Encyclopaedia Britannica - Russia

almost exactly one year later.

Nemtsov, BorisFlowers, condolence messages, and a memorial photograph marking the spot in Moscow's Red Square where Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was assassinated on February 27, 2015.Ivan Sekretarev/AP Images

As Russia’s air campaign in Syria entered its second year, the Assad government regained momentum against the opposition and Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) forces. Russian fighter jets routinely violated NATO airspace in the Baltic in 2016, and nuclear-capable missile systems were deployed to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. In the months prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a series of high-profile hacking attacks targeted the Democratic Party and its presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Thousands of private e-mails were subsequently published by the Web site WikiLeaks, and U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies implicated Russian state security services in the cyberattacks. After the victory of Republican candidate Donald Trump in November 2016, a series of investigations were launched by the U.S. to determine if there had been collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.

Putin, Vladimir; Obama, BarackVladimir Putin (left) and Barack Obama at a G20 meeting in Hangzhou, China, 2016.Alexei Druzhinin/AP Images

Although the Russian economy continued to struggle, Putin remained broadly popular with the Russian public. Low oil prices hurt exports, and imports were hamstrung by Western sanctions and a ruble that had fallen sharply against the dollar. Putin’s enduring appeal seemed to derive in no small part from his propagation of the image of an ascendant Russia bedeviled by a jealous West. When the entire Russian track and field team was banned from the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Putin decried the politicization of sport—despite the fact that investigators had uncovered a massive Russian state-sponsored doping program. The International Olympic Committee subsequently issued the harshest penalty in the history of the modern Olympic movement when it banned the entire Russian team from the 2018 Winter Games in P’yŏngch’ang (Pyeongchang), South Korea. In December 2017 Putin declared his intention to seek reelection for a fourth term as president. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Leaders of Russia from 1276

The table provides a chronological list of the leaders of Russia from 1276 onward.

Leaders of Muscovy, Russia, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union princes and grand princes of Moscow (Muscovy): Danilovich dynasty* *The Danilovich dynasty is a late branch of the Rurik dynasty and is named after its progenitor, Daniel. **On Oct. 22 (O.S.), 1721, Peter I the Great took the title of "emperor" (Russian: imperator), considering it a larger, more European title than the Russian "tsar." However, despite the official titling, conventional usage took an odd turn. Every male sovereign continued usually to be called tsar (and his consort tsarina, or tsaritsa), but every female sovereign was conventionally called empress (imperatritsa). ***The direct line of the Romanov dynasty came to an end in 1761 with the death of Elizabeth, daughter of Peter I. However, subsequent rulers of the "Holstein-Gottorp dynasty"—the first of whom was Peter III, son of Charles Frederick, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and Anna, daughter of Peter I—took the family name of Romanov. Daniel (son of Alexander Nevsky) c. 1276–1303 Yury 1303–25 Ivan I 1325–40 Semyon (Simeon) 1340–53 Ivan II 1353–59 Dmitry (II) Donskoy 1359–89 Vasily I 1389–1425 Vasily II 1425–62 Ivan III 1462–1505 Vasily III 1505–33 Ivan IV 1533–47 tsars of Russia: Danilovich dynasty Ivan IV 1547–84 Fyodor I 1584–98 tsars of Russia: Time of Troubles Boris Godunov 1598–1605 Fyodor II 1605 False Dmitry 1605–06 Vasily (IV) Shuysky 1606–10 Interregnum 1610–12 tsars and empresses of Russia and the Russian Empire: Romanov dynasty** Michael 1613–45 Alexis 1645–76 Fyodor III 1676–82 Peter I (Ivan V coruler 1682–96) 1682–1725 Catherine I 1725–27 Peter II 1727–30 Anna 1730–40 Ivan VI 1740–41 Elizabeth 1741–61 (O.S.) Peter III*** 1761–62 (O.S.) Catherine II 1762–96 Paul 1796–1801 Alexander I 1801–25 Nicholas I 1825–55 Alexander II 1855–81 Alexander III 1881–94 Nicholas II 1894–1917 provisional government 1917 chairmen (or first secretaries) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Vladimir Ilich Lenin 1917–24 Joseph Stalin 1924–53 Georgy Malenkov 1953 Nikita Khrushchev 1953–64 Leonid Brezhnev 1964–82 Yury Andropov 1982–84 Konstantin Chernenko 1984–85 Mikhail Gorbachev 1985–91 presidents of Russia Boris Yeltsin 1991–99 Vladimir Putin 1999–2008 Dmitry Medvedev 2008–12 Vladimir Putin 2012–

Citation Information

Article Title: Russia

Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Date Published: 24 August 2019

URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/Russia

Access Date: August 27, 2019

Additional Reading

A general overview of Russia is Glenn E. Curtis, Russia: A Country Study (1998). Denis J.B. Shaw, Russia in the Modern World: A New Geography (1999), examines the spatial structures of Russia, including those of polity, culture, economy, and rural and urban life, with a descriptive discussion of the country’s traditional 11 economic regions. Land

Graham Smith, The Post-Soviet States: Mapping the Politics of Transition (1999), explores Russia’s transition into democracy, particularly with respect to the states that now border the country. Blair A. Ruble, Jodi Koehn, and Nancy E. Popson (eds.), Fragmented Space in the Russian Federation (2001), combines the efforts of Western and Russian geographers in a collective monograph. Of similar origin and character is George J. Demko, Gregory Ioffe, and Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya (eds.), Population Under Duress: The Geodemography of Post-Soviet Russia (1999).

Information about Russia’s forests and deforestation is presented in Friends of the Siberian Forests, Bureau for Regional Outreach Campaigns, and Anatoly Lebedev, The Wild East: Trees in Transit: The Timber Trade Between Siberia, the Russian Far East, and China (2001); Alexey Yu. Yaroshenko, Peter V. Potapov, and Svetlana A. Turubanova, The Last Intact Forest Landscapes of Northern European Russia: Mapping of Intact Forest Landscapes in Northern European Russia Using High-Resolution Satellite Images: Methods and Results (2001); and Alexey Morozov, Survey of Illegal Forest Felling Activities in Russia (2000).

Ecological damage suffered during the Soviet period is discussed in Ze’ev Wolfson (Boris Komarov), The Geography of Survival: Ecology in the Post-Soviet Era (1994); and Murray Feshbach, Ecological Disaster: Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet

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