Russian History Resources

Click on a portrait of a Tsar to go the Wikipedia page for that ruler (opens in new tab).

Timelines

There are quite a few timelines around, some less accurate than others (BBC, for instance). The Wikipedia one is very detailed:

• Wikipedia timeline This detailed timeline also offers links to other Wikipedia articles covering events by year
• The animated History of Russia. Covers a lot of ground from earliest days on beyond 1800, but the first half is as good a quick introduction as anything (4minutes!)

Maps & Atlases

Maps are a bit of a problem for this period of Russian history, not least because many of them are, not unreasonably, in Russian. Use Google Translate (which may happen automatically, certainly in Microsoft Edge, or Google Chrome) to get them in English. There are many very useful maps scattered about the Wikipedia entries, too numerous to list here.

• Routledge Atlas of Russian History, Martin Gilbert, 4th Ed. 2013. Only twenty or so maps on Russia prior to 1917, and all in black & white. Quite hard to use, I find, but I find this is true of all his atlases. Amazon
• An Atlas of Russian History: Eleven Centuries of Changing Borders. Alan Frank Chew, 1967. 37 B&W maps with useful accompanying text. Very hard to find.
• Russian Geographical Society GeoPortal A great collection of maps, and atlases. The linked page is for the Atlas of the USSR Part 1, but provides a useful springboard. Of course all the text is in Russian, but for many of the maps, this doesn’t matter, and the main site is translated OK by Google Translate et al.

At the heart of much of Russian expansionary policy and practice over five hundred years plus is the irreducible problem of its geography. This article makes a good fist of explaining the essential geo-political issues:

• Russia and the ‘Geo’ of its geopolitics
• And a contemporary take, but with the same themes perhaps more elegantly expressed: Russia’s Perpetual Geopolitics

The critical nature of geography and political history is the subject of a famous essay by Halford Mackinder in 1904: The geographical pivot of history. 

Wikipedia

Apart from the mostly very good pages on the individual Tsars of the period, linked to from the images at the top of the page, there are a series of other Wikipedia articles that can send you on a long chain of reading. One extra benefit of the better Wikipedia pages is the ‘Further Reading’, ‘See Also’ and ‘References’ sections at the bottom of each page.

There’s a series of pages offering a synoptic view of the period:

• History of Russia  The whole sweep from earliest times
• Kievan Rus’
• Expansion of Russia 1500-1800
• Tsardom of Russia
• Russian Empire
• History of Russia (1721–96)

For the period before 1600, there are lots of pages, often with very helpful maps. A sample below, but there are links on all these pages to greater depth:

• Timeline of the Golden Horde Perhaps start here
• Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus’
• Grand Duchy of Moscow (1283–1547)

The series of wars that involved Sweden and Russia are well covered:

• The Second Northern War  1655-1660
• The Russo-Polish or Thirteen Years’ War – 1654–1667
• The Scanian War  – 1674–1679
• The Great Northern War – 1700–1721, including of course, the Battle of Poltava July 1709

And other wars in all directions:

• Russo-Persian War (1722–1723)
• History of the Russo-Turkish Wars including the Crimean campaigns of 1687 and 1689  

Other topics:

• Territorial Expansion of Russia   Useful list of dates and links to events 1600-1800 with links to appropriate maps
• Serfdom in Russia A good starting point with lots of references and links
• Russian Conquest of Siberia
• Great Northern Expedition 1725?-1743 and early Russian settlement of Alaska
• Russian Enlightenment  A reasonable place to start with a link to the great Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov .

Other Websites

There are, not surprisingly, a lot of websites that cover this period in Russian history which are in Russian. Google Translate is your friend! If you go to the site via Google, it will usually (depending on your browser set-up), offer to translate them, and nowadays it usually does a pretty good job.

• Home Romanov: a lovely site which uses a literal tree to provide biographical details of the whole Romanov clan.

YouTube

There are lots of YouTube videos covering all periods of Russian history,. Many of them were produced before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but for the most part this doesn’t affect their usefulness, though the tone may grate!

• Russia: 1000 Years Of History – History Documentary  Very professional production (is that Fiona Shaw as narrator?) – quite a few talking heads—you can skip the first 4 minutes) 190 minutes.
• Ancient Origins of the Kyivan Rus: From Rurikids to Mongols At 2 hours this is a major effort. It’s rather slow, but seems very comprehensive, with a good grounding in maps to explain movements. Doesn’t hurt to run it at 1.25x! There are other videos from Kings and Generals covering this period, search YouTube for “kings and generals russia”
• The origins of Russia – Summary on a Map  A quick summary in 15 minutes
• The History of Russia Part 1: I thought this was well done: history to 1613 using maps as the background, so places come to make sense.. 8 minutes, worth it. There 4 more episodes (YouTube: Ep.2, Ep 3, Ep.4, Ep.5) done in the same way, and a complete version…
• The History of Russia: The same producer as the previous video, but covers the whole period up until 1917. 45 minutes, but with the maps as background it all works very well.

In Our Time (BBC Sounds)

There are two episodes that cover the period:

• Catherine the Great. First broadcast on  23 Feb 2006, with Janet Hartley, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics; Simon Dixon, Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds; Tony Lentin, Professor of History at the Open University.
• The Building of St Petersburg. First broadcast on 23rd April 2009, with Simon Dixon, Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at University College London; Janet Hartley, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics; Anthony Cross, Emeritus Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge

Other Media

• Catherine the Great, in the series Russia in Five Babushka dolls. First broadcast on 9th October 2017. 
• Ekaterina: The Rise of Catherine the Great  The  series (three series now) on Catherine’s rise, is available on Amazon Prime and Netflix.
• European Civilization, 1648-1945 Lecture 4 – Peter the Great  A Yale Lecture, 37 mins long, by John Merriman, Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University. The delivery style leaves much to be desired, but the approach is interesting.

People

Obviously there are hundreds of people who could be listed here, but a few who are critical to the story of Russia in this period, and some interesting British and Irish characters who served Catherine in various capacities, are:

• Alexander Menshikov  This Wikipedia page is very sparing, but reading Robert Massie’s Peter the Great gives a much stronger impression of the extent to which Menshikov was a force of being alongside Peter.
• Grigory Potemkin   A much fuller account of the role and character of Potemkin
• George Browne An Irish soldier of fortune, he ended up as Governor of Livonia from 1783 
• Charles Cameron: A Scottish architect. An online monograph on him and his buildings with lots of old pictures is here.   And a short piece in Scottish Field is nicely drawn.
• Mikhail Lomonosov Russia’s first polymath.  He made important contributions to literature, education, and science.

Table of Ranks

Introduced by Peter the Great in 1722, the Table remained a crucial part of Russian life until 1917, and was tinkered with from time to time, especially by Catherine the Great.

• Table of Ranks  – Wikipedia, and also an interesting piece about its form in English and Russian. Also a chart showing changes over time 
• Implementation of the Russian Table of Ranks during the Eighteenth Century via Jstor

Military History

General Books

• The Military History of Tsarist Russia ed.Frederick Kagan, Robin Higham, 2002. The first half is relevant to the period. Largely schematic, and very broad coverage of campaigns. Amazon  link for reference only: eyewatering price! 
• Russia at War [2 volumes]: From the Mongol Conquest to Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Beyond, Timothy C. Dowling  2015. An encyclopaedia of battles, themes and people.
• The Military and Society in Russia 1450-1917 (History of Warfare), Eric Lohr, Marshall Poe, 2002. Quite a detailed account of various military activities across the period, and there are some very useful maps at the beginning.

Major Campaigns

• Poltava: Poltava 1709 Russia comes of age, Angus Konstam, 1994. An Osprey battle series book, with good writing and context and lots of illustrations. Amazon

Articles on the Web

• History’s Nutcases: Czar Peter III of Russia

St Petersburg

A couple of years ago, I prepared a presentation on the origins of of St Petersburg as part of our topic at the time: 1700-1710. A PDF copy of this can be seen here: The Founding of St Petersburg .

Peter Lavington’s presentation:

Also available as a download here (clicking this will open the PDF in your browser at a size that makes it readable, and downloadable).

Rosie on Menshikov:

[pdf-embedder url=”https://furnessu3a.org/worldhistory/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/02/What-do-we-know-Alexander-Menshikov.pdf” title=”What do we know Alexander Menshikov”]

Also available as a download here (clicking this will open the PDF in your browser at a size that makes it readable, and downloadable).

John Kaye on The Great Northern War:

[pdf-embedder url=”https://furnessu3a.org/worldhistory/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/02/Great-Northern-War.pdf” title=”Great Northern War”]

Also available as a download here (clicking this will open the PDF in your browser at a size that makes it readable, and downloadable).

Rosie on Elizabeth, Empress of Russia:

[pdf-embedder url=”https://furnessu3a.org/worldhistory/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/Elizabeth-of-Russia.pdf” title=”Elizabeth of Russia”]

Rosie on Elizabeth, Empress of Russia:

[pdf-embedder url=”https://furnessu3a.org/worldhistory/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/Elizabeth-of-Russia.pdf” title=”Elizabeth of Russia”]

Also available as a download here (clicking this will open the PDF in your browser at a size that makes it readable, and downloadable).

Grete On Ivan VI:

[pdf-embedder url=”https://furnessu3a.org/worldhistory/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/Ivan-VI.pdf” title=”Ivan VI”]

Also available as a download here (clicking this will open the PDF in your browser at a size that makes it readable, and downloadable).

John Kaye on Potemkin:

Available as a PDF download here (clicking this will open the PDF in your browser at a size that makes it readable, and downloadable).