Russia

From the Viking princes of Kiev to a continental empire spanning eleven time zones.

Russia traces its political origins to Kievan Rus', the medieval federation of Slavic and Varangian (Viking) principalities conventionally dated to 882, when the prince Oleg seized Kiev and made it his capital. After the Mongol invasion of 1237-1240 shattered the Kievan realm and subjected the Russian lands to the Golden Horde, the principality of Moscow slowly gathered the scattered territories, threw off Mongol overlordship in 1480, and in 1547 saw Ivan IV crowned the first tsar. Peter the Great proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721, and under him and Catherine the Great Russia became a European great power stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific. The empire collapsed in the revolutions of 1917; the Bolsheviks founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, a one-party communist state whose history includes forced collectivization, the man-made famine of 1932-33, the Great Terror, the gulag, and the staggering sacrifice and victory of the Great Patriotic War. The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, leaving the Russian Federation as its principal successor state.