With no surrender, no supplies and winter closing in, he ordered the retreat. It was a catastrophe: cold, hunger and constant harassment broke up the Grande Armée, which left Russia reduced to a fraction of the force that had entered.
Napoleon's disaster turned Russia into the gendarme of Europe. Its troops reached Paris in 1814, and Alexander I was one of the central figures at the Congress of Vienna. But many Russian officers came back from the West with liberal ideas, and in December 1825 they led the Decembrist uprising, demanding a constitution. The revolt failed and its leaders were executed or exiled to Siberia, but it began the long history of Russian revolutionary opposition.
Russia's 19th century was one of sharp contrast between a brilliant culture and a backward regime. While Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky gave Russia one of the great golden ages of literature and music, most of the population were still serfs, bound to the land and to the landowner. The humiliating defeat in the Crimean War (1853-1856) laid that backwardness bare in front of the western powers.
In 1861, Tsar Alexander II decreed the emancipation of the serfs, freeing more than twenty million peasants. It was a historic reform, but an incomplete one: the peasants were saddled with debts to pay for land that was often not enough, and rural discontent did not die down. Alexander II also pushed through judicial and local reforms, but the revolutionary tide kept rising, and in 1881 the reforming tsar himself was killed by a bomb thrown by the terrorist group Narodnaya Volya.
His successors, Alexander III and Nicholas II, answered with repression and autocracy while the country industrialised at breakneck speed, with the Trans-Siberian Railway as its symbol. The cities filled with poorly paid workers and Marxist ideas. Defeat by Japan in 1905 sparked the Revolution of 1905, with strikes, mutinies —such as the one on the battleship Potemkin— and the Bloody Sunday massacre, when the guard opened fire on a peaceful demonstration outside the Winter Palace. Nicholas II was forced to grant a parliament, the Duma, but never truly accepted limits on his power. The regime staggered on into 1914.
The First World War was the last straw. Russia entered it in 1914 full of patriotic fervour, but defeats against Germany, millions of dead, bread shortages and economic chaos wore away any loyalty to the tsar. Nicholas II, who had personally taken command of the army, took the blame for every disaster, while rumours swirled in the capital about the influence of the monk Rasputin over the imperial family.
In February 1917 (by the Julian calendar then in use; March in the Gregorian), bread protests and strikes in Petrograd overwhelmed the regime. Soldiers refused to fire on the crowds and went over to the revolution. On 2 March Nicholas II abdicated, and with him fell three centuries of Romanovs and centuries of tsarism. A Provisional Government was formed that shared power, in a fragile balance, with the soviets, the councils of workers and soldiers.
That government made the fatal mistake of staying in the war. In April, Lenin returned from exile with a clear programme: bread, peace and land, and all power to the soviets. On the night of 25 October (7 November Gregorian) 1917, the Bolsheviks struck: they seized the key points of Petrograd and stormed the Winter Palace, overthrowing the Provisional Government. It was the October Revolution. Shortly afterwards, having lost the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks dissolved it by force: the new regime was not going to be a parliamentary democracy, but a one-party dictatorship.
Bolshevik power was not consolidated without bloodshed. Between 1918 and 1921 a ferocious civil war raged between the Red Army, organised by Trotsky, and the White Armies backed by foreign powers. In the middle of that war, in July 1918, the Bolsheviks shot Nicholas II and his whole family in a basement in Yekaterinburg. The Red Terror, famine and epidemics cost millions of lives. In 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, was formally proclaimed.
When Lenin died in 1924, after a power struggle, Joseph Stalin came out on top. Under his rule the USSR went through a brutal transformation: the forced collectivisation of agriculture destroyed the traditional peasantry and caused catastrophic famines, among them the Holodomor in Ukraine (1932-1933), with millions dead; the historians' debate over its nature —a famine resulting from Soviet policy or a deliberate genocide— remains open. The rapid industrialisation of the five-year plans raised entire factories at the cost of forced labour in the Gulag, the Soviet network of concentration camps.
In 1936-1938, the Great Terror took repression to its peak: rigged trials, denunciations, mass executions of real or imagined opponents, including much of the party's and the army's own leadership. The most widely accepted estimates speak of hundreds of thousands shot and millions deported in those years, within an overall toll of Stalinism that historians still debate but that undoubtedly runs to several million victims. Stalin built a totalitarian state and an industrial power on top of a mountain of dead.
In 1939, Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with a secret protocol to carve up eastern Europe; the USSR occupied part of Poland, the Baltic states and parts of Finland. But in June 1941, Germany broke the pact and launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in history. For the Soviets it was the start of the Great Patriotic War, the most devastating episode in their history and, at the same time, the most central to their national identity.
The Nazi advance reached the gates of Moscow and besieged Leningrad (St Petersburg) for almost 900 days, with hundreds of thousands dead from starvation. The turning point was Stalingrad (today Volgograd), where in 1942-1943 one of the bloodiest battles in history was fought and the German 6th Army was surrounded and destroyed. From then on the Red Army advanced unstoppably until it took Berlin in May 1945. The USSR paid an unimaginable price for that victory: around 27 million Soviet dead, the greatest loss of any country in the war.
Out of victory came a superpower. The USSR imposed communist regimes across eastern Europe, and the world was split into two blocs by the so-called Iron Curtain. The Cold War began: the arms and nuclear race, the space race —with Sputnik in 1957 and Gagarin, the first human in space, in 1961—, crises such as the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and proxy wars across half the world. After Stalin's terror, leaders such as Khrushchev and Brezhnev eased the repression but kept the one-party system, with dissent persecuted and an economy growing ever more stagnant.
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and tried to reform an exhausted system with perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (openness and transparency). The reforms exposed the accumulated problems instead of solving them: the economy collapsed, the Soviet republics demanded independence and central control cracked. In August 1991, a coup attempt by hardliners failed thanks, in part, to the resistance led by Boris Yeltsin. On 8 December, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the agreement dissolving the USSR; on 25 December 1991 Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
The Yeltsin decade (1991-1999) brought political freedom but also chaos: economic shock therapy that impoverished millions, the rise of the oligarchs who took over privatised industry, the 1998 financial crisis and the bloody First Chechen War. Amid that disillusion, Yeltsin appointed as prime minister an almost unknown former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, and resigned on the last day of 1999, leaving him as acting president.
Putin won the 2000 election and has dominated Russian politics ever since, alternating between the presidency and the post of prime minister. His era brought stability and economic recovery thanks to oil, but also a growing concentration of power, control of the media, repression of the opposition and an increasingly confrontational foreign policy: the war with Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and, on 24 February 2022, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which opened the largest armed conflict in Europe since 1945. The war, still ongoing, has caused tens of thousands of deaths, international sanctions and an isolation of Russia from the West whose outcome is yet to be written.
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Moscow first appears in the chronicles in 1147, as a modest stronghold founded by Prince Yuri Dolgoruky on the forested frontier of Rus. Nothing hinted at its destiny. Its rise began under the Mongol yoke: its princes became collectors of the Horde's tribute and used that role to amass land, money and the seat of the Orthodox Church, which moved there in the 14th century and gave the city enormous prestige.
When Ivan III stopped paying tribute to the Mongols in 1480 and married a niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Moscow began to present itself as the Third Rome, heir to Constantinople and capital of Orthodoxy. The Kremlin — the walled fortress on the Moskva River — was rebuilt with the help of Italian architects, with its golden-domed cathedrals and red-brick walls that still stand today.
Moscow was the undisputed capital until Peter the Great founded Saint Petersburg and moved the government there in 1712. For two centuries Moscow remained the old capital, more Russian and more traditional than the westernised city on the Neva, but it lost its political prominence. Its most dramatic moment in that period came in 1812, when Napoleon occupied it and a great fire destroyed much of the city, which was later rebuilt.
The Revolution gave it back its crown: in March 1918 the Bolshevik government moved the capital back to Moscow, safer and more central than Petrograd. From then on the Kremlin was once again the centre of Russian and Soviet power, and Red Square, with Lenin's Mausoleum and St Basil's Cathedral, became the stage for the great parades of the 20th century.
Under the USSR, Moscow became the showcase of socialism. The metro opened in 1935, with stations decorated like underground palaces of marble, mosaics and chandeliers, designed to show that luxury now belonged to the people. Stalin ordered the construction of the Seven Sisters, the huge Stalinist-style skyscrapers that still define the city's skyline.
Soviet Moscow was also the Moscow of fear: home of the Lubyanka, headquarters of the political police, and the starting point of the purges. And it was the city that held out: in the winter of 1941 the Red Army stopped the German troops at the gates of the capital, in one of the decisive battles of the Second World War. The Red Square parades, every 1 May and every 9 May, became the image of Soviet might before the world.
Around Moscow, to the north-east, stretches the Golden Ring: a group of ancient towns that were the heart of medieval Rus before Moscow eclipsed them. In the 12th and 13th centuries Vladimir and Suzdal were capitals of a powerful principality, with white cathedrals of carved stone that rank among the masterpieces of early Russian architecture. Rostov, Yaroslavl, Sergiev Posad and others complete the route.
Suzdal is the jewel of the group: a museum-town with almost no modern buildings, with dozens of churches, monasteries and wooden houses scattered among open fields, which keeps the look of Russia before Peter the Great. Sergiev Posad, with its Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, is still the great spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox Church. In many ways, the Golden Ring is a journey to the country's origins.
With more than twelve million inhabitants, Moscow is today one of the largest cities in Europe and the absolute centre of Russia's political and economic power. After the end of the USSR it went through a dizzying transformation: the oligarchs, the glass skyscrapers of the Moscow-City financial district, monumental traffic jams and a sharp contrast between the huge wealth concentrated here and the rest of the country.
At the same time, it is still the city of the Kremlin and Red Square, where the decisions that shape all of Russia are made and, in recent years, much of the international agenda too. On its streets, the domes of churches rebuilt after Soviet atheism, Lenin's Mausoleum still standing and the symbols of the new Russian capitalism sit side by side: the layers of its history summed up in a single city.
Before Moscow existed, Veliky Novgorod was already one of the most important cities of Rus. Located on the trade routes linking the Baltic with the interior, in the 9th century it was one of the first centres of the Rurikid dynasty, and during the Middle Ages it was governed as a unique merchant republic: its popular assembly, the veche, elected and deposed princes, something unheard of in the rest of Russia.
Novgorod prospered as a partner of the Hanseatic League and kept its independence until Moscow subdued it by force under Ivan III in 1478, and Ivan the Terrible punished it with a massacre in 1570. Its kremlin on the banks of the Volkhov River and its 11th-century St Sophia Cathedral make it a living museum of the country's medieval origins.
In 1703, in the middle of the marshy Neva delta freshly taken from Sweden, Peter the Great founded Saint Petersburg as his window on Europe. The city was built from scratch with the forced labour of tens of thousands of serfs and prisoners, many of whom died on the job. In 1712 it became the capital of the Russian Empire, a role it would keep for two centuries.
Designed as a European capital, Saint Petersburg filled up with Baroque and Neoclassical palaces, canals and ruler-straight avenues. The Winter Palace and the Hermitage, Nevsky Prospekt, the white nights of summer: everything breathes the imperial ambition of turning Russia into a Western power. It was the city of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, and the setting for the court of the last tsars.
Saint Petersburg was the stage for the earthquake of 1917. Here, then called Petrograd, the February protests that toppled the tsar broke out and, in October, the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace. After Lenin's death the city was renamed Leningrad in 1924. It lost its status as capital, which moved back to Moscow in 1918, but kept its huge cultural and industrial weight.
Its most tragic chapter is the siege of Leningrad: between 1941 and 1944 German troops encircled it for almost 900 days. Hunger, cold and bombing killed around a million civilians, in one of the deadliest sieges in history. The city held out without surrendering, and that resistance was etched into the national memory. In 1991, with the end of the USSR, it got back its historic name of Saint Petersburg.
At the far western end, cut off from the rest of Russia by Lithuania and Poland, lies the exclave of Kaliningrad. Until 1945 it was called Königsberg and was one of the great cities of East Prussia, founded by the Teutonic Knights in the 13th century, the coronation city of the Prussian kings and home of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose tomb is still there.
After the Second World War, the Potsdam Conference awarded the northern part of East Prussia to the USSR. The German population was expelled or died, and the city, flattened by bombing, was resettled with Soviet citizens and renamed Kaliningrad in 1946. Today it is a Russian territory surrounded by the European Union and NATO, of huge military value for its port on the Baltic, with a Prussian heritage that peeks out among the Soviet architecture.
The Russian north-west holds two faces of the far north. On Lake Onega, the island of Kizhi preserves a unique ensemble of wooden architecture: the Church of the Transfiguration, with its twenty-two domes, was built in the 18th century entirely of wood and, according to tradition, without a single nail. It is a testament to the old carpentry craft of the peasant Russian north.
Further north, in the Arctic, lies Murmansk, founded in 1916 as an ice-free port thanks to the Gulf Stream. It was key in both world wars as an entry point for Allied supplies, and during the Cold War it became the base of the Soviet Northern Fleet and its nuclear submarines. It is the largest city in the world above the Arctic Circle and the gateway to the Kola Peninsula and the northern lights.
The Ural Mountains, low and worn down, are the conventional line separating Europe from Asia, and they split Russia in two. For centuries they were the gateway to Siberia, and from the 18th century they became the empire's great mining and industrial district: iron, copper, gold, platinum and precious stones fuelled Russia's growth and, later, Soviet heavy industry.
Yekaterinburg, founded in 1723 and named after Empress Catherine I, is the great city of the Urals. In the Second World War the region took in hundreds of factories evacuated from the west ahead of the German advance, which made it the industrial and arms-making heart of the USSR, much of it in closed, secret cities.
Yekaterinburg carries one of the darkest episodes in Russian history. After the Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II and his family were brought here as prisoners. On the night of 16 to 17 July 1918, in the basement of the Ipatiev House, the Bolsheviks shot the tsar, the tsarina, their five children and several servants, and hid the bodies in the nearby forests.
For decades the crime was hushed up. The remains were identified and officially buried only in post-Soviet Russia, in 1998, and the Church on the Blood was built on the site of the execution. The Orthodox Church canonised the imperial family as martyrs. Yekaterinburg became sadly famous for this event, and it is also the birthplace of Boris Yeltsin, the first president of post-Soviet Russia.
Siberia, that third of the planet's land surface, began to be absorbed into Russia at the end of the 16th century, when Cossacks and fur trappers pushed forward river by river, driven by the trade in sable and fox. In barely a century they reached the Pacific. Colonisation subjugated the indigenous Siberian peoples and burdened them with a tribute paid in furs.
Siberia was also always a land of exile: the Decembrists, political prisoners and common criminals were sent there under the tsars, and it was there that Stalin spread the Gulag archipelago, with millions deported to its labour camps. Its great modern feat was the Trans-Siberian Railway, built between 1891 and 1916, which links Moscow with the Pacific over more than 9,000 kilometres and made it possible to settle and exploit that immense territory.
In southern Siberia lies Lake Baikal, the deepest and oldest lake on the planet: more than 1,600 metres deep and some 25 million years old. It holds around a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water and is home to thousands of species found nowhere else, such as the nerpa, a freshwater seal.
Its shores are the land of the Buryat people, whose culture and language are related to those of the Mongols and whose traditions are Buddhist and shamanic. They consider many of the lake's rocks and islands sacred, such as Olkhon Island. For Russians, Baikal is a symbol of the vastness and beauty of Siberia; in winter its surface freezes into clear blue ice that has become an iconic image of the country.
At the other end of the country, on the Pacific Ocean, Vladivostok is the great port of the Russian Far East and the end of the Trans-Siberian line. Its name literally means "rule the East". It was founded in 1860 after these lands were annexed to the empire, as part of Russia's eastward expansion at China's expense. It is the base of the Russian Pacific Fleet.
During the Russian Civil War it was one of the last strongholds to fall under Soviet control, in 1922, after an intervention by foreign troops, including Japanese and American forces. In Soviet times it was a military city closed to foreigners until 1991. Today, with its bays and its great suspension bridges, it looks to Asia (China, Korea and Japan) as much as or more than to faraway Moscow, and it sums up the dual European and Asian character of all of Russia.
The Volga, the longest river in Europe, is Russia's historic backbone. Along its 3,500 kilometres are strung some of the country's most important cities, and for centuries trade, armies and waves of colonisation heading south and east travelled its waters. Russians fondly call it Volga-matushka, little mother Volga.
Very different peoples lived side by side on its banks: Slavs, Tatars, Chuvash, Mordvins, and the Volga Germans invited by Catherine the Great. It was the setting for the great peasant and Cossack rebellions — those of Stenka Razin and Pugachev — and, in the 20th century, for Soviet industrialisation and the dams that turned it into a chain of reservoirs. To understand the Volga is to understand how Russia expanded from its core towards the south and into Asia.
Kazan, today the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, was the capital of a powerful Tatar khanate, heir to the Golden Horde and of Muslim tradition. Its conquest by Ivan the Terrible in 1552 was a turning point: it marked Russia's shift from kingdom to multi-ethnic empire and opened the door to expansion towards the lower Volga, the Urals and Siberia. St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow was built to celebrate it.
Since then, Muslim Tatars and Orthodox Russians have lived together in the region, not without tensions over the centuries. Today Kazan is one of the great symbols of a plural Russia: in its white kremlin, a World Heritage Site, the Kul Sharif Mosque — rebuilt in 2005 — and an Orthodox cathedral stand together, an image of the ever-delicate balance between the two cultures.
Founded in 1221 where the Volga meets the Oka, Nizhny Novgorod was for centuries the great trading hub of inland Russia. Its annual fair, the Makaryevskaya, was the largest in the empire: a meeting point between the goods of Europe and those of Asia, which made the city famous across the 19th-century world of commerce.
In the Soviet era it changed its name — it was called Gorky, after the writer Maxim Gorky, who was born there — and became an industrial and military centre closed to foreigners; the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov was exiled to this city. It got its historic name back with the end of the USSR. Its red-brick kremlin, perched above the Volga, is still one of the great viewpoints over the river.
Volgograd was called Stalingrad between 1925 and 1961, and that name is etched into world history. Between August 1942 and February 1943 the Battle of Stalingrad was fought here, one of the bloodiest battles ever: the city was reduced to rubble in street-by-street fighting, and there the German army suffered its first major defeat as the 6th Army was encircled and destroyed.
Stalingrad was the turning point of the Second World War on the Eastern Front: from then on the initiative passed to the Red Army, which would not stop advancing until Berlin. The human cost of the battle is counted at close to two million casualties among both sides and civilians. Today the city is dominated by the colossal Motherland Calls statue on Mamayev Kurgan hill, one of the great war memorials.
In the far south, on the Black Sea and at the foot of the Caucasus, Sochi is Russia's climatic exception: a subtropical corner of palm trees and beaches, sheltered from cold winds by the mountains. It became famous in the Soviet era as the country's great resort city, a destination for workers' sanatoriums and holidays, and a summer retreat for Kremlin leaders, Stalin included.
This southern region, already on the edge of the Caucasus, has a complex history: in the 19th century it was the land of the Circassians, a people who suffered expulsion and ethnic cleansing after the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, an episode remembered today as a tragedy. In 2014 Sochi hosted the Winter Olympics, the great international showcase of Putin's Russia, with the snowy mountains of Krasnaya Polyana just a few kilometres from the warm coast.
Hardly anything that happened to Russia happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
