By early 1917 the military defeats and social strains of World War I had created a political crisis in Imperial Russia. Over several unseasonably warm days in February and March of that year, angry crowds gathered in the capital of Petrograd (formerly and once again St. Petersburg), and the capital garrison refused to suppress the disturbances. Isolated at military headquarters near the front, Tsar Nicholas II did not realize the gravity of the situation until too late. He waited too long to return to the seat of his government and was forced to abdicate in Pskov, where his train was diverted...

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Like all the combatant powers at the onset of World War I, Russia expected to prevail in the conflict and developed comprehensive and far-reaching war aims. Many of these goals were long-standing. Since the eighteenth century, Russia had been trying to seize the Turkish Straits, its only access to the Mediterranean Sea and rich southern trade routes. Russian interests in Central Europe had moved from defending its western borders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to expanding into Polish territory in the eighteenth and attempting to create a hegemony over the Balkans in the nineteenth...

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the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian media began to actively report on the government and to question its actions. When President Vladimir Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin into office, he implemented restrictions on the media that greatly reduced their freedoms. Putin also began to reinstate government controls over the media and to prosecute media companies and owners who did not comply...

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The first two years of the Great War strained tsarist Russia to its breaking point. Vladimir Lenin described the war as massively accelerating the process of revolution, and after nearly a century of hindsight it is difficult to establish a credible counterfactual scenario in which Russia might have avoided at least something along the lines of the February 1916 collapse of the monarchy. Was the war itself the cause of the collapse of Imperial Russia? Or did the war merely exacerbate fundamental weaknesses that had been previously demonstrated yet never effectively addressed?..

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Count Sergei Iul'evich Witte oversaw Russia's transition economy from 1892 to 1903. As finance minister, Witte pushed for greater exports, ambitious industrialization, and large foreign loans. He hoped to modernize Russia and make it competitive with other great powers. These policies by and large continued after Witte was dismissed in 1903 and were expanded by Witte when he returned to government as premier in 1905-1906, and by his successors...

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A traditional explanation for the success of the Bolshevik coup in November 1917 is the polarization of Russian society during the last decades of the empire. As Russia underwent rapid industrialization and urbanization--with the growth of a capital-controlling middle class and the proliferation of poor industrial workers--the traditional agrarian economy of Russia and the organization of its society into sosloviia (estates) was breaking down and becoming replaced with an unstable capitalist system. For some scholars, the classical Marxist paradigm of a radicalized proletariat seizing power from an oppressive bourgeoisie has best explained the Russian Revolution. According to this argument, no social conciliation was possible, and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was inevitable...

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Russia is known for its long and bitter winters. The country's hostile climate helped stop various invaders during its history, including the large armies of Napoleon in 1812 and of Adolf Hitler in 1941 and 1942. In the Moscow region, snow covers the ground for about five months each year. In the northernmost part of Russia, snow abounds for eight to nine months a year. The small percentage of Russia's land that is fit for agriculture has a short growing season and insufficient rainfall. Half the land has permafrost beneath the surface. Most of the coastal waters, lakes, and rivers freeze for much of the year...

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Russia's many large rivers have served as important means of communication and commerce. The construction of canals further improved these activities...

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Many scientists divide Russia into four zones according to soil conditions and plant life, which are based mainly on climate. The zones form broad belts across Russia, and no sharp transitions separate them. From north to south, the zones are (1) the tundra, (2) the forest zone, (3) the steppes, and (4) the semidesert and mountainous zone...

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The arts in Russia date back to the earliest days of the country. But Russian artists did not produce internationally recognized works in many fields until the early 1800's. Throughout much of the 1800's and the early 1900's, Russia became an international leader in classical music, ballet, drama, and literature. Several Russian painters and sculptors also gained worldwide fame...

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