Russian Revolution facts: Mostly accurate portrayal of events

The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments. They dreamt of a world revolution that would wipe out national states. That is why they were so generous in drawing borders and bestowing territorial gifts. It is no longer important what exactly ...

1861 - Emancipation Edict ends serfdom but keeps peasants tied to the land through continuing labour obligations; rapid industrialisation leads to growth of a small working class and the spread of revolutionary ideas. 1864-65 - Kazakh steppes and Central Asian Muslim states annexed. 1877-78 - Russian-Turkish War sees Russia seize land from Ottoman Empire in the Caucasus and establish client states in the Balkans.

Already and well before the outbreak of WWI, Russia had become one of the largest land empires on Earth, exercising hegemony over people of many nationalities, religions and ethnicities. The Russian Imperial territories had been extended southwest to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire; east to the Pacific; south and east absorbing the Caucasus Mountains and Central Asia; and north all the way to the polar icecap.

Around 1523 the monk Philofei developed the idea · of Moscow as the “third Rome” after Constantinople (“the second Rome”) takeover by Turks, and · wrote a letter about it to Vasilii to promote Moscow as the chief center of the Orthodox world. This provided some impetus for uniting all Orthodox Christians in Russia, Ukraine, the Balkans, etc. Religious conservatism of the Russian Orthodox Church that dated back to the great schism

November (October, Old Style) 1917: Led by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the Bolsheviks overthrow the Provisional Government.

Catherine II, "the Great" (r. 1762–1796), was a German princess who married the German heir to the Russian crown. Catherine overthrew him in a coup in 1762, becoming queen regnant. Catherine enthusiastically supported the ideals of The Enlightenment, thus earning the status of an enlightened despot.

The next day the Constituent Assembly was dissolved by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. An alternative socialist establishment co-existed, the Petrograd Soviet, wielding power through the democratically elected councils of workers and peasants, called soviets. The rule of the new authorities only aggravated the crisis in the country instead of resolving it, and eventually, the October Revolution, led by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government and gave full governing power to the soviets, leading to the creation of the world's first socialist state.

This is a timeline of Russian history, comprising important legal and territorial changes and political events in Russia and its predecessor states. To read about the background to these events, see history of Russia. See also list of Russian monarchs and list of heads of state of Russia.

A systematic enumeration of the chief institutional forms of traditional Russian totalitarianism further demonstrates, except for minor accidents of degree and magnitude, the substantial identity of these forms in the past and present. The first form is statism and all that it entails in the way of leader worship, state dominance, parasitical bureaucracy, an expedient policy of concessions and the like. The far-flung power of the state in the U.S.S.R. is self-evident.