Russia, a Vile, Evil, and Disruptive State (Attachments to Part 2)

Russia size, geography, resources and demographics

Russia is huge. By land mass it is the largest country in the world. Its almost 6.6 million square miles (17 million sq. km) are spread across two continents – Europe and Asia. The Russian border, at 57,792 kilometres, is the world’s longest. It has the world’s fourth-longest coastline, at 37,653 km, excluding Crimea. Russia has an additional 850 km of coastline along the Caspian Sea, which is the world’s largest inland body of water. Russia, alongside Canada and the US, is one of only three countries with a coast along three oceans (however connection to the Atlantic Ocean is extremely remote). Approximately two-thirds of the frontier is bounded by seawater. Virtually all of the lengthy northern coast is well above the Arctic Circle.

It has enormous raw resources of oil, gas, minerals, agriculture, and so on, holding the greatest reserves of mineral resources of any country in the world. Though they are abundant, they are in remote areas with extreme climates, making them expensive to mine. Russia holds around forty percent of the world’s natural gas reserves. The country has one of the largest gold reserves in the world;

It has eleven different time zones, many different ethnic groups, and more than 144 million inhabitants. 

Russia shares borders with more countries than any other state in the world (16 sovereign nations). 

Countries to Russia’ west, including the length of the land border:

• Norway 196 km
• Finland 1272 km (When Finland joined the NATO Alliance in April 2023, NATO’s land border with Russia more than doubled. Even after Finland’s accession, only 11% of Russia’s land border is shared with NATO countries.)
• Estonia 324 km (138?)
• Latvia 271 km
• Lithuania 266 km (In March 1990, a year before the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to break away when it proclaimed the restoration of its independence) 
• Belarus 1239 km
• Poland 204 km (It is bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukraine to the east, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the south, and Germany to the west.)
• Ukraine 1974 km (It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which borders it to the east and northeast. It also borders Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; and Romania and Moldova to the southwest; with a coastline along the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to the south and southeast)

Counties to Russia’s SW and south

• Azerbaijan 328 km; a transcontinental country located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and West Asia. It is a part of the South Caucasus region, straddling the Caucasus Mountains (a mountain range at the intersection of Asia and Europe) and is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia (Dagestan, a republic of Russia which is the southernmost tip of Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia and Turkey to the west, and Iran to the south.
• Georgia 894 km; a transcontinental country located in Eastern Europe and West Asia. It is part of the Caucasus region, bounded by the Black Sea to the west, Russia to the north and northeast, Turkey to the southwest, Armenia to the south, and by Azerbaijan to the southeast
• China 4209 km
• Mongolia 3485 km; is a landlocked country in East Asia, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south. The western extremity of Mongolia is only 23 km (14 mi) from Kazakhstan, and this area can resemble a quadripoint when viewed on a map)
• Kazakhstan 7413 km: is a landlocked country mostly in Central Asia, with a small part in Eastern European. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbekistan to the south, and Turkmenistan to the southwest, with a coastline along the Caspian Sea
• North Korea 17 km
• Japan and the USA: water
• Canada, through the Arctic Bridge or Arctic Sea Bridge (a seasonal sea route approximately 6,700 kilometres long linking Russia to Canada, specifically the Russian port of Murmansk to the Hudson Bay port of Churchill, Manitoba)

Demographics: 

Russia’s 22 republics include a wide variety of peoples, including northern Europeans, Tatars, Caucasus peoples, and indigenous Siberians. The largest federal subjects are in Siberia.

In all age groups until 29 years old, there were more men than women in Russia as of January 1, 2023. Total: 146.5 million. After that age, the female population outnumbered the male population in each category. As of January 1, 2023, 109.7 million inhabitants lived in Russian cities, opposed to 36.8 million people living in the countryside. The rural population of Russia saw a gradual decrease over the observed time period. Since 1994, when the Russian population was about 148 people, they have lost nearly five million people, reducing to 143m in 1921. Compared to Russia, the US gained almost 70 million people in the same period. The country’s population jumped to 146.5m in 2023 after Moscow gave citizenship to people of Russian ethnicities in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union – which had a population of around 288.6 million in 1990 – the newly-emerged Russian Federation represented barely half of the communist state’s demographics in 1991, as many non-Russian republics from Turkic Central Asia to the European Baltics gained independence from Moscow. 

Russia is facing more population decrease, either as battlefield casualties and also due to large scale migration by civilians keen to avoid drafting into the military or other consequences of Russia’s “special military operation”. 

The Russian fertility rate reached its lowest point of 1.2 in 1998, a turbulent year when the country faced a serious currency crisis. Through the 1990s, various factors – ranging from a large number of abortions to a low birth rate combined with a high death level and decreased life expectancy – contributed to the Russian demographic decline. 

Under Putin, a strong advocate of pronatalist and pro-family policies, Russia has offered incentives to stimulate the birth rate, leading to the country’s fertility rate growing to the current level of 1.6. The Kremlin has also launched a policy of attracting Russian-ethnic communities from former Soviet republics in the Baltics and Central Asia to settle in Russia. But it has not been so successful. 

Not only is the country’s population in decline but also that ethnic Russians, primarily Christians, are losing ground to Muslim minorities. Between 2010 and 2021, Russian ethnic communities diminished by 5.4 million, their population falling to 72% of the country’s population. 

At present, Muslim ethnic groups constitute 10% of the country’s population. But within a decade, Muslim communities under Moscow are predicted to represent 30% of the Russian Federation’s population. Experts also see a demographic motivation in Moscow’s offensive against Kiev, mainly to increase its Orthodox Slavic population by forcefully integrating Ukraine – the birthplace of the first Russian state in the 9th century – into the federation. The Ukraine conflict has forced many skilled workers to leave Russia in the largest exodus since the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to labour shortages across many sectors. The Russian state also exempts males with three kids and more from military service in Ukraine.

Russia and NATO

Russia is not part of NATO. In fact, the Russian government’s perceived aggressiveness is the main issue NATO was founded to counteract. NATO suspended cooperation with Russia in 2014 following Russia’s invasion of Crimea. In October 2021, NATO expelled eight Russians from its Brussels, Belgium headquarters amid concerns that they were undeclared intelligence agents. Russia responded by suspending relations with NATO.

Russian History, by date

• 801-1200 (9th-12th century): Kievan Rus – a powerful East Slavic state existed; the beginning of Russia. Shaped in the 9th century it went on to flourish for the next 300 years.  Kyivan Rus was a confederation of princedoms. Its centre was the city of Kyiv, now Ukraine’s capital. Its rulers were the Rus, Scandinavian Vikings who gradually established dominance over the region and merged with local Slavic tribes. (“Rus”, or Rus’, is the origin of the word “Russia”.) When it comes to political and cultural tradition, Kyivan Rus is indeed the cradle of Russia and Ukraine, as well as the country now called Belarus. It was a refined European civilization with roots in the Byzantine empire and its Orthodox Christian religion. Kievan Rus reached its greatest extent under Yaroslav the Wise (r. 1019–1054); his sons assembled and issued its first written legal code, the Russkaya Pravda (or Russian Justice), shortly after his death. It finally fell to the Mongol invasion in the mid-13th century. The empire is traditionally seen as the beginning of Russia (See “980”)

• 980: Vladimir the Great consolidated the Rus realm from modern-day Belarus, Russia and Ukraine to the Baltic Sea and solidified the frontiers against incursions. Originally a follower of Slavic paganism, Vladimir(958-1015) converted to Christianity in 988 and Christianized the Kievan Rus (thus he also known as Saint Vladimir). He introduced the Byzantine law code into his territories following his conversion but reformed some of its harsher elements; he notably abolished capital punishment, along with judicial torture and mutilation (See “801-1200” and “1240”)

• 1240: Kievan Rus was invaded by the Tatars. In the mid-11th century, Kyivan Rus began to fragment into semi-autonomous principalities. These included Galicia-Volhynia, which covered parts of modern Ukraine and Belarus, Novgorod in north-western modern-day Russia, and Vladimir-Suzdal, in western Russia. In 1240 the Mongol empire besieged Kyiv, finally destroying what remained of Kyivan Rus as a single entity. Their state, the Empire of the Golden Horde, ruled over Russian lands for almost three centuries (See “801-1200”,“980”, “1569” and “1648”) 

• 1480: Moscow took the leading role in liberating Russia from Mongol domination. Ivan III (Ivan the Great 1440-1505) finally broke the Russians free from Tatar control and overthrew the Mongols. He had recaptured Ukranian territory from Poland and Lithuania. Moscow later became the capital of an empire that would eventually encompass all of Russia and Siberia, and parts of many other lands. By 1500 Moscow (Muscovy) had a population of 100,000 and was one of the largest cities in the world. It was, however, under Mongol rule, then, that Russia became Russian 

• 1526: The Mughal empire, the Timurid Empire, was founded by Babur, a warrior chieftain from what is today Uzbekistan, who employed aid from the neighbouring Savavid and Ottoman empires, to defeat the Sultan of Delhi in the First Battle of Panipat and to sweep down the plains of North India. (The Mughal imperial structure, however, is sometimes dated to 1600, to the rule of Babur’s grandson, Akbar.) This imperial structure lasted until 1720, shortly after the death of the last major emperor during whose reign the empire also achieved its maximum geographical extent. The relative peace maintained by the empire during much of the 17th century was a factor in India’s economic expansion. Reduced subsequently to the region in and around Old Delhi by 1760, the empire was formally dissolved by the British Raj after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (See “1857”) 

• 1547: Ivan IV (the Terrible) became the first Tsar of Russia. He was also Grand Duke of Moscow. In 1552 he crushed the Tatar stronghold of Kazan. The campaign began Russia’s expansion into Siberia, annexing a large Muslim population. He started his reign with reforms but degenerated into ruthless and suspicious despotism, thereby founding the tsarist style of autocratic rule (for example the sacking of Novgorod). He initiated a secret police force, which operated through summary arrest, torture and execution. In 1570 he killed his son in a fit of temper 

• 1569: The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania joined forces to create the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Background: when the Mongol empire and its successors began to decline in the 14th century, rival polities rose to fill the vacuum. In the east of the region, power eventually accumulated in Moscow, leading to the creation of the Grand Principality of Muscovy. To the west, as noted, what had become the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania joined forces in 1569 to create the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (See “801-1200”, “980”, “1240” and “1648”) 

• 1613: The nobles chose Mikhail Romanov as Tsar of Russia. He was one of the closest surviving relatives of the royal family. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia until the 1917 Revolution brought an end to the Tsarist state 

• 1648: The Cossacks led an uprising against the Polish-Lithuania commonwealth. The Cossacks were settlers on the steppe who amalgamated into disciplined military units. This led to the formation of their own state, the Hetmanate. Many Ukrainians look back to the Hetmanate as the origin of their identity as an independent state. Indeed, the original Cossack lands were often called “Ukraine”, a Slavic word meaning “borderland”. Early Cossack warriors practised a limited form of democracy, a contrast to Muscovy’s autocratic regime (see “1569”). That the Hetmanate came about as an act of resistance to larger neighbouring powers is a history that resonates with Ukrainians today. In the 19th century, the folk memory of the Cossacks’ state helped inspire the birth of a recognizable form of Ukraine’s cultural nationalism (See “980”, 1240”, “1569”, “1708” and “1721”) 

• 1654: Cossack leaders pledged allegiance to the tsar of Muscovy. (The Cossack state had a hard time; they were threatened by the Poles as well as the Ottomans to the south). A few decades later intellectuals in Kyiv wrote what is believed to be one of the oldest texts outlining the basis of a “Slavo-Rossian” nation. They hoped to convince the tsar to defend them, not only because of their shared history and Orthodox religion, but also in the name of ethno-national unity. By the end of the 17th century the Hetmanate’s territory had split into two: Muscovy took control of the east bank of the Dnieper river, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth seized the west. In 1708 Ivan Mazepa, a Cossack leader, led a failed uprising against Tsar Peter the Great. (Russia regards Mazepa as a traitor; in Ukraine he is a hero.) Peter went on to become Russia’s first emperor in 1721 (See “980”, “1240”, “1569”, “1648” and “1721”) 

• 1686, May: Treaty of Perpetual Peace between the Czardom of Russia and the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth, in which the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth agreed that Kyiv, among other territories, belonged to the Czardom of Russia. These parties were incited to cooperate after a major geopolitical intervention in Ukraine on the part of the Ottoman Empire. The treaty secured Russia’s possession of Left-bank Ukraine (the part of Ukraine on the left (east) bank of the Dnieper) plus the right-bank city of Kiev. By signing this treaty, Russia became a member of the anti-Turk coalition, which comprised Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Holy Roman Empire and Venice 

• 1696: Peter the Great became Russia’s de facto ruler. He reigned jointly with his half-brother Ivan V from 1682. He transformed Russia into a European state. In 1703 he started a brand new capital on the Gulf of Finland, St. Petersburg. Peter I (1672-1725) became an absolute monarch and assumed the title of Emperor in 1721 and Russia officially became the Russian Empire (See “1703, May”)

• 1703, May: Peter the Great started his most dramatic project – Saint Petersburg sprang up, a brand new capital on the Gulf of Finland – at tremendous human and financial cost. It became the capital of the Russian Empire for more than two hundred years (1712–1728, 1732–1918). Saint Petersburg ceased being the capital in 1918 after the Russian Revolution of 1917 (See “1696” and “1721, Oct”) 

• 1721, Oct: Peter the Great assumed the title of Emperor and Russia officially became the Russian Empire. In 1712 Peter (1672-1725) moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, where it remained – with only a brief interruption – until 1918. His reign is now seen as the decisive formative event in the Russian imperial past. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, “He did not completely bridge the gulf between Russia and the Western countries, but he achieved considerable progress in development of the national economy and trade, education, science and culture, and foreign policy. Russia became a great power, without whose concurrence no important European problem could thenceforth be settled. His internal reforms achieved progress to an extent that no earlier innovator could have envisaged.” (See “1703, May”) 

• 1725, Feb: Catherine I ascended to the throne as the first empress of Russia upon the death of her husband, Peter the Great. She (1684-1727) was an illiterate orphan that caught Peter’s eye, became his mistress and eventually wife. They had 12 children, but only two reached adulthood, both girls, Elizabeth (1709-1762; Empress Elizabeth ruled Russia 1741-1762) and Anna (See “1762, July”)

• 1740-1748: The War of the Austrian Succession regarding the right of Maria Theresa to succeed her father, Emperor Charles VI, as ruler of the Habsburg monarchy. It was a European conflict fought primarily in Central Europe, the Austrian Netherlands, and Italy. France, Prussia, and Bavaria saw it as an opportunity to challenge Habsburg power. The result was the realignment known as the Diplomatic Revolution. Austria and France ended the rivalry which had dominated European affairs for centuries, while Prussia allied with Great Britain. These changes set the scene for the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756. This was all part of the constantly shifting pattern of alliances throughout the 18th century in efforts to preserve or upset the European balance of power (See “1756-1763”)

• 1741: Elizabeth of Russia commences her reign of Russia until her death in 1762. She (1709-1762) was a popular monarch and chose not to execute a single person during her reign 

• 1741: Vitus Bering, a Danish explorer in Russian service, claimed the Alaskan territory for the Russian Empire in his second voyage. Russia later confirmed its rule over the territory with a decree which established the southern border of Russian America along the 55th parallel north. The Russians were primarily interested in the abundance of fur-bearing mammals on Alaska’s coast, as stocks had been depleted by overhunting in Siberia. By the middle of the 19th century the Russians concluded that their North American colonies were too expensive to retain so they sold it to the US in 1867 (See “1867, Oct” and “1870, July”) 

• 1756-1763: The Seven Years’ War was a global conflict that involved most of the European Great Powers, and was fought primarily in Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific – like an 18th-century equivalent of World War I. (The French and Indian War was the North American conflict in this larger imperial war which resulted from ongoing frontier tensions in North America as both French and British imperial officials and colonists sought to extend each country’s sphere of influence in frontier regions.) The opposing alliances were led by Great Britain (plus Prussia and Hanover) and France (plus Austria, Sweden, Saxony, Russia, Spain) respectively, both seeking to establish global pre-eminence at the expense of the other. The war was successful for Great Britain, which gained the bulk of New France in North America (which included Canada as it was defined then, Hudson Bay, Acadia, Louisiana), Spanish Florida, and some individual Caribbean islands. The Seven Years’ War was perhaps the first global war and it was very much about land. It restructured not only the European political order, but also affected events all around the world, paving the way for the beginning of later British world supremacy in the 19th century (See “1740-1748” and “1763, Feb”)
• 1762, July: Catherine II (Catherine the Great) came to power in Russia in a coup d’état against her husband, Peter III. She governed at a time when the Russian Empire was expanding rapidly by conquest and diplomacy. The Russian empire broke up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with help from Austria and Prussia. The Russians also seized territory in what is now southern Ukraine from the Ottomans. This included Crimea, annexed to Russia by Catherine in 1783. She oversaw the final dismantling of the Cossack Hetmanate. Under her long reign (through to her death in 1796), inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment, Russia experienced a renaissance of culture and sciences, which led to the founding of many new cities, universities, and theatres; along with large-scale immigration from the rest of Europe, and the recognition of Russia as one of the great powers of Europe. Russians also became the first Europeans to colonize Alaska (See “1725, Feb” and “1787”)
• 1776: The Bolshoi Ballet was founded. It is an internationally renowned classical ballet  company based at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Russia. The Bolshoi is among the world’s oldest ballet companies. In the early 20th century, it came to international prominence as Moscow became the capital of Soviet Russia. The Bolshoi has been recognized as one of the foremost ballet companies in the world. Over the years it has developed its own unique identity
• 1787: The term “Potemkin village” comes from stories of a fake portable village built by field marshal Grigory for the Russian Empress Catherine II, solely to impress the Empress during her journey to Crimea. Potemkin was a lover of the Empress (Catherine the Great, 1729-1796) and had became governor of Crimea, after the 1783 Russian annexation of the area from the Ottoman Empire. Crimea had been devastated by the war, and the Muslim Tatar inhabitants of Crimea were viewed as a potential fifth column of the Ottoman Empire. Potemkin’s tasks were to pacify and rebuild by bringing in Russian settlers. The original story was that Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the Russian Empress and foreign guests. The structures would be disassembled after she passed, and re-assembled farther along her route to be seen again (See “1762, July”) 
• 1792-1802: The French Revolutionary Wars were a series of sweeping military conflicts lasting during this period and resulting from the French Revolution. They pitted France against Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and several other monarchies. In 1802, the British and French signed the Treaty of Amiens, ending the war. The treaty is generally considered to be the most appropriate point to mark the transition between the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars (See “1798-1815”) 
• 1798-1815: The Napoleonic Wars were a series of major global conflicts pitting the French Empire and its allies, led by Napoleon I, against a fluctuating array of European states formed into various coalitions. It produced a period of French domination over most of continental Europe. The wars stemmed from the unresolved disputes associated with the French Revolution and the French Revolutionary Wars (See “1792-1802”, “1804, Dec”,1812, Sept”, “1813, Oct” and “1814, Sept-1815, June”)  
• 1809: The Prussian government asked philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt to redesign their entire education system. He changed the system so that everyone should (regardless of age) start with the same all-around foundation – a general picture of good character. It was about creating human beings with moral responsibility, a rich inner life, and intellectual openness to knowledge (and not to be primarily about acquiring skill sets). He (1767-1835) also believed in lifelong learning. His approach brought up key questions, such as what is the right relationship between useful skill-learning and the more nebulous benefits of the making or forming of a person, to develop a person’s complete humanity as he grows, until he takes his place as a well-rounded personage in adult society 
• 1812, Sept: Napoleon leaves Moscow severely weakened after a Pyrrhic victory in the Battle of Borodino, the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic Wars. The Russian army retreated, still intact, implementing scorched earth tactics, whereby they destroyed everything of value to the invaders. It became a textbook example of what a hold logistics placed upon an army far from its centre of supply. After narrowly defeating the imperial Russian army (in total, there were over 70,000 casualties in only twelve hours), he continued on to briefly occupy Moscow desperately hoping to reach a peace agreement with the tsar. When it became clear that no such peace was forthcoming, Napoleon ordered a retreat from Moscow on 18 October. The infamous Russian winter soon set in, and the Grande Armée was whittled down by attrition and the pursuing Russian army. By the time it limped back in early December, it had lost half a million troops and almost all its horses and cannons. Of the 100,000 survivors, most were unfit for battle, rendering the Grande Armée effectively destroyed. Borodino constituted a Pyrrhic victory for the French; Russian guerrilla warfare, lack of food and shelter, and bitter cold all decimated the French army. Of the 600,000+ soldiers who invaded the Russian Empire, less than 100,000 returned (See “1813, Oct”, “1814, March” and “1815, June”) 
• 1813, Oct: Napoleon suffered one of his worst defeats in the Battle at Leipzig (aka Battle of the Nations), the largest battle of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and indeed in European history prior to WWI (there were 133,000 casualties). He faced the Coalition armies of Prussia, Austria and Russia. Decisively defeated again, Napoleon was compelled to return to France while the Sixth Coalition kept up its momentum, dissolving the Confederation of the Rhine and invading France early the next year.  It hastened the decline of Napoleon’s empire. It was a clash of empires that decided the fate of the continent’s governance for 50-plus years to come 
• 1814, March: The Battle of Paris (or the Storming of Paris) was fought between the French Empire, who surrendered, and the Sixth Coalition (consisting of Russia, Austria, Prussia, Portugal, Great Britain, Sweden, and Spain). After a day of fighting in the suburbs of Paris, the French surrendered on 31 March, ending the War of the Sixth Coalition and forcing Napoleon to abdicate in April and go into exile on the island of Elba. The victorious Coalition met in Vienna to begin planning a post-Napoleonic Europe; of course, the Congress of Vienna would be briefly interrupted by Napoleon’s return in March 1815 (See “1813, Oct”, “1815, March” and “1815, June”) 
• 1814, Sept-1815, June: The Congress of Vienna reorganized Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. It began in September 1814, five months after Napoleon I’s first abdication and completed its “Final Act” in June 1815, shortly before the Waterloo campaign and the final defeat of Napoleon. The settlement was the most-comprehensive treaty that Europe had ever seen. All the powers (except Spain) acceded to it. At the negotiation table, the position of France was weak in relation to that of Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia, partly due to the military strategy of its leader, Bonaparte over the previous two decades, and his recent defeat. Prussia added territory from smaller states. Russia added the central and eastern parts of the Duchy of Warsaw. Switzerland was given neutralization status. As a result, the political boundaries laid down by the Congress of Vienna lasted, except for one or two changes, for more than 40 years. The statesmen had successfully worked out the principle of a balance of power. However, the idea of nationality had been almost entirely ignored – necessarily so because it was not yet ready for expression. Territories had been bartered about without much reference to the wishes of their inhabitants. (An even greater settlement took place at Versailles after WWI.) 
• 1815, June: The British and others beat the French in the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon was once again exiled. Napoleon’s forces invaded Belgium, where British and Prussian troops were stationed. On June 16, Napoleon’s troops defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Ligny. However, two days later at the Battle of Waterloo near Brussels, the French were crushed by the British (led by the Duke of Wellington), with assistance from the Prussians. The Bourbons were restored to the French throne, and Napoleon was once again exiled, this time to the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic and died in 1821. After his defeat Napoleon supposedly said “History is a series of lies that people have agreed upon.”
• 1832: Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War, the most significant attempt in Western history to understand war, both in its internal dynamics and as an instrument of policy. It has been read throughout the world, and has stimulated generations of soldiers, political leaders, and intellectuals. He (1780-1831) was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the “moral”, in modern terms meaning psychological, and political aspects of waging war 
• 1848, Feb: German philosophers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, publish their pamphlet The Communist Manifesto.The opening lines set forth the principal basis of Marxism: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. Subsequently Marx wrote his four-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). Marx believed that private ownership of capital goods, or the means of production such as factories and businesses, led to the exploitation of the workers and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the capitalists. But he also believed that socialism was not possible without a society having gone through capitalism first. By his theory, socialism should not happen in agrarian societies such as tsarist Russia or pre-revolutionary China, neither of which had gone through the stage of capitalism. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and the pamphlet as one of the world’s most influential political documents 
• 1853-56: The Crimean War was fought and lost by Russia, triggering major reforms. An ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the UK and Piedmont-Sardinia fought Russia. The flashpoint was a disagreement over the rights of Christian minorities in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, with the French promoting the rights of Roman Catholics, and Russia promoting those of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Crimean War was one of the first conflicts in which military forces used modern technologies such as explosive naval shells, railways, and telegraph. The war was also one of the first to be documented extensively in written reports and in photographs. The war marked a turning point for the Russian Empire:  it weakened the Russian army, drained the treasury and undermined Russia’s influence in Europe. The empire would take decades to recover. Russia’s humiliation forced its educated elites to identify its problems and to recognize the need for fundamental reforms; it became a catalyst for reforms (See “1856, March”) 
• 1856, March: The Treaty of Paris ended the Crimean War. It forbade Russia to base warships in the Black Sea (See “1853-56” and “1867, Oct”)
• 1858: The Russian Empire strong-armed China’s Qing dynasty to cede more than a million square kilometres of its vast northeast territory. A treaty was signed (the Treaty of Aigun) between the Russian Empire and the Qing dynasty that established much of the modern border between the Russian Far East and China by ceding much of Manchuria (the ancestral homeland of the Manchu people), now known as Northeast China. From 1850 to 1864, when China was heavily involved in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion, Russia camped tens of thousands of troops on the borders of Mongolia and Manchuria, preparing to make legal Russian de facto control over the Amur River from past settlement. They seized the opportunity when it was clear that China was losing the Second Opium War, and threatened China with a war on a second front 
• 1861: Tsar Alexander II (the Liberator-Tsar), freed more than 20 million serfs. This Edict of Emancipation was the first and most important of the liberal reforms enacted during the Tsar’s reign (1855–1881). This affected only the privately owned serfs. The state-owned serfs were emancipated in 1866 and were given better and larger plots of land. It was arguably the single most important event in 19th century Russian history. He was assassinated in 1881 (See ”1869”) 
• 1867, Oct: Russia sold Alaska to the US. Imperial Russia needed money after its defeat in the Crimean War, so Czar Alexander II decided to sell it – for US$7.2-million. The Americans were looking for more land. Russian nationalists still complain they were cheated (See “1741” and “1870, July”) 
• 1869: Leo Tolstoy finished writing his historical novel, War and Peace, a panoramic study of early 19th-century Russian society. He finished Anna Karenina in 1878, a story that takes place against the backdrop of the liberal reforms initiated by Emperor Alexander II. The two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. A Russian writer, he (1828-1910) is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time (See “1861”) 
• 1871: Dmitri Mendeleev developed the periodic classification of the elements. Mendeleev, a Russian chemist (1834-1907), found that, when all the known chemical elements were arranged in order of increasing atomic weight, the resulting table displayed a recurring pattern, or periodicity, of properties within groups of elements. He even left gaps in places where he believed unknown elements would find their place
• 1877-78: The Russo-Turkish War was a conflict between the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) and a coalition led by the Russian Empire, and including Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro. Fought in the Balkans and in the Caucasus, it originated in emerging 19th century Balkan nationalism. Russia was victorious, but the gains it achieved under the Treaty of San Stefano (1878) were restricted by the Congress of Berlin (1878), imposed by Britain and Austria-Hungary 
• 1879, Jan: The Brothers Karamazov was the last novel written by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Literary critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature. His (1821-1881) literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. His other novels include Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Idiot (1869) 
• 1889: This “Russian flu” is considered as the first pandemic of the industrial era for which statistics have been collected, and may have been a coronavirus pandemic. This planetary event, which raged from 1889 to 1894, started in Turkestan and hit the Russian Empire, before reaching all European countries, the US, and the whole world. Contemporaries were surprised by its high contagiousness as evidenced by attack rates averaging 60% in urban populations, its rapid spread in successive waves circling the globe in a few months by rail and sea, and the tendency of the disease to relapse. Despite its low case-fatality rate, it is estimated to have caused one million deaths worldwide.  Current speculation is that it might have been a coronavirus pandemic
• 1894, Nov: Nicholas II came to power in Russia upon the death of his father, Czar Alexander III, but the revolutionary socialist movement was growing. In 1905 the Russian Revolution was suppressed, but Nicholas II had to concede major reforms, among them a constitution and the creation of the first Parliament, the Duma 
• 1904-05: The Russo-Japanese War and shocking defeat of Imperial/tzarist Russia by the Japanese and gaining both southern Manchuria and the Korean peninsula. This is generally considered the first modern war. Repeating rifles, machine guns and fast-firing artillery were new. Japan, angered by diplomatic betrayals and overreaching Russian expansion in Asia, started the war. Russian soldiers found themselves under siege in the barren winter hellscape of Port Arthur, with vulnerable supply lines. The Japanese navy was a modern one with traditions based on Britain’s royal navy – and it was built in England. The Russian Baltic Fleet, which Russian Emperor Nicholas II had sent halfway around the world, was destroyed by Japan at the island of Tsushima. Some familiar rings to the current Russian war with Ukraine emerge
• 1905, Jan: The Russian Revolution of 1905 (also known as the First Russian Revolution). A wave of mass political and social unrest began to spread across the vast areas of the Russian Empire. The unrest was directed primarily against the Tsar, the nobility, and the ruling class. It included worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies. In response to the public pressure, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to go back on his earlier authoritarian stance and enact some reform (issued in the October Manifesto). This took the form of establishing the State Duma, the multi-party system, and the Russian Constitution of 1906. The 1905 revolution was set off by the international humiliation that resulted from the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War 
• 1907: The Triple Entente formed – an alliance among UK, France and the Russian Empire. It occurred after the 1882 Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) offered an ominous threat plus the German army and navy continued to grow in size and power 
• 1914, July: Start of World War I (the Great War). The Austro-Hungarian empire declares war on Serbia. Serbia appealed to its traditional ally, Russia, while Austria turned to the foolish German Emperor Wilhelm II, who thought a brief war might distract growing discontent at home and break the encirclement of Germany by Russia and France. He declared war on them both. When German armies invaded Belgium, Britain and its empire allied with France and Russia. Result: four years of carnage; 20 million dead. The Russian economy collapses; riots break out. (Though the Central Powers lost the war after the US joined the Allies, Adolf Hitler bides his time and plotted revenge.) (See “1919, June”) 
• 1917, Feb-1922: The Russian (Bolshevik) Revolution ending the Romanov dynastic rule and the Russian Empire, and Russia withdraws from WWI. (Also called the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution, it was the first of two revolutions which took place in Russia in 1917.) A period of political and social revolution that took place in the former Russian Empire that saw Russia abolish its monarchy and adopt a socialist form of government following two successive revolutions and a bloody civil war. Long-standing discontent with the monarchy resulted in mass demonstrations and violent armed clashes with police and gendarmes, the last loyal forces of the Russian monarchy. Then Tsar Nicholas II abdicates In February ending the Romanov dynastic rule and the Russian Empire. The birth of communism was under Lenin’s leadership. Russia withdrew from WWI, effectively abandoning allies (including Canada) and prolonging the conflict for them. In some parts of Russia, no one was in control, and enormous suffering and loss of life among the civilian population resulted. It was not until 1920 that most of the fighting finally ended and Lenin and his followers could focus on turning Russia into a communist state. Two years later, the Communists gave the nation a new name – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also known as the Soviet Union
• 1917, Nov: The October Revolution (or the Great October Socialist Revolution or Bolshevik Revolution) was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key moment in the larger Russian Revolution of 1917-1923. It was the second revolutionary change of government in Russia in 1917. It took place through an armed insurrection in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg). It was the precipitating event of the Russian Civil War. The October Revolution followed and capitalized on the February Revolution earlier that year, which led to the abdication of Nicholas II and the creation of a provisional government (which remained unpopular, especially because it was continuing to fight in WWI.) The victorious Soviet Union viewed Revolution Day as a validation of their ideology, and the triumph of the worker over capitalism (See “1917, Feb”) 
• 1917, Nov: Vladimir Lenin served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. He (1870-1924) was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. A controversial and highly divisive historical figure, Lenin is viewed by his supporters as a champion of socialism, communism, anti-imperialism and the working class, while his critics accuse him of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship that oversaw mass killings and political repression of dissidents
• 1917, Dec: Cheka, the first of a succession of Soviet secret-police organizations known for conducting the Red Terror, was established by the highest executive authorities of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) – the Sovnarkom. By late 1918, hundreds of Cheka committees had sprung up in the RSFSR at all levels. Ostensibly set up to protect the revolution from reactionary forces, i.e. “class enemies” such as the bourgeoisie and members of the clergy, it soon became the repression tool against all political opponents of the communist regime. At the direction of Vladimir Lenin, the Cheka performed mass arrests, imprisonments, torture, and executions without trial. In 1921, the Troops for the Internal Defence of the Republic (a branch of the Cheka) numbered at least 200,000. They policed Labour camps, ran the Gulag system, conducted requisitions of food, and put down rebellions and riots by workers and peasants and mutinies in the Red Army (See “1918-1960, Jan” and “1923, Nov”) 
• 1918, Jan: Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) declared independence. Officials in Kyiv had founded the UPR, a state in union with Russia. Eventually Lenin took the UPR by force. But the strength of Ukrainian national identity compelled him to create a socialist Ukrainian republic, and to allow the use of the Ukrainian language. In 1922 Ukraine became one of the four founding members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – or Soviet Union 
• 1918, March: Leon Trotsky was appointed the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs for the Soviet Union and led the negotiations for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia withdrew from World War I. Trotsky (1879-1940) embraced Marxism in 1896. In 1898, he was arrested for revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia, but in 1902 escaped to London, where he met Lenin and wrote for Iskra, the paper of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). The RSDLP split in 1903 into Bolsheviks (“majority”) and Mensheviks (“minority”) factions, with the Bolshevik faction eventually becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After the February Revolution of 1917 which overthrew the tsar, Trotsky returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played an important role in the October Revolution which overthrew the Provisional Government. In the struggle for power following Vladimir Lenin’s death, however, Joseph Stalin emerged as victor, while Trotsky was removed from all positions of power and later exiled (1929). He remained the leader of an anti-Stalinist opposition abroad until his assignation by a Stalinist agent
• 1918, March: A peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, in what is now Belarus, was signed by the new Russian government, now under Lenin’s leadership. By 1917, participation in WW I had resulted in disaster for the tsar’s armies and government. The nation’s casualties were much higher than those of any other country, and its economy was in shambles. Germany knew that Russian Communists, known as Bolsheviks, had long opposed the war and were eager to make peace. Lenin believed that Russia must end its participation in the war so that the nation could focus on building a communist state based on the ideas of Karl Marx. Lenin had no say in the terms of that treaty; the Germans imposed it by threatening to resume their attacks on Russia if the agreement was not signed immediately. Under the treaty, Russia had to turn over several territories to Germany: Finland, Russian Poland, Estonia, Livonia, Courland (now part of Latvia), Lithuania, Ukraine, and Bessarabia. In addition, the Bolsheviks had to give much of the southern part of Russia to what was still the Ottoman Empire, controlled by Turkey. In all, the treaty forced Russia to give up about 30% of its territory
• 1918-1960, Jan: A system of forced labour camps, the Gulag, existed in the Soviet Union where it was recognized as a major instrument of political repression. In 1918–1922, the agency was administered by the Cheka, followed by the GPU (1922–1923), the OGPU (1923–1934), later known as the NKVD (1934–1946), and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in the final years. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s. By the end of 1940, the population of the Gulag camps amounted to 1.5 million. The emergent consensus among scholars is that, of the 14 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag colonies from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million prisoners perished there or they died soon after they were released. The writer and prominent Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. The system was officially abolished when the remains of its administration were dissolved by Nikita Khrushchev. The legal practice of sentencing convicts to penal labour continues to exist in the Russian Federation, but its capacity is greatly reduced (See “1917, Dec” and “1923, Nov”)
• 1918, July: The Russian Imperial Romanov family (Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Alexandra, and their five children) were shot and bayoneted to death by Bolshevik revolutionaries under Yakov Yurovsky on the orders of the Ural Regional Soviet in Yekaterinburg. Also murdered that night were members of the imperial entourage who had accompanied them. The bodies were taken to the Koptyaki forest, where they were stripped, mutilated with grenades to prevent identification, and buried. The Romanovs and their servants had been imprisoned in the Alexander Palace before being moved to Tobolsk, Siberia, in the aftermath of the October Revolution. They were next moved to a house in Yekaterinburg. The Soviet Union did not acknowledge the existence of these remains publicly until 1989 during the glasnost period. No written document has been found which proves Vladimir Lenin or Yakov Sverdlov (chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from 1917 to 1919) ordered the executions; however, they endorsed the murders after they occurred
• 1919, Jan-June: Paris Peace Conference was the formal meeting of the victorious Allies after the end of WWI to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers. Dominated by the leaders of Britain, France, the US and Italy, it resulted in five treaties that rearranged the maps of Europe and parts of Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands, and also imposed financial penalties. As a result of Russia withdrawing from WWI, effectively abandoning its allies, the Bolshevik regime was not recognized by allied governments, nor were Bolshevik leaders invited to peace negotiations at Paris that resulted in the Treaty of Versailles. The Conference imposed various settlements on the defeated powers, notably the Treaty of Versailles (June 29, 1919). Germany and the other losing nations had no voice in the Conference’s deliberations; this gave rise to political resentments that lasted for decades (See “1914, July”) 
• 1919, June: Treaty of Versailles ended the war (WWI) between Germany and the Allied Powers (France, UK, Russia, Italy, Japan, and the US). It was the most important of the peace treaties. The other Central Powers on the German side (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria) signed separate treaties.Although the armistice of November 11 1918 ended the actual fighting, it took six months of Allied negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty. The treaty required Germany to disarm, make ample territorial concessions, and pay reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers. (Article 231, which became known as the War Guilt clause, was future subject of great debate – and in part became the cause of WWII.) (See “1914, July”)
• 1920, Jan: The League of Nations founded. It was the first worldwide intergovernmental organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded by the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. The main organization ceased operations on 20 April 1946 but many of its components were relocated into the new United Nations (See “1945, April” 
• 1922, Dec: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was born with Joseph Stalin in charge. Initially, the new nation only had four members: the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Transcaucasian Soviet republics. Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1953) and premier of the Soviet state (1941–53); by the 1930s he consolidated power to become a dictator. During the quarter of a century preceding his death, Stalin as dictator probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. He industrialized the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and forcibly collectivized its agriculture 
• 1923, Nov: The forced labour camp of Solovki served as a prototype for the Russian Gulag (a system of forced labour camps). It was set up on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea as a remote and inaccessible place of detention, primarily intended for socialist opponents of Soviet Russia’s new Bolshevik regime. Its remote situation made escape almost impossible and in Tsarist times the monastery in which it was housed had been used, on occasion, as a political prison by the Russian imperial administration (See “1918-1960, Jan” and “1917, Dec”)
• 1924, Jan: Vladimir Lenin dies. He was the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924 
• 1924, July: The World Chess Federation was founded in Paris, France. (It is referred to by its French acronym, FIDE.) In 1950 it established a system of titles, conferring the titles of Grandmaster and International Master on 27 players. Mikhail Botvinnik started an era of Soviet dominance in the chess world which stood almost uninterrupted for more than a half-century. This was driven mainly through the Soviet government’s politically inspired efforts to demonstrate intellectual superiority over the West. Until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there was only one non-Soviet champion, American Bobby Fischer (champion 1972–1975). Note: chess has an ancient history. The earliest texts referring to the origins of chess date from the beginning of the 7th century. The oldest known chess manual was in Arabic and dates to about 840 AD 
• 1928, Aug: The Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed outlawing war between the nations that signed, including France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. With the signing of the Litvinov Protocol in Moscow February 1929, the Soviet Union and its western neighbours, including Romania, agreed to put the Kellogg–Briand Pact in effect. The world was eager to maintain peace, and the pact was signed by 15 nations initially, followed by 47 additional countries in the following years. Signatories of the “Paris Pact” (the act’s nickname) were to renounce war as a national policy and settle disputes by peaceful means. While acts of aggression were outlawed, self-defence was permitted, which led to the pact’s eventual downfall. What’s more, there weren’t any real legal consequences for violations, and nations soon began justifying international aggression as self-defence, and without any repercussions, beginning with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, China, in 1931. Although the pact failed to prevent World War II, it remains in effect today, and its goals are still relevant 
• 1931, Sept: Japanese invasion of Manchuria (northeast China). The true beginning of another “great” war. It was an escalation in a long running struggle with Russia – first Tsarist, then Soviet – over control of Manchuria and its key ports and railways. At the war’s end in February 1932, the Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo 
• 1932-33: Stalin’s Russia caused a man-made famine (the Holodomor) in Soviet Ukraine resulting in 3.5 to 5 million victims (some estimates go from 7 to 10 million). The origins of the famine lay in the decision by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist Party agitators forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal property, and sometimes housing to collective farms, and they deported so-called kulaks – wealthier peasants – as well as any peasants who resisted collectivization altogether. Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages. Ukrainians were forcibly deprived of their grain and food; whole villages were depopulated, and the grain which should have fed Ukrainians was sold internationally. The Holodomor (Ukrainian for “death by starvation”) has been recognized by Ukraine alongside 15 other countries, as a genocide against the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet regime
• 1934, Sept: USSR became a member of the League of Nations. It was expelled in December 1939 for invading Finland
• 1936, Aug-1938, March: The Great Purge was Soviet General Secretary Stalin’s campaign to solidify his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the state by eliminating his rivals by the use of imprisonment and execution. Scholars estimate the death toll for the Great Purge to be roughly 700,000. (Called also the Great Terroror the Year of ’37). In particular, the purges were designed to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky. They occurred with the most prominent feature being show trials of leading Bolshevik party members. However, a considerable proportion of the country’s population was affected as well. The purges themselves were largely conducted by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the secret police of the USSR. The NKVD began the removal of the central party leadership, Old Bolsheviks, government officials, and regional party bosses. Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. The NKVD widely utilized imprisonment, torture (a great number of accusations were based on forced confessions under torture), violent interrogation, and arbitrary executions to solidify control over civilians through fear 
• 1939, Aug: A secret speech was allegedly given by Joseph Stalin justifying the Soviet strategy to promote military conflict in Europe. The historicity of this is still the subject of academic debate. The speech was apparently given to members of the Politburo (the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) wherein he justified the Soviet strategy to promote military conflict in Europe, which would be beneficial for the future territorial expansion of the Communist system. The strategy included Soviet-Nazi collaboration and the suggestion of what has become the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 
• 1939, Aug: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the Hitler-Stalin Pact), which made the two dictators allies. It was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union enabled those powers to partition Poland between them. They marked out their “spheres of influence” across Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. Stalin covertly partnered with Hitler to re-arm Nazi Germany. Note: in today’s Russia, it is forbidden to study, in an unbiased  manner, this early period of WWII (1939–1941), when this Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was in force, when as said the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland, the Baltic countries and invaded Finland. Those who “identify” the similarities in the policies of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany during that period face the possibility of a large fine or arrest. The full historical truth about WWII is dangerous for todays Kremlin. Starting with its very name, which back in Soviet times was supplanted and replaced by the “Great Patriotic War,” which began only in 1941, many military archives from that period are still kept highly classified. Russia has erased from its history books the fact that Stalin signed this “non-aggression pact” in 1939 with Nazi German. But Hitler double-crossed Stalin, attacked his army then spent years and millions of lives trying to drive the Russians back to Moscow and conquer the rest of Russia. That world war was caused by two treacherous leaders who signed their deal in order to enslave or eliminate millions of people who lived in between them. Then they ended up destroying one another (See “1940, June” and “1954, Apr”)
• 1939, Sept 1: World War II begins. German forces under the control of Adolf Hitler bombard Poland on land and from the air. The UK & France declared war on Germany Sept 3. The war involved the vast majority of the world’s countries – including all of the great powers – forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. It resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians
• 1939, Nov: The Winter War (or the First Soviet-Finnish War), between the Soviet Union and Finland; it ended after 3 1/3 months with the Moscow Peace Treaty. Despite superior military strength the Soviet Union suffered severe losses and initially made little headway. The League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union from the organization on December 14, 1939 
• 1940, May: The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police). The order to execute captive members of the Polish officer corps was secretly issued by the Soviet Politburo led by Joseph Stalin. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be “intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials”. In the 1990s, the Soviets accepted responsibility for the massacres, but refused to classify it as a war crime or as an act of mass murder 
• 1940, June: The Soviet Union invaded and occupied the three independent Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact wth Nazi Germany as “constituent republics” and annexed them in August. In June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and within weeks occupied these Baltic territories. The Soviet Union recaptured these states in 1944. During the 1944-1991 Soviet occupation many people from Russia and other parts of the former USSR were settled in the three Baltic countries, while the local languages, religion and customs were suppressed. This colonization included mass executions, deportations and repression of the native population 
• 1941, June: Germany led the European Axis powers in an invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), opening the Eastern Front, the largest land theatre of war in history. The Germans sent around 110 divisions eastward. What stopped it? First, the weather (very early onset of extreme frosts and snow – the coldest winter, ironically since Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, and with German troops still clad in summer uniforms); secondly, the Red Army fought back sufficiently to slow the Germans down; and thirdly Russia threw more troops into the fight
• 1941, Sept-1944, Jan: The Siege of Leningrad, one of the most lethal in world history, lasted for 900 days. This was a prolonged military blockade undertaken by the Axis powers against the Soviet city of Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg ). The city survived, with heroic resistance. It was possibly the costliest siege in history due to the number of casualties which were suffered throughout its duration. It has sInce been determined that it was Hitler’s ultimate plan to raze Leningrad 
• 1942, Aug-1943, Feb: The Battle of Stalingrad, where over one million perished. Russians consider it to be one of the greatest battles of their Great Patriotic War, and most historians consider it to be the greatest battle of the entire conflict. It stopped the German advance into the Soviet Union and marked the turning of the tide of war in favour of the Allies (See “1943, Feb”)
• 1943, Jan: The Casablanca Conference finalized the Allied strategic plans against the Axis powers and the promulgation of the policy of demanding “unconditional surrender” from the Germans, Italians, and Japanese. The discussions were held between US President Franklin Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill. Stalin could not attend as he was preoccupied with the Russian defence of Leningrad. (See “1941, Sept-1944, Jan”) What the leaders ordained in Casablanca largely came about
• 1943, Feb: Russian troops retook Stalingrad and captured nearly 100,000 German soldiers, though pockets of resistance continued to fight in the city until early March. Most of the captured soldiers died in Russian prison camps, either as a result of disease or starvation. The loss at Stalingrad was the first failure of the war to be publicly acknowledged by Hitler. It put Hitler and the Axis powers on the defensive, and boosted Russian confidence as it continued to do battle on the Eastern Front in WW II. Stalingrad led to the death of 750,000 Soviet and 850,000 Axis forces. And more civilians died in the battle of Stalingrad than in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. In the end, many historians believe the Battle at Stalingrad marked a major turning point in the conflict. It was the beginning of the march toward victory for the Allied forces of Russia, Britain, France and the US (See “1942, Aug-1943, Feb”) 
• 1943, Nov: Tehrān Conference held where the chief discussion centred on the opening of a “second front” in western Europe. Present were US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British PM Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. Stalin agreed to an eastern offensive to coincide with the forthcoming Western Front, and he pressed the western leaders to proceed with formal preparations for their long-promised invasion of German-occupied France. Though the settlement for Germany was discussed at length, all three Allied leaders appeared uncertain; their views were imprecise on the topic of a postwar international organization; and, on the Polish question, the western Allies and the Soviet Union found themselves in sharp dissension. On Iran, they were able to agree on a declaration guaranteeing the postwar independence and territorial integrity of that state and promising postwar economic assistance 
• 1944, May: Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar nation – roughly 200,000 people – from its homeland. The deportation is remembered as “the Exile”, an event of brutal dispossession and mass death. Thousands of the deportees died over the course of the journey from inhumane conditions, lack of water and food, and vicious treatment by Stalin’s NKVD. Thousands more perished from hunger, exposure, and disease in “special settlement camps” in Central Asia and Siberia, where they languished for nearly half a century. It was ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide ordered by the Soviet leader, Stalin. By the end of the deportation, not a single Crimean Tatar lived in Crimea. The deportation was formally recognized as a genocide by Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Canada 
• 1944, July: The Bretton Woods Agreement was negotiated by delegates from 44 countries at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The principal goals were to create an efficient foreign exchange system, prevent competitive devaluations of currencies, and promote international economic growth. The Agreement also created two important organizations – the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in which the US dollar was the common currency of exchange.(Canada was a founding member of the Bretton Woods system.) While the Bretton Woods System was dissolved in the 1970s, both the IMF and World Bank have remained pillars for the exchange of international currencies 
• 1945, Jan: Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army during the Vistula-Oder Offensive. This was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp in occupied Poland where more than a million people were murdered as part of the Nazi’s “final solution” to the Jewish question
• 1945, Feb: Yalta Conference. Thiswas the meeting of the heads of government of the US, the UK, and the Soviet Union to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe. The aim of the conference was to shape a postwar peace that represented not only a collective security order but also a plan to give self-determination to the liberated peoples of Europe, including the demilitarization, democratization and denazification of Germany. It was intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe. Yalta obligated the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan within three months after Germany’s surrender, in exchange for territorial concessions and Soviet influence in post-war Manchuria. At Yalta the Soviets agreed to join the UN because of a secret understanding of a voting formula with a veto power for permanent members of the Security Council, which ensured that each country could block unwanted decisions. Other countries in Central and Eastern Europe were occupied and converted into Soviet-controlled satellite states (the people’s Republic of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovak, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, East Germany). Stalin also did not honour his promise of free elections for Poland
• 1945, April: The United Nations charter adopted; begins operations shortly after, but has flaws that must be corrected. The UN was established after WWII with the aim of preventing future world wars, succeeding the League of Nations, which was characterized as ineffective. It is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. It is the world’s largest and most familiar international organization. Initially it had 51 member states; membership is now 193, representing almost all of the world’s sovereign states. The United Nations currently is verging on dysfunction, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state (See “1920, Jan”) 
• 1945, April: The Battle for Berlin by the Soviet Red Army from the east. There are horrific stories of rape by Russian soldiers of the German women (a taboo subject in Russia even today); it is believed they raped up to two million German women. Old women and children were not exempt. The Soviet command turned a blind eye to it all and many officers were complicit. Counter stories of German soldiers raping Russian women also abound
• 1945, May 8: The surrender of the Third Reich in Berlin. The day before, Germany had signed another surrender document close to it with the Allies in Reims in France, but it was not recognized by the Soviet Union for enforcement, so another document was needed to sign 
• 1945, Aug: Soviet invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (officially the State of Manchuria – northeastern China). It was the largest campaign of the 1945 Soviet-Japanese War, which resumed hostilities between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Empire of Japan after almost six years of peace. The Soviets and Mongolians ended Japanese control of Manchukuo, northern Korea, and the Kuril Islands. The defeat of Japan’s army, along with the two Atomic bombs, helped bring about the Japanese surrender and the termination of World War II
• 1945, Sept: Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk for the Soviet embassy to Canada, defected with 109 documents on the USSR’s espionage activities in the West. In response, Canada’s Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, called a royal commission to investigate espionage in Canada. Gouzenko exposed Soviet intelligence’s efforts to steal nuclear secrets as well as the technique of planting sleeper agents. The “Gouzenko Affair” is often credited as a triggering event of the Cold War, with historian Jack Granatstein stating it was “the beginning of the Cold War for public opinion” and journalist Robert Fulford writing he was “absolutely certain the Cold War began in Ottawa”. Gouzenko’s actions were described as having “awakened the people of North America to the magnitude and the danger of Soviet espionage”. Canada played an important part in the early research with nuclear bomb technology, being part of the wartime Manhattan Project along with the US and UK. That kind of vital information could be dangerous to Canadian interests in the hands of other nations1945, 
• 1945, Nov-1946, Oct: The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany for carrying out invasions of other countries and atrocities against their citizens in WWII – the true beginning of international criminal law. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) tried 21 of the most important surviving leaders of Nazi Germany in the political, military, and economic spheres, as well as six German organizations. The purpose of the trial was not just to convict the defendants but also to assemble irrefutable evidence of Nazi crimes, offer a history lesson to the defeated Germans, and delegitimize the traditional German elite. Four organizations were ruled to be criminal: the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the SS (the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party), the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), and the SD (the intelligence agency of the SS). Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death. Seven defendants were sent to prison. Controversial at the time for their retroactive criminalization of aggression, the trials’ innovation of holding individuals responsible for violations of international law is considered “the true beginning of international criminal law” 
• 1946, March: Winston Churchill described the threat of Soviet Communism as an anti-democratic “Iron Curtain” descending across Europe. It was “a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization” signalling the start of the Cold War. Churchill’s speech in the US (after he was UK prime minister) was the first time anyone had used that now-common phrase to describe the Communist threat
• 1947, March: The Truman Doctrineannounced, leading to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This was an American foreign policy that originated with the primary goal of containing Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. It was further developed in July 1948, when US President Harry Truman pledged to contain the communist uprisings in Greece and Turkey (through a dramatic speech to a joint session of congress he asks for US assistance for Greece and Turkey to forestall communist domination of the two nations). Direct American military force was not involved, but Congress appropriated financial aid to support the economies and militaries. More generally, the Doctrine implied American support for other nations thought to be threatened by Soviet communism. The Truman Doctrine became the foundation of American foreign policy, and led, in 1949, to the formation of NATO (See “1949, April”) 
• 1947: The AK-47 submachine gun introduced; it is thought to be the most widely used firearm in history. It was first manufactured in the Soviet Union. It’s easy to use and carry (weighing around 10 pounds) and is accurate. It is the originating firearm of the Kalashnikov family of rifles. After more than eight decades since its creation, the AK-47 model and its variants remain one of the most popular and widely used firearms in the world 
• 1948, April: The Marshall Plan(officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative enacted to provide foreign aid to Western Europe for economic recovery programs to their economies after the end of WWII. The US transferred $13.3 billion (equivalent of $173 billion in 2023). Aid was divided among the participant states roughly on a per capita basis. A larger amount was given to the major industrial powers, as the prevailing opinion was that their resuscitation was essential for the general European revival. Somewhat more aid per capita was also directed toward the Allied nations, with less for those that had been part of the Axis or remained neutral. The largest recipient of Marshall Plan money was the UK (receiving about 26% of the total). The next highest contributions went to France (18%) and West Germany (11%). Some eighteen European countries received Plan benefits. Although offered participation, the Soviet Union refused Plan benefits and also blocked benefits to Eastern Bloc countries, such as Romania and Poland. USSR developed its own economic recovery program, known as the Molotov Plan 
• 1949, April: The foundations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were officially laid down with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty (the Washington Treaty). It is an intergovernmental military alliance (also called the North Atlantic Alliance) currently between 31 member states – 29 European and two North American (Canada and US). It is a collective security system: its independent member states agree to defend each other against attacks by third parties. During the Cold War, NATO operated as a check on the threat posed by the Soviet Union. Members have agreed to reach or maintain the target defence spending of at least 2% of their GDP by 2024. (Sweden and Finland chose not to join until 2023.) (See “2023, April and “2023, Oct”) 
• 1949, May: West Germany, or the Federal Republic of Germany, was officially established. East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic, was established in October 1949. Under their occupying governments, the two Germanys followed very different paths. (At the end of WWII, Germany was divided into four occupation zones, each controlled by one of the Allied powers: Britain, France, the US and the Soviet Union. The German capital, Berlin, was similarly divided into four sectors, even though the entire city was located within the eastern part of Germany under Soviet control.) (See “1961, Aug” and “1989, Nov”) 
• 1949, Aug: The Soviet Union’s first test of a nuclear weapon kicked off the arms race (code-named “First Lightning”) in Kazakhstan, ending the US monopoly on nuclear weaponry and kicking off the arms race 
• 1950, Jan: Klaus Fuchs confessed that he had passed information from the American, British and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviets over a seven-year period beginning in 1942. A British court sentenced him to fourteen years’ imprisonment. Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist who came to the US to work on the US atomic bomb and was assigned to research facilities in New York and Los Alamos, N.M. He was able to pass along to the Soviets details of the plutonium and the uranium bombs and to describe the design and method of their construction. Their information advanced the Soviet atomic weapons program at least 18 months, according to the Senate-House Atomic Energy Committee, and it helped the Soviets explode their first atomic bomb in 1949. His case led to the exposure of an espionage ring that included atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in New York in 1953, and Harry Gold, a Philadelphia biochemist who was Dr. Fuchs’ contact with the Soviets. The Atomic Energy Committee said, “Fuchs alone has influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy not only in the history of the United States but in the history of nations.” (See “1951, March”)
• 1950, Feb: The Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance was signed by China and the Soviet Union. The treaty was signed against the background of the establishment of China’s communist regime and the Cold War confrontation, resulting directly from Mao’s foreign policy directive of “leaning to one side” (siding with the socialist camp) and Stalin’s strategic and ideological considerations pertaining to the extension of Soviet influence in East Asia. The expiration of the treaty in 1979 allowed China to attack Vietnam, a Soviet ally, in the Third Indochina War as a response to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia
• 1950, April: A top secret US National Security Council policy paper made the rollback of global Communist expansion a high priority. Developed for President Truman, the highlyclassified document, NSC 68 (the United States Objectives and Programs for National Security) advocated a large expansion in the military budget, the development of a hydrogen bomb, and increased military aid to allies. It also rejected the alternative policies of friendly détente and containment of the Soviet Union. This ideologically charged document established the parameters of US policy throughout the Cold War. Juxtaposed against that free society was “the slave society” of the Soviet Union, which demanded “total power over all men within the Soviet state without a single exception” along with “total power over all Communist Parties and all states under Soviet domination.” NSC-68 made a case for American hegemony. “In a shrinking world,” the document asserted, “the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable.” This fact imposed on the United States “the responsibility of world leadership” along with an obligation “to bring about order and justice by means consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.” Washington committed itself to establishing a dominant military configured as a global police force. The necessity of US military supremacy – whether measured by Pentagon spending, the number of bases abroad, or a propensity to use force – has become an article of fait 
• 1951, March: American citizens, Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel, were convicted for theft of atomic secrets for Russia in the most sensational atomic spying case of the cold war. The judge held the Rosenbergs responsible for putting into the hands of the Russians data about the A-bomb years before the best US scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb. They were executed two years later (See “1950, Jan”) 
• 1953, Feb: Death of the dictator Joseph Stalin. He ruled the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953, becoming one of the most powerful and murderous dictators in history. He was a communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism. In spite of his reign of terror that caused tens of millions to die, he remained “Uncle Joe,” the “father” of all Russians to his final days 
• 1954, April: The Soviet Union transferred the administration of Crimea from Soviet Russia to Ukraine. (Ukraine’s territory had expanded during the Soviet period. Under the Soviet Union’s non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed in 1939, the two countries carved up eastern Europe. In the ensuing fighting, what had been parts of Poland that were settled by Ukrainians were added to Soviet Ukraine.) (See “1939, Aug”)
• 1954, May: USSR’s bid to join NATO was rejected on grounds that the USSR’s membership of the organization would be incompatible with its democratic and defensive aims. USSR had suggested that it join NATO as it feared the restoration of German militarism in West Germany.Moscow hit back, establishing an Eastern counterpart, dubbed the Warsaw Pact. The struggle for global dominance, known as the Cold War, is now rolling
• 1954, June: The USSR’s Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant became the world’s first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid. Although its production of electricity for the grid ceased in 1959, it remained in operation until 2022; thereafter it functioned as a research and isotope production plant only
• 1955, Feb: The Middle East Treaty Organization (METO) established. Also known as the Baghdad Pact, it was a military alliance of the Cold War. It was formed by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and the UK. Its goal was to contain the Soviet Union (USSR) by having a line of strong states along the Soviet Union’s southwestern frontier. Similarly, it was known as the ‘Northern Tier’ to prevent Soviet expansion into the Middle East. The alliance was dissolved in 1979 
• 1955, Nov-1975, April: The Vietnam War. A conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from November 1,1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 30, 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was a major conflict of the Cold War. While the war was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, the north was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist states, while the south was supported by the United States and other anti-communist allies, making the war a proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union. It lasted almost 20 years, with direct US military involvement ending in 1973. The conflict also spilled over into neighbouring states, exacerbating the Laotian Civil War and the Cambodian Civil War, which ended with all three countries officially becoming communist states by 1976 (See “1964, Aug”, “1973, Jan” and “1975, April”)
• 1956, Feb: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech that was sharply critical of the rule of the General Secretary and Premier Joseph Stalin (who died in 1953), particularly with respect to the purges which had especially marked the last years of the 1930s. Speaking to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev charged Stalin with having fostered a leadership cult of personality despite ostensibly maintaining support for the ideals of communism. The speech (On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences) was leaked to the West by the Israeli intelligence agency. The speech was shocking in its day due to the revelations of Stalin’s use of terror. It resulted in confusion among many Soviet citizens who were raised on the permanent praise of the “genius” of Stalin. The speech was cited as a major cause of the Sino-Soviet split by China (under Chairman Mao Zedong) who condemned Khrushchev as a revisionist. The speech was a milestone in the Khrushchev Thaw when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were relaxed due to Khrushchev’s policies of de-Stalinization and peaceful coexistence with other nations 
• 1956, Nov: A spontaneous national uprising takes place in Hungary; Soviet forces crush Budapest.The uprising demanded a more democratic political system and freedom from Soviet oppression. It lasted 12 days before being crushed by Soviet tanks and troops.TheSoviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had pledged a retreat from the Stalinist policies and repression of the past, but the violent actions in Budapest suggested otherwise. This nationwide revolution against the one-party Hungarian socialist state and its Soviet-imposed policies was the first major threat to Soviet control since the Red Army drove Nazi Germany from its territory at the end of WWII. Hungary was the country where Soviet-style Communism would begin to lose its appeal. Nikita Khrushchev’s view was that if the “counterrevolution” got out of hand in Hungary, he would have to intervene. It did, and he did. The Hungarian uprising had a shattering impact on the shape of world affairs. To quote historian Tony Judt “1956 represented the defeat and collapse of the revolutionary myth so successfully cultivated by Lenin and his heirs”. The failure of Communism in Hungary was important (See “1991, March”) 
• 1957, Oct: Soviets were the first nation to successfully launch the first man-made satellite into space, Sputnik 1. Just days before, on a modified version of the rocket that powered Sputnik, the Soviets conductedthe world’s first successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), seen as capable of striking U.S. territory. Then one month later they launched Sputnik 2 with a dog, Laika. The satellite’s unanticipated success precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race, part of the Cold War. Since then, more than 6,500 have been launched
• 1957, Oct: Just days after the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, two US physicists were able to determine accurate location information (thus the Global Positioning System orGPS emerged). The two physicists at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, William Guier and George Weiffenbach, used the radio signals emanating from the satellite to determine Sputnik’s orbit by analyzing the Doppler shift of its radio signals during a single pass. Next the inverse problem was investigated: pinpointing the user’s location. Fast forward to 1973 and the Navstar Global Positioning System (See “1960” and “1973”) 
• 1959, Dec: The Antarctic Treaty was signed by the twelve nations that had been active during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1957-58 (Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States and USSR). The Treaty applies to the area south of 60° South latitude. It makes the Earth’s only unoccupied continent a military-free, scientific nature preserve. Through this agreement, the countries active in Antarctica consult on the uses of a whole continent, with a commitment that it should not become the scene or object of international discord. Among a number of things it bans nuclear explosions and radioactive waste disposal. The Treaty came into effect June 1961 and now has 54 signatories 
• 1961, April: Soviets put first man in space. Travelling in the Vostok 1 capsule, Yuri Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth
• 1961, April: US Bay of Pigs failure in Cuba. A failed landing operation on the coast of Cuba by Cuban exiles who opposed Fidel Castro’s revolution, covertly financed and directed by the US government. The operation took place at the height of the Cold War, and its failure influenced relations between Cuba, the US, and the Soviet Union. The invasion’s defeat solidified Castro’s role as a national hero and widened the political division between the two formerly allied countries. It also pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union, setting the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 
• 1962 1961, Aug: Construction of the Berlin wall begins, to keep residents from leaving, by the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) that ideologically and physically divided Berlin and culturally codifying the Cold War. It was portrayed as protecting the Eastern Bloc from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the “will of the people“ from building a socialist state in East Germany. It came down in 1989 (See “1949, May” and “1989, Nov”)
• 1961, Oct: Soviets exploded Tsar Bomba about 13,000 feet above an island in the Arctic Circle. It was equal to 4000 Hiroshima bombs – the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated 
• 1962, Oct: Cuban Missile Crisis when the USSR put nuclear missiles in Cuba. When the US discovered Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba (a US U-2 spy plane discovered them and one was shot down), President John F. Kennedy demanded their removal and announced a naval blockade of the island. He sent his brother Robert F. Kennedy, who was Attorney General, to meet the Soviet Ambassador to cut a deal. After a thirteen-day standoff between the superpowers, which included a US naval quarantine of Cuba, the Soviet leader Khrushchev agrees to withdraw its missiles. In exchange, the US publicly pledges not to invade Cuba and, confidentially, agrees to pull its nuclear missiles out of Turkey 
• 1963, Aug: The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed by Russia, UK and the US. The treaty prohibited all test detonations of nuclear weapons except for those conducted underground. It formally went into effect October 1963. Since then, 123 other states have become party to the treaty. Ten states have signed but not ratified the treaty (See “2010, Apr”) 
• 1964, Oct: Russia’s Voskhod 1 launched with 3 astronauts – a record 
• 1964, Oct: The Russian Politburo removed Khrushchev and put in Leonid Brezhnev on the same day as the Voskhod 1 launch. He became first Secretary of the CPSU, the most powerful position in the USSR. Russia’s “stagnation” period started although it achieved nuclear parity with the US. While Brezhnev came up through the military, some historians saw  him as “peace loving”. He was succeeded in 1982 by Yuri Andropov, who was a strict head of the KGB (who in turn died in 1984) (See “1982, Nov”) 
• 1965, March: First space walk. Russian cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, exited the capsule during the Voskhod 2 mission for 12 minutes
• 1966 Feb: The Soviet Luna 9 was the first soft landing on moon, plus they sent pictures; it became the first spacecraft to achieve a survivable landing on a celestial body. The mission also determined that a spacecraft would not sink into the lunar dust; that the ground could support a lander. In April Luna 10 was the 1st artificial lunar satellite around moon 
• 1966, March: The Canadian “Munsinger” affair was Canada’s first national political sex scandal. The affair involved Gerda Munsinger, a German citizen who had been convicted in Germany as a prostitute, a petty thief and a smuggler. She emigrated to Canada and in 1960 was the mistress of the former Associate Minister of National Defence Pierre Sévigny. Munsinger was actually “a self-admitted espionage agent” in the employ of the “Russian intelligence service” 
• 1967 April: Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died on re-entry to earth in a shoddily constructed space capsule Soyuz I, when the parachutes didn’t deploy. Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, had decided to stage a spectacular mid-space rendezvous between two Soviet spaceships to celebrate Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution
• 1967, Oct: The Outer Space Treaty came into effect, banning ownership of the region beyond the earth and its atmosphere. It also bans the weaponization of space. There are now 114 countries that are parties to the treaty – including all major spacefaring countries and 22 others are signatories 
• 1968, July: The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons signed (NPT). It is an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament. The treaty entered into force in 1970. As required after 25 years NPT Parties met in May 1995 and agreed to extend the treaty indefinitely. More countries are parties to the NPT than any other arms limitation and disarmament agreement, a testament to the treaty’s significance.  As of August 2016, 191 states have become parties to the treaty, though North Korea announced its withdrawal in 2003, following detonation of nuclear devices in violation of core obligations. Four UN member states have never accepted the NPT, three of which possess nuclear weapons: India, Israel, and Pakistan. Note: the movement of some tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus in June 2023 is in contravention of this treaty (See “2017, July”)
• 1968, Aug: Leonid Brezhnev sent Soviet tanks into Prague, Czechoslovakia to end the “Prague Spring ” reform movement for national freedom. The invasion (which was actually by the combined four Warsaw Pact countries: the Soviet Union, the Polish People’s Republic, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, and the Hungarian People’s Republic) stopped the liberalization reforms and strengthened the authoritarian wing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Brezhnev had replaced Khrushchev in 1964 as First Secretary of the CPSU, the most powerful position in the USSR. While Brezhnev came up through the military, some historians saw Brezhnev as “peace loving”; he was succeeded by Yuri Andropov (who died in 1984) (See “1989, Nov”)
• 1969, March: China and the Soviet Union had a military clash on Zhenbao Island, northeastern China. (This finally got resolved in the 1990s!) This along with other incidents reflected the significant tensions that had been occurring following China’s ideological split with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. It is well documented that the Soviet Union had considered a preemptive surgical strike against China’s nuclear bases and certain border cities. The US had been asked to stay neutral but the Nixon administration refused and leaked the information to the press forcing the Soviets to abandon the plan 
• 1972, May: Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) which resulted in the first treaty between the US and the USSR, known as SALT I. Of the resulting complex of agreements, the most important were the Treaty on Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Systems and the Interim Agreement and Protocol on Limitation of Strategic Offensive Weapons. By signing SALT I, they agreed to a limited number of ballistic missiles, as well as a limited number of missile deployment sites. They were intended to restrain the arms race in strategic (long-range or intercontinental) ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons (See “1991, July”) 
• 1972, Sept: Bobby Fischer became the first American to claim the world chess championship. He beat the defending Champion, Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union, in the “Match of the Century”. The Soviet Union dominated chess; all the world champions since the end of WWII had been Soviets. The Fischer-Spassky match thus became a metaphorical battle in the Cold War. The match attached more worldwide interest than any championship before or since. At age 15, Fischer (1943-2008) was also the youngest chess grandmaster (See “1985, Nov”)
• 1973, March: The Group of Seven (G7) was formed. It is an intergovernmental political forum consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan (the only Asian country in the G7), the UK and the US; additionally, the European Union (EU). Russia was a formal member (as part of the Group of Eight) from 1997 to 2014, but was booted out in 2014 after annexing Crimea from Ukraine. G7 members are large International Monetary Fund advanced economies and account for over half of global net wealth (at over $200 trillion), 30 to 43% percent of global gross domestic product, and 10% of the world’s population (770 million people). The responsibility of hosting the G7 is rotated through the member states with the holder of the presidency setting the agenda (See “2023, May”) 
• 1976, May: A human rights organization was created to monitor the Soviet Union’s compliance with the Helsinki Accords was formed. It was called The Moscow Helsinki Group. The aim of the accords was to improve relations between the Communist bloc and Western countries, and to that end it established terms of cooperation between the signatories on various political and economic matters. Yet its provisions were non-binding. At the time of their signing, the Helsinki Accords met with quite a bit of skepticism among Western politicians about their likely effect on Soviet behaviour. To Russian dissidents, the agreement represented a clear betrayal by Western powers, who had given Moscow everything it wanted in exchange for empty promises. Since the end of WW II, the Soviet Union had wanted the world to recognize the Baltic Republics, which it had obtained from Hitler, as its own; the Helsinki Accords made this a reality. For years the Soviet Union had wanted Eastern Europe to remain as its protectorate; the Helsinki signatories agreed. And despite these imperialistic policies, the Soviet Union wanted economic cooperation with the West; once again, its negotiating partners gave in
• 1978, April: The April Coup in Afghanistan. The then Afghan president, Daoud Khan and most of his family, were executed, The successful People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA – a Marxist-Leninist political party) uprising resulted in the creation of a socialist Afghan government that was closely aligned with the Soviet Union. It was a significant event in the county’s history as it marked the beginning of decades of continuous conflict 
• 1979, June: The US and Soviet Union sign a SALT II agreement. It would have placed further limits on their nuclear weapons and launch platforms, including strategic bombers, and imposed certain notification requirements and new testing bans. But in December, the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, starting a nine-year war in which its forces and allied Afghan communists battle the US-funded mujahideen resistance. President Jimmy Carter responds to the Soviet invasion by asking the Senate to freeze consideration of the SALT II treaty and by pulling the country out of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow 
• 1979, Dec: Start of Soviet War in Afghanistan. Soviet operatives killed the president Hafizullah Amin, kickstarting the 10-year Soviet-Afghan War. The invasion added new fuel to Cold War tensions. For the next decade, Moscow tried to quell resistance from anti-communist Muslim fighters, known as mujahideen, who were supported by aid from the West. The invasion was a contributing factor to the dissolution of the Soviet Union; they withdrew in 1989. The decision by the Soviet Union to directly intervene in Afghanistan was based on the Brezhnev Doctrine (a policy that proclaimed any threat to socialist rule in any state of the Soviet Bloc in Central and Eastern Europe was a threat to them all, and therefore justified the intervention of fellow socialist states). It was the Soviet Vietnam. The involvement of the foreign powers made the war a proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union. The conflict led to the deaths of between 562,000 and 2,000,000 Afghans, while millions more fled from the country as refugees 
• 1981, Nov: American cruise missiles delivered to the UK. Over a five-year period, 464 cruise and 108 Pershing II missiles were deployed in five NATO countries as a counter to the Soviet Union’s SS20 missiles. Each nuclear warhead of the Tomahawk cruise missiles, is 16 times more powerful than the bomb exploded at Hiroshima
• 1981, Dec: Martial law declared in Poland in an attempt to counter political opposition, in particular the Solidarity movement, a Polish trade-movement representing one-third of the country’s working-age population. (Solidarity’s leader Lech Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and the union is widely recognized as having played a central role in the end of Communist rule in Poland.) While the tanks were Polish, the order to deploy them came from Moscow. Martial law in Poland was formally lifted in July 1983, though many heightened controls on civil liberties and political life, as well as food rationing, remained in the country throughout the mid-to-late 1980s. As a consequence of economic hardship and political repression, an exodus of Poles saw 700,000 emigrate to the West between 1981 and 1989 
• 1982, Nov: Yuri Andropov was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) after Leonid Brezhnev’s death, the first former head of the KGB to become General Secretary. For two long years he ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist (See “1974, Oct”) 
• 1983, March: President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” and “Star Wars” speeches. Reagan refers to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” and warns against “appeasement” and “the so-called nuclear freeze solutions proposed by some.” In an address two weeks later he announces a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to create a space-based ballistic missile shield that could protect against a Soviet nuclear attack. SDI seemed to mark a major shift in a US posture that had so far embraced the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or MAD, to maintain strategic stability. Critics say that the SDI, if technologically viable, would run afoul of the ABM treaty. Meanwhile, the Soviet military grows increasingly wary of a widening technological gap with the West 
• 1983, Sept: A Korean Air Lines plane was shot down by a Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 interceptor over Soviet prohibited airspace. The Boeing 747 airliner was en route from Anchorage to Seoul, but owing to a navigational mistake made by the crew, the airliner drifted from its original planned route and flew through Soviet prohibited airspace. The Soviet Air Force treated the unidentified aircraft as an intruding US spy plane, and destroyed it with air-to air missiles, after firing warning shots. The Korean airliner eventually crashed into the sea west of Sakhalin Island in the Sea of Japan. All 269 passengers and crew aboard were killed, including a US representative. The Soviet Union found the wreckage under the sea two weeks later and found the flight recorders in October, but this information was kept secret by the Soviet authorities until 1992, after the country’s collapse. As a result of the incident, president Reagan issued a directive making American satellite-based radio navigation GPS freely available for civilian use (See “1973”) 
• 1985, March: Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and President of the Soviet Union (USSR) with 15 countries and 6 Eastern Bloc satellite nations (Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany). His “perestroika” and “glasnost” shook up the country. In Geneva, he and Ronald Reagan embarked on a historic series of arms control talks. There is a debate regarding his legacy: either the restructuring of Russia’s economy and permitting freedoms to reverse decades of disastrous Stalinism or essentially the breakup of a country (See “1982, Nov”) 
• 1986, April: The world’s worst-ever nuclear accident took place: an explosion at the nuclear facility in Chernobyl, northern Ukraine. It is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at seven – the maximum severity – on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated US$68 billion in 2019, adjusted for inflation. This occurred during the dying days of the Soviet Union. The damage, and the ensuing cover-up, has heightened Ukrainians’ anger towards the Kremlin (See “1979, March” and “2011, March”)
• 1987, Dec: The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed by Russia and the US agreeing to eliminate by 1991 their countries’ arsenals of ground-launched, midrange nuclear missiles (ranging from about 300 to 3,400 miles). It’s the first agreement to reduce nuclear arms – as opposed to setting ceilings – and it introduced comprehensive verification measures. A turning point for the negotiations came after Gorbachev, in a shift from his previous posture, agreed to de-link the INF from broader strategic talks, which included Soviet efforts to inhibit US development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). In October 2018 President Donald Trump announced that he was withdrawing the US from the treaty due to Russian non-compliance; he claimed another reason for the withdrawal was to counter a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific, as China was not a signatory to the treaty. Russia then withdrew in response
• 1989, June: Poland became the first country of the Eastern Bloc in which democratically elected representatives gained real power. Not all parliamentary seats were contested, but the resounding victory of the Solidarity opposition, under the charismatic leadership of Lech Wałęsa (a shipyard electrician by trade) in the freely contested races paved the way to the end of communist rule in the country. Wałęsa became the first democratically elected president of Poland since 1926 and the first-ever Polish president elected by popular vote (See “2023, Nov”)
• 1989, Nov: The Iron Curtain fell. Demolition of the Berlin Wall commenced. (I have a chunk of it I purchased a few months later in Berlin.)  This was less than a week after half a million people took to the streets of East Berlin demanding democracy. The world will have to thank Mikhail Gorbachev (then the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) for that. If it had not been for him, the end of the Soviet empire could have been a drawn-out and bloody affair. Unlike his predecessors, who had used force to quash anti-communist movements in Hungary (1956) and the former Czechoslovakia (1968), Gorbachev insisted on “the sovereign right of each people to choose their own social system at their own discretion.” The Soviet Union collapsed two years later, in no small part because of the fall of the Wall. The reunification of Germany took place October 1990 (See “1949, May” and “1961, Aug”) 
• 1989, Nov: The Velvet Revolution was a non-violent transition of power in what was then Czechoslovakia. The result was the end of 41 years of one-party rule and the subsequent dismantling of the command economy and conversion to a parliamentary republic. This was eight days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Playwright Vaclav Havel became President of the country and six months later democratic elections were held (and 2 1/2 years later Czechoslovakia peacefully split into two countries, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic representing the two major ethnicities.) Czechoslovakia was created in 1918 when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. Between 1939 and 1945, the state ceased to exist, as Slovakia proclaimed its independence and Carpathian Ruthenia became part of Hungary, while the remainder of the Czech Lands, the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed. After WWII, Czechoslovakia was reestablished under its pre-1938 borders (with the exception of Carpathian Ruthenia, which became part of the Ukranian SSR (a republic of the Soviet Union). The Communist Party seized power in a coup in 1948 and it was part of the Soviet Bloc with a planned economy (See “1968, Aug”)
• 1990, Feb: “A promise that NATO would not expand to the east if Russia accepted Germany’s unification” is a claim made by Vladimir Putin that the US secretary of state James Baker, made in a discussion with the then Soviet leader, Gorbachev. Gorbachev has since been quoted (in October 2014) “The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a singe Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either.”
• 1990, June: The first multi-party elections since 1939 were held in Bulgaria. In November the Grand National Assembly voted to change the country’s name to the Republic of Bulgaria and removed the Communist star emblem from the national flag
• 1990, Sept: The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany was signed setting out how NATO troops could operate in the territory of the former East Germany. It allowed foreign-stationed NATO troops to cross the old cold war line marked by East Germany at the discretion of the German government. The agreement was contained in a signed addendum. NATO’s commitment to protect, enshrined in article 5, had for the first time moved east into former Russian-held territory. The last Russian troops left Germany by August 1994 
• 1990, Nov: The Paris Charter, adopted by a summit meeting in Paris, was the peace conference of the Cold War: Perestroika had ultimately put an end to the ideological and political division of the Iron Curtain. Pluralist democracy and market economy were together with international law and multilateralism seen as the victors. Most European governments in addition to those of Canada, the US and the Soviet Union, were present. The charter was established on the foundation of the Helsinki Accords (1975) and was further amended in the 1999 Charter for European Security. Together, these documents form the agreed basis for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. However, not all OSCE member countries have signed the treaty 
• 1991, March: The Soviet army began leaving Hungary with the last troops gone by June (See ”1956, Nov”)
• 1991, July: The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), a bilateral arms control treaty between the US and the Soviet Union, was signed. The result of the agreement was the first significant reduction in the number of strategic nuclear weapons in both the US and the Soviet stockpiles. This plus its successor, known as New START, capped the number of nuclear warheads each side could possess – most recently at 1,550 – and established a verification process that allowed US and Russian monitors to visit the other country’s nuclear facilities up to 18 times a year. (Note: on Feb 21, 2023 Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia will “put the agreement on hold” stating that it was “absurd; for the US to be allowed to inspect Russian nuclear facilities at a time when the US and its allies were sending military support to Ukraine.) (See “1972, May”, ”2010, Apr” and  “2021, Feb”) 
• 1991, Aug: A referendum held in Ukraine that led it to become an independent modern nation-state, effectively ending the USSR. Ukraine was the second-most powerful republic in the Soviet Union both economically and politically (behind Russia), and its secession ended any realistic chance of Gorbachev keeping the USSR together. On the same day, a presidential election took place. In the month up to the presidential election, all six candidates campaigned across Ukraine in favour of independence from the Soviet Union, and a “Yes” vote in the referendum. (55% of the ethnic Russians in Ukraine voted for independence.) Leonid Kravchuk, the parliament chairman and de facto head of state, was elected to serve as the first President of Ukraine. So the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) emerged as the present-day independent state of Ukraine although the modified Soviet era constitution remained in use until the adoption of the modern Ukrainian constitution in June 1996 (See “1989, Nov” and “1991, Dec”) 
• 1991, Dec: The break-up of the Soviet Union.It disintegrated into 15 separate countries, bringing an end to the Cold War and reformulating political, economic and military alliances all over the globe. The outcome, or the Belavezha Accords, put an end to the USSR, replacing it with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Gorbachev declared his office extinct on Dec 25, 1991 and the country splintered into its constituent republics and handed over its attributes – including control of the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes – to Russian president Boris Yeltsin. It was a humble end for a 69-year strong nuclear empire. (Ukraine suddenly became home to the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal.) What followed was a decade of chaotic privatization and the rise of oligarchs. Putin has called this the biggest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century (See “1947, Oct”)
• 1991, Dec: The Russian KGB was officially dissolved and was later succeeded by the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and what would later become the Federal Security Service (FSB), the principal security agency of Russia. Information gathering, disinformation, infiltration, double agents, sabotage, defectors and moles, inserting malware, bribery, etc. all became part of their lingo. In 2006 the FSB was given the legal power to engage in targeted killing of terrorism suspects overseas if ordered by the president
• 1991, Dec: Boris Yeltsin becomes he first elected president of the Russian Federal Republic within the USSR. Yeltsin, the first president of the independent Russian state was, in fact, an inherent part of the previous communist regime. He rose to power as Gorbachev’s protegee in the late 1980s and emerged as a leader of the wave of Russian anti-communist nationalism that picked up in the early 1990s. What resulted was radical capitalist shock therapy (withdrawal of price controls; mass privatization of state assets; printing of more rubles resulting in hyperinflation). On top of all that, Yeltsin was tormented by depression and was a serious alcoholic (See “1996, June”)
• 1992, Jan: Yeltsin proved incapable of managing the promised transformation of Russia to a capitalist economy. In January the departure from the state regulated economy began, triggering hyperinflation that swept away lifelong savings, with prices of everyday commodities skyrocketing by 350% within the first month of the reform. By 1993, the country was in a deep depression, and the ruble’s worth plummeted. Living standards deteriorated so radically that between 1992 and 1994, male life expectancy in Russia dropped from 62 to 57 years, a decrease that has been attributed to socio-economic stress and resulting alcohol abuse and suicide 
• 1992, March: The Treaty on Open Skies signed by the US, the newly independent Russia, and twenty-five other countries. It allows members to conduct scheduled reconnaissance flights over another’s territory. Note: In November 2020, the US withdrew from this treaty. As its rationale, the Trump administration alleges that Russia has been abusing the agreement for years. Many NATO members express regret at the US withdrawal from Open Skies, which they say is useful despite Russia’s noncompliance 
• 1992, May: Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine sign the Lisbon Protocol to the START agreement, committing the newly independent states to transferring the former Soviet nuclear arsenals to Russia and to joining the NPT as nonnuclear-weapons states. The US government provides billions of dollars to fund the denuclearization process through its Cooperative Threat Reduction program. The weapons handover is completed by the end of 1996
• 1993, Aug: Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in talks with Lech Walensa, the Polish leader, conceded Poland’s right to join NATO and did not perceive it as a threat. In December 1997, Yeltsin had described NATO expansion as a threat to Russia 
• 1994, Nov: A covert attempt by Russian intelligence services to oust the Chechen government by seizing the Chechen capital of Grozny. The attack was conducted by armed formations of the opposition Provisional Council, with the clandestine support of Russian Federation armour and aircraft. The fighting subsided after the first 10 hours, with the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria decisively repelling the assault. The Russian government officially denied military involvement in the operation. The incident led to the large-scale military invasion of the republic that began the next month (See next)
• 1994, Dec-1995, March: The First Battle of Grozny was the Russian Army’s invasion and subsequent conquest of the Chechen capital of Grozny, during the early months of the First Chechen War. The attack, which resulted in the military occupation of the city by the Russian Army and rallied most of the Chechen nation around the government of Dzhokhar Dudayev (See next)
• 1994, Dec-1996, Aug: The First Chechen War (or First Russo-Chechen War), was a struggle for independence waged by the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria against the Russian Federation. This conflict was preceded by the Battle of Grozny. It took two months of heavy fighting before the Russian Army was able to capture Grozny. It concluded as a pyrrhic victory for the Russian federal forces (they destroyed much of the city and killed 20,000 civilians). Their subsequent efforts to establish control over the remaining lowlands and mountainous regions of Chechnya were met with fierce resistance from Chechen guerrillas who often conducted surprise raids. The battle caused enormous destruction and casualties amongst the civilian population and saw the heaviest bombing campaign in Europe since the end of WWII. Despite Russia’s considerable military advantages, the recapture of Grozny in 1996 significantly demoralized Russian troops. This development led Boris Yeltsin’s government to announce a ceasefire with the Chechens in 1996 and ultimately culminated in the signing of a peace treaty in 1997. It is estimated that the number of Russian military deaths was as high as 14,000; the number of Chechen military deaths was approximately 3,000-10,000; the number of Chechen civilian deaths was between 30,000 and 100,000 (See “1999, Aug”)
• 1994, Dec: The Budapest Memorandum was signed, obligating Russia and others to respect the sovereignty, independence, and existing borders of Ukraine. Ukraine was persuaded to give up the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world in exchange for guarantees for it’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. It prohibited the Russian Federation, the UK and the US from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine (as well as Belarus and Kazakhstan). Ukraine had a weak hand; the country was on the verge of economic collapse plus the US and Russia were allied against it and they faced international isolation if they didn’t sign. Had the Budapest Memorandum provided the guarantees of their country’s territorial integrity that the Ukrainians sought instead of mere assurances, Russia would have met with much greater obstacles to violating Ukraine’s borders, including in Crimea and the Donbas 
• 1996, June: The incumbent President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, defeated Communist challenger Gennady Zyuganov. His campaign worked to shift the narrative of the election into a referendum on whether voters wanted to return to their communist past (with Zyuganov), or continue with reforms (with Yeltsin). The media was apparently overwhelming supportive of Yeltsin. One of the reasons was their fear that a Communist government would dismantle Russia’s right to a free press. Yeltsin lobbied President Clinton to speak praisefully of Russia’s transition to democracy. He believed that this would strengthen his support from voters. Yeltsin’s campaign was largely funded through the so-called Davos pact, an agreement made during the 1996 World Economic Forum between Anatoly Chubais, who was leading the financial reforms in Russia, and a group of oligarchs. They agreed to provide financial support to Yeltsin and exercise their control over newly privatized media. Yeltsin would not complete the second term for which he was elected, as he resigned on 31 December 1999, eight months before the scheduled end of his term in August 2000 (See “1991, Dec”) 
• 1996, Nov: The Arctic Council was formed as a high-level intergovernmental forum to enhance cooperation among the Arctic states with the active involvement of Arctic Indigenous Peoples. The members are Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Russian Federation, and the US. “Observers” admitted are China, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and India
• 1997, March: Yeltsin appoints Putin deputy chief of the Presidential Staff, a post which he retained until May 1998
• 1997, May: The NATO-Russia Founding Act (NRFA) was signed enabling the creation of the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council (NRPJC). It has failed. The 2022 NATO Madrid summit declared Russia “a direct threat to Euro-Atlantic security” while the NATO–Russia Council was declared defunct. This was a political agreement – not a legally binding treaty. Despite efforts to structure forums that promote cooperation between Russia and NATO, relations as of 2024 have become severely strained over time due to post-Soviet conflicts and territory disputes involving Russia having broken out, including Azerbaijan (1990-19940; Moldova (1992-present); Georgia (2004-present); Lithuania (2006); Estonia (2006–2007); Poland (2006-present); Belarus (2007); Ukraine (2014-present); Syria (2015-present); Turkey (2015-2016); Kazakhstan (2021-2022); and Armenia (2022) 
• 1998, July: Yeltsin appoints Putin director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the primary intelligence and security organization of the Russian Federation and the successor to the KGB (See “1999, Aug”) 
• 1999, Aug: Putin appointed prime minister of Russia and Yeltsin’s chosen successor. Then on Dec 31 Yeltsin resigns, leaving power in the hands of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. On March 2000 Putin is elected President of Russia (See “1998, July” and ”2000, March”) 
• 1999, Sept: The Second Russian-Chechen War commenced. Putin ordered the air bombing of Grozny which marked the beginning the war. While the war began in 1999, and although active hostilities lasted until 2000, the counter-terrorist operation mode in the region lasted until 2009. Even today there are mass detentions and disappearances of young people in Chechnya, who are later found either in the police and officials’ offices, or not found at all. In Chechnya, there was no precise victory, great and shining, for the sake of which nothing was spared. Moreover, in Chechnya, the Russian army lost for years to volunteer guerrilla units, former farmers, and students, not to the professional military. Civilian casualties in Chechnya between 1999 and 2009 are incalculable and could amount to millions. The Russian army, especially during the second war, bombed civilian targets en masse, always claiming there were terrorists hiding there (See “1995, Dec-1996, Aug”)
• 1999, Sept: Explosions of residential buildings in Moscow were blamed on Chechen extremists but were in reality the work of the FSB to make Putin admired. Explosions also occurred in Ryazan and Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad – the site of the bloodiest battles of WWII). These bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities were a false flag attack coordinated by the FSB in order to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya  and boosted Putin’s popularity in the lead-up to parliamentary elections and presidential transfer of power. The handling of the crisis by Putin, who was PM at the time, greatly boosted his popularity and helped him become president with a few months. While not proven in court, this thesis was explained in a 2002 book “Blowing Up Russia” by ex FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko (who in turn was killed by Russian assassins in 2006) (See “2006, Nov”) 
• 1999, Dec: President of Russia Boris Yeltsin resigned six months before the end of his term, leaving power in the hands of Prime Minister Putin, his chosen successor whom he had appointed prime minister a few months earlier. He seemed determined to try to put a lock on Putin’s succession to the presidency in the coming March, 2000 election. He did it when popular support for Putin was at a high to increase Putin’s chance of being elected. Yeltsin had transformed Russia’s command economy into a capitalist market economy by implementing economic shock therapy, market exchange rate of the ruble, nationwide privatization, and lifting of price controls. Economic downturn, volatility and inflation ensued 
• 2000, March: Putin is elected President of Russia in what his biographer Steven Myers said “would be the last election in Russia that could still arguably be called democratic.”
• 2002, Oct: A 3-day siege of a Moscow theatre ended by an opiate pumped into theatre. 130 died. The siege was originally blamed on Chechen terrorists. Strong subsequent evidence suggest the siege had been orchestrated by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) to vilify the Chechen rebels and burnish Putin’s strongman image 
• 2003, Oct: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian businessman, oligarch, and opposition activist, was arrested by Russian authorities and charged with fraud. He was believed to be the wealthiest man in Russia, with a fortune estimated to be worth $15 billion. He dared confront then president Vladimir Putin, criticizing state corruption. He was convicted in two Kafka-esque trials, and imprisoned. Putin pardoned him, releasing him in 2013; he now lives in London. The once powerful oligarch is now an invisible hero for the growing opposition to Putin’s tyranny. In a 2010 op-ed for the New York Times, Khodorkovsky argued that “Russia must make a historic choice. Either we turn back from the dead end toward which we have been heading in recent years – and we do it soon – or else we continue in this direction and Russia in its current form simply ceases to exist.” In 2022 he published his account of what is happening in Russia today, How to Slay a Dragon. In it he declares regarding Russia, “A genuine change of regime is now possible only in the event of a military defeat.” (See “2022, June”) 
• 2003, Nov: The so-called Rose Revolution took place in Georgia, a country at the intersection of Eastern Europe and Western Asia.The Revolution triggered new presidential and parliamentary elections, which brought the National Movement-Democrats coalition to power. This started the wave of “colour revolutions” that swept the former Soviet states 
• 2004, March: NATO accepted into its ranks three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – which were once part of the Soviet Union. The accession of the Baltics signalled that NATO enlargement would not halt at the former border of the Soviet Union. The EU followed suit in May (See “2004, May”)
• 2004, May: The EU extended its border eastward to include a number of former Soviet republics and allies, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia (and including the Baltic states accepted in March). Since Putin, a leader of an empire denying its own decline, still considered Soviet borders significant, he viewed such moves as a massive affront 
• 2004, Nov to 2005, Jan: The Orange Revolution toppled the pro-Kremlin regime in Ukraine. Ukrainians took to the streets to demand a genuine election, rather than the stage-managed farce that Putin’s regime had perfected. Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-Western politician (who had survived a poisoning attempt many believed was masterminded by the Kremlin) beat Viktor Yanukovych. This made the Ukrainian aspirations to join the EU clear. For Putin, the Orange Revolution was a double defeat. Not only did his candidate lose, but the democratic protests in Ukraine deepened anti-Russian sentiment in the two other states that had “colour revolutions,” Georgia and Kyrgyzstan 
• 2006, Nov: Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and the KGB. He was the first confirmed victim of lethal polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome. On his deathbed he accused the Russian FSB of misdeeds and Putin being behind his poisoning. Russia, and Putin, were found responsible in a British court (See “1999, Sept”) 
• 2007, Feb: Putin makes a famous speech, where he refused to accept the post-1989 settlement in Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall. Putin’s speech, delivered to the Munich Security Conference,accused the west of forgetting and breaking assurances, leaving international law in ruin (See ”2022, Feb”) 
• 2008, May: The Arctic Five (A5) established at the Arctic Ocean Conference held in Ilulissat (Greenland).Theyare the five littoral states bordering the Arctic Ocean: Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the US. The key issues they focus on include environmental regulation, maritime security, mineral exploration, polar oil oversight, and transportation (See “1996, Sept”) 
• 2008, Aug: Russia invasion of Abkhazia and South Odessa in Georgia. It is regarded as the first European war of the 21st century. It was the first time Russia had invaded a sovereign state since the fall of the USSR. Georgia had declared its independence in early 1991 as the Soviet Union began to fall apart. The country remains independent today. Russia has not returned any of the occupied territories. The Russo-Georgian war was viewed at the time as a mere bump in the road to a “reset” in US-Russian relations under a new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev. Relations briefly improved, making possible the signing of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New Start, under President Obama in 2010 (See “2010, April”) 
• 2009, June: The BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) block of large emerging market economies gathered in Yekaterinburg, Russia. They announced the need for a new global reserve currency, which would have to be “diverse, stable and predictable”. South Africa officially became a member nation December 2010. The group was renamed BRICS. Numerous other countries have expressed interest in joining the bloc, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Mexico, Argentina, Nigeria, Indonesia, Bahrain, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. The original aim of BRICS was the establishment of an equitable, democratic and multi-polar world order, but later BRICS became a political organization, especially after South Africa joined. BRICS is seen as a potential vehicle  for breaking the dominance of the US dollar, a long standing Chinese goal. 
• Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov postured, at a recent BRICS conference, that Moscow had, like other members, also overcome imperialism and European colonization. The truth is that the Soviet Union was not anti-colonial but the opposite: The Russian Federation is the last remaining European empire. In fact, Putin’s war against Ukraine is aimed at preventing the independence of its most important former colony (See “2023, Aug”)
• 2009, Nov: Death of Ukrainian-born Russian tax attorney Sergei Magnitsky, responsible for exposing corruption and misconduct by Russian government officials while representing client Hermitage Capital Management and hedge-funder Bill Browder. He died in a Russian prison on trumped up charges after being refused medical care
• 2010, Feb: Viktor Yanukovych was elected president of Ukraine; the election was judged free and fair by international observers (See “2013, Nov”) 
• 2010, April: New Strategic Arms Reduction Agreement (START treaty) signed (and in force February 2011). President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sign a new strategic arms reduction agreement in Prague, replacing the first START treaty, which expired in 2009. The so-called New START treaty commits Washington and Moscow to another round of cuts to their strategic offensive arsenals. The package sets a 30 percent reduction on deployed warheads and lower caps on deployed and non-deployed intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, submarine-launched ballistic missile launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear weapons (See “1963, Aug”, “1991, July”, “2008, Aug”, and “2021, Feb”) 
• 2012, March: Vladimir Putin retakes control from Dmitry Medvedev as president of Russia in an election tainted by allegations of voter fraud. He served two terms in the Kremlin before term limits forced him to step down in 2008. But he served as prime minister (office of prime minister is nominally the subservient position) under his successor, Dmitry Medvedev
• 2012, July: The Battle of Aleppo was a major military confrontation in Aleppo, the largest city in Syria, between the Syrian opposition (including the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other largely-Sunni groups, such as the Levant Front and the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front) against the Syrian government, supported by Hezbollah, Shia militias and Russia, and against the Kurdish-majority People’s Protection Units (YPG). The battle began in July 2012 and was part of the ongoing Syrian Civil War. A stalemate that had been in place for four years finally ended in July 2016, when Syrian government troops closed the rebels’ last supply line into Aleppo with the support of Russian airstrikes. In response, rebel forces launched unsuccessful counteroffensives in September and October that failed to break the siege; in November, government forces embarked on a decisive campaign that resulted in the recapture of all of Aleppo by December 2016. The Syrian government victory was widely seen as a turning point in Syria’s civil war 
• 2013, Aug: President Obama’s reluctance to punish the Russian-backed president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, for using sarin gas-filled rockets in Damascus diminished America’s credibility. His warned that “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons being moved around or utilised. That would change my calculus.” This red line over Syria is remembered as a defining moment of his presidency. Rather than strike immediately, he first decided to ask for a vote in Congress and then agreed not to act at all if Russia stepped in to oversee Syria’s chemical disarmament. Critics argue that Obama’s reluctance to punish Assad diminished America’s credibility and that the consequences are still being felt even now. This one incidence of perceived US weakness in Syria may well have encouraged America’s adversaries, including Russia, to test the US further (See “2015, Sept”)                                                                                                                                                                                             
• 2013, Nov: The Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. Ukrainians went to Independence Square in Kyiv to protest the Russian-leaning government. The next February the Revolution of Dignity (Maidan Revolution) resulted in the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych and the overthrow of the Ukrainian government. (This was a reaction to the refusal by Yanukovych, who was chummy with Russia, to sign an association agreement – an extensive free-trade deal – with the European Union. Thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets and Yanukovych fled to Russia. Ukraine’s new government signed the agreement, infuriating Putin. His subsequent response to the Maidan marked Russia’s first military incursions into independent Ukraine.) (See ”2010, Feb” and “2014, May”)
• 2014, Feb: The illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia; the February 2022 act of aggression by Russia is the latest in a war that really started back here. Masked men wearing unmarked green flak jackets took the Crimean parliament. This stemmed from the overthrowing of Russian-allied president Viktor Yanukovych (who had been installed with the help of American political operative Paul Manafort). With its assault on and subsequent annexation of Crimea, Russia violates its previous pledges to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, raising concerns about its commitments to arms control. Moscow also begins arming and abetting pro-Russia separatists in southeastern Ukraine. The aggression is widely condemned by Western powers, which impose economic sanctions. This is the biggest success President Putin can lay claim to, that of establishing a land bridge from Russia’s border to Crimea so it is no longer reliant on its bridge over the Kerch Strait. The Sea of Azov, inside the Kerch Strait, “has become Russia’s internal sea”, Putin has stated, pointing out that even Russian Tsar Peter the Great did not manage that
• 2014, March: Russia suspended from the G8 due to its annexation of Crimea. In a nod to political and economic reforms, the US, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Italy had added Russia to their group in 1998 – transforming it from the G7 to the G8 
• 2014, April: The War in Donbas was a phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War in the Donbas region of Ukraine. It began when a fifty-man commando unit headed by Russian citizen Igor Girkin seized Sloviansk in the Donetsk Oblast (or region). The Ukrainian military launched an operation against them. It continued until it was subsumed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. There was an attempt to stop the fighting; the Minsk Protocol (Minsk I) was signed in September 2014 but this agreement failed to stop the fighting and was thus followed with a revised and updated agreement, Minsk II (See “2015, Feb”)
• 2014, May: Petro Poroshenko elected president of Ukraine on a platform of decommunization, inclusive capitalism, nationalism and Ukranian language. The events leading to his election were perceived by Moscow as a coup (See “2013, Nov” and “2019, April”) 
• 2015, Feb: The Minsk II agreement was signed but never fully implemented. Brokered by France and Germany, it was signed by representatives of Russia, Ukraine, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the leaders of separatist-held regions Donetsk and Luhansk. It sought to halt the conflict that began when Russia-backed separatists seized swaths of territory following Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. A major blockage has been Russia’s insistence that it is not a party to the conflict and therefore is not bound by its terms. And Ukraine saw the 2015 agreement as an instrument to re-establish control over the rebel territories. (It came on the back of Minsk I, an earlier failed attempt at a ceasefire agreement.)
• 2015, April: The US and world powers reached a nuclear deal with Iran calledthe Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the “Iran nuclear deal”. It was between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, together with the European Union. Iran drastically curtailed its program in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions. However, president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal during his presidency. New evidence as of May 2023 suggests that Iran could produce enough fissile material for a nuclear device immediately (See “1906, Aug”, “2018, May” and “2023, May”) 
• 2015, Sept: Russian Army officially entered the war in Syria to fight alongside the troops of dictator Bashar al-Assad, ostensibly to neutralize the expansion of the Islamic State (IS) in the Syrian Civil War. The intervention was kick-started by extensive air strikes across Syria, focused on attacking opposition strongholds of Free Syrian militias of Revolutionary Command Council and Sunni militias under Army of Conquest coalition. Russian Special Operations Forces, military advisors and private military contractors like the Wagner Group were also sent to Syria to support the Assad regime, which was on the verge of collapse. In practice, troops and fighter jets sent by Moscow, on its first foreign mission since the collapse of the Soviet Union, undertook a devastating bombing campaign over areas controlled by rebel factions. On Ukrainian territory, they hit medical centres, schools or markets without shame. In December 2017, the Russian government announced that its troops would be deployed to Syria permanently. By the end of April 2018, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) documented that Russian bombings directly killed more than 7,700 civilians, about a quarter of them children, apart from 4,749 opposition fighters and 4,893 IS fighters. The Russian campaign has been criticized by numerous international bodies for indiscriminate aerial bombing across Syria that target schools and civilian infrastructures and carpet bombing of cities like Aleppo. During the Georgian war in 2008, Putin found out that he had inherited an incompetent army, with outdated weapons and lousy communication systems. The military campaign in Syria served as a preparation for the Russian armed forces (See “2013, Aug”) 
• 2016, July: A 97-page report covering significant state-sponsored doping in Russia was published by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The report concluded that it was shown “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Russia’s Ministry of Sport, the Centre of Sports Preparation of the National Teams of Russia, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow had “operated for the protection of doped Russian competitors” within a “state-directed failsafe system” using “the disappearing positive [test] methodology” (DPM) after the country’s poor medal count during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver (See “2019, Dec”) 
• 2017, July: The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), or the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty, adopted by the UN General Assembly. It is the first legally binding international agreement to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal being their total elimination (See “1968, July”) 
• 2018, March: Putin’s “state of the nation” address in which he announced that Russia had developed a new arsenal of nuclear missiles capable of penetrating US air defences. “The attempt at curbing Russia has failed.” Putin said Russia had tested new nuclear weapons, including a nuclear-powered cruise missile and a nuclear-capable underwater drone that, Putin claimed, would be impossible to intercept 
• 2019, April: Election of Volodymyr Zelenskyy as President of Ukraine after a runoff vote withthe top two vote-getters – the incumbent president, Petro Poroshenko and Zelenskyy (See “2014, May”) 
• 2019, Dec: Russia received a four-year ban from all major sporting events by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA); this includes the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics and football’s 2022 World Cup in Qatar. (In 2020 the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) reduced the ban period to two years following an appeal by Russia.) Athletes who can prove they are untainted by the doping scandal will be able to compete under a neutral flag (See “2016, July”)
• 2020, Aug: Russian opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and was hospitalized in serious condition. According to the EU, the poisoning became possible “only with the consent of the Presidential Executive Office” and with the participation of the FSB. He returned to Russia the next year and was given a 2 1/2 year prison sentence, which was later extended to 9 years. He then faced new criminal accusations that extended his prison term to 19 years. He was moved in December to a Russian Arctic prison so remote that his aides have had very limited contact with him. He died in prison on Feb 16, 2024 (See “2024, Feb”) 
• 2021, Feb: The US and Russia agree to extend New START treaty for another five years, keeping verifiable limits on their arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons. The agreement is one of Joe Biden’s first major foreign policy acts as US president. The Trump administration had tried and failed in its final months to secure a shorter extension to the treaty that would have addressed China’s nuclear weapons.(Note: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move in February 2023 to suspend Russia’s involvement came as a disturbing surprise) (See “1991, July” and “2010, Apr”) 
• 2021, Oct: NATO expelled eight Russians from its Brussels, Belgium headquarters amid concerns that they were undeclared intelligence agents. Russia responded by suspending relations with NATO
• 2022, Feb: Brittney Griner, an American professional basketball player, was arrested on smuggling charges by Russian customs officials after cartridges containing less than a gram of medically prescribed hash oil, illegal in Russia, were found in her luggage. She is a two-time Olympic gold medalist with the US women’s national basketball team and a six-time WNBA All-Star. She had been playing basketball with the Russian Premier League during the WNBA off-season. She pleaded guilty to the charges, and in August was sentenced to nine years in prison. In November 2022, Griner was transferred to a Russian penal colony. US officials stated that she was “wrongfully detained”. On December 8, Griner was released in a prisoner exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout
• 2022, Feb: Russia invades Ukraine. Russian presidentVladimir Putin described the biggest European invasion since the end of WWII as a “special military operation”. His declared goal on 24 February 2022 was to “demilitarise and denazify” Ukraine and not occupy it by force, days after backing independence for eastern Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian proxy forces since 2014. He vowed to protect people from eight years of Ukrainian bullying and genocide – a Russian propaganda claim with no foundation in reality. He spoke of preventing NATO from gaining a foothold in Ukraine, then added another objective of ensuring Ukraine’s neutral status. For years, Putin has denied Ukraine its own statehood, writing in a lengthy 2021 essay that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people” dating back to the late 9th Century (See “2007, Feb”)
• 2022, March: Russia’s parliament passed a law imposing a jail term of up to 15 years for spreading intentionally “fake” news about the military, stepping up the information war over the conflict in Ukraine. Lawmakers passed amendments to the criminal code making the spread of “fake” information an offence punishable with fines or jail terms. They also imposed fines for public calls for sanctions against Russia. Russia’s communications watchdog, known as Roskomnadzor, also cut access to several foreign news organizations’ websites, including the BBC and Deutsche Welle, for spreading what it alleged was false information about its war in Ukraine
• 2022, March: The Republic of Moldova applied for European Union membership. In June, the European Commission formally recommended that the European Council grant the Republic of Moldova the perspective to become a member of the EU and candidate status for accession, with a number of conditions for the opening of accession negotiations
• 2022, June:  Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian businessman, oligarch, and opposition activist, published his account of what is happening in Russia today. In 2003 he was arrested by Russian authorities and charged with fraud; he was released from prison in 2013. In his book How to Slay a Dragon, he declares regarding Russia, “A genuine change of regime is now possible only in the event of a military defeat.” He says that Putin “goes to war with one, and only one, objective – to squeeze at least some benefit for himself from the protests against his irremovability, ultra-centralization and corruption. Any lull in the fighting will lead to an increase in the protests, which will only force him once again to undertake even bigger military adventures, spreading the virus of aggression to new territories. Compromises with Putin simply serve to reinforce his belief that aversion is an all-purpose way of removing any conflicts, be they external or internal.” (See “2003, Oct”) 
• 2022, Sept: Reverses on the battlefield have Putin annexing four Ukrainian provinces, without having full control of any of them: neither Luhansk or Donetsk in the east, nor Kherson or Zaporizhzhia to the south. He has also announced Russia’s first mobilization since World War Two, although it was partial and limited to some 300,000 reservists 
• 2023, March: The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for war crimes during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The ICC isalleging responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of children during the Russo-Ukrainian War. The warrant against Putin is the first against the leader of a permanent member of the UN Security Council 
• 2023, March: Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist and reporter, was detained by Russia’s Federal Security Service on charges of espionage. He worked for the Wall Street Journal covering Russia. This marked the first time a journalist working for an American outlet had been arrested on charges of spying in Russia since the Cold War. Accusing Gershkovich of espionage may well have been motivated at least in part by fury that someone with a Russian background would dare report the truth about Russia. It must be especially galling for Russians of conscience to hear Putin using the antifascist language of World War II – the one feat of Soviet history that all its people are proud of – in the effort to destroy Ukraine. Experts have speculated that the motivation behind the order for Gershkovich’s arrest was an anticipated prisoner exchange for one or more high-profile Russians imprisoned in other countries 
• 2023, April: Finland joined the NATO military alliance. This Nordic country’s membership doubles Russia’s border with the world’s biggest security alliance. Finland had adopted neutrality after its defeat by the Soviets in WWII, but its leaders signalled they wanted to join NATO after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. This brought the number of member states to 31. Note: in November Finland closed four crossing points, then finally all crossings, with Russia to stop the flow of Middle Eastern and African migrants that it accuses Moscow of ushering to the border in recent months (See “1949, April” and “2023, Oct”)
• 2023, April: Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian and British political activist, journalist, author, filmmaker, was sentenced by a Russian court to 25 years in prison, charged with treason. Ironic as two of his great-grandfathers were executed as spies and “enemies of the people” during Stalin’s great purges. He is a Russian opposition activist and Washington Post contributor. He survived what he characterized several years ago as two government attempts to poison him. Amnesty International and others called the charges politically motivated for his anti-war views. He urged American lawmakers to expand economic sanctions against the Russian government under a landmark law known as the Magnitsky Act that was enacted by Congress in 2012 and expanded in 2016
• 2023, April: Pope Francis embarked on a secret “peace mission” to try and end the Ukraine war. One month later he personally announced the mission was over because there was no apparent end in sight. The consultations were doomed from the start because they were between the Pope’s envoy and one of Putin’s closest foreign policy advisors, as well as Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill. This is the same man who has issued a directive to Russian soldiers that “your task is to wipe the Ukrainian nation off the face of the earth” 
• 2023, Aug: The BRICS group of countries have agreed to add six more. To the original group of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will be added Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Argentina, and the United Arab Emirates as of January 2024. With this addition the 11-nation “BRICS Plus” group will account for 47% of the world’s population and 37% of its GDP in purchasing-power parity (PPP) terms, compared to 9.8% of the world’s population and 29.8% of the global GDP for the G7. It is becoming a “support organization for China’s geopolitical agenda” and a “venue for anti-US political activism” according to some observers (See “2009, June”) 
• 2023, Aug: The Wagner mercenary group leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, died after the private jet he was on went down northwest of Moscow. Russia confirmed later his identity through genetic testing. 10 people were on board including Wagner’s top commander. Two months before Prigozhin had staged a short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership. US intelligence has concluded that an internal explosion caused the plane to go down leading to suspicions that he was likely targeted by Putin. Russia’s special services quickly divided Prigozhin’s sprawling military-criminal enterprise among themselves. The FSB would keep domestic businesses and the SVR the media arms, such as the troll farms which interfered in America’s presidential election in 2016. The GRU (Russia’s military intelligence agency) got the foreign military bits, split into a Volunteer Corps for Ukraine and an Expeditionary Corps, managed by General Averyanov (deputy head of the GRU), for the rest of the world 
• 2023, Aug: A “coup contagion” is afflicting former French colonies. A military coup d’état took place in Gabon, a former French colony, just one month after another coup in Niger and six others. It is judged to be the past focus of France offering only military intervention, in partnership with local strong men. The British colonies fared better because its decolonization template was to build strong democratic and judicial institutions, also with strong media. Coup leaders in Mali, the Central African Republic, and Burkina Faso have all rejected French involvement from now on. This has spread also to the Ivory Coast and Senegal, as well as to North Africa where France’s relations with its former colonies – Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria – have become extremely hostile. It is a complicated picture involving China, which has its official Belt and Road program having 52 African countries signing on. Africa is a key part of China’s economic empire. The other predatory player is Russia, whose Wagner Group has provided political, propaganda, and military advice. The future there is uncertain following the assassination of its leadership team 
• 2023, Sept: The Group of 20 (G20) reflects a comparatively weaker influence of the West, which has now been diluted by the addition of the African Union as a permanent member representing an additional 55 countries (of which many members have close ties to Russia and China). The G20 is now effectively the Group of 21. The G20 still carries a great deal of heft and responsibility; there is no other grouping of countries representing two-thirds of the world’s population and almost 80% of global GDP.  At this recent summit, Indian PM Narendra Modi, who chaired the summit, ensured that a statement (watered down from the 2022 Bali G20 summit) condemned the Russia invasion of Ukraine. The G20 also announced plans for a new rail and shipping corridor that will connect India and Europe through the Middle East. This ambitious plan is part of Biden’s larger vision of creating high-quality infrastructure projects and the development of economic corridors that together should promote sustainable growth in low- and middle-income countries. There also seems to be a front of mind regarding a growing challenge from BRICS for some G20 attendees (See ”1999, Sept”, “2001, May”, ”2009, June” and “2023, Aug”)
• 2023, Oct: Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan submitted to the Turkish parliament a bill approving Sweden’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a step he has been delaying to pressure Sweden into clamping down on members of the Kurdistan Workers Party in Sweden, a party that aims to create an autonomous Kurdish region that would include parts of Turkey (See “1949, April and “2023, April”)
• 2023, Oct: The Russian parliament passed a bill to revoke its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), while retaining its cooperation with the treaty’s verification system and implementing organization. A Russian spokesperson said “The aim is to be on equal footing with the US who signed the Treaty, but didn’t ratify it. Revocation doesn’t mean the intention to resume nuclear tests.” Note: The US signed the CTBT in 1996 but the Senate did not ratify the treaty. Successive US administrations however have observed a moratorium on testing nuclear weapons. (Apart from the US, it has yet to be ratified by China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, Iran and Egypt.) Putin suggested Moscow might resuming testing for the first time in 33 years, signalling another downward turn in relations between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers
• 2023, Oct: Poland voters changed government, reversing the slide towards the kind of electoral authoritarianism practiced by Viktor Urban in Hungary. The opposition, consisting of the Civic Coalition (under the leadership Donald Tusk), Third Way, and The Left achieved a combined vote total of 54% and are widely expected to form a coalition government. It was assessed that voters got fed up with the corrupt, obscurantist rule of the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) under its resentful leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski plus the risk that Poland would be moved further to the right and join forces with Orban of Hungary, the Slovak populist Robert Fico, and Giorgia Meloni of Italy. Poland’s populist nightmare may soon be over (See “1989, June”) 
• 2023, Nov: Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right party PVV, or Party for Freedom won the most votes in a general election, in The Hague, Netherlands. This seismic shift reverberated through Europe. Wilders’ anti-Islam, anti-immigration party won 37 seats in the 150-seat Second Chamber of Parliament putting him in pole position to succeed Prime Minister Mark Rutte. But at least two potential coalition partners are balking at some of his policy pledges that they consider unconstitutional (his campaign pledges were for “No Islamic schools, Qurans and mosques”.) He’s also against internationalism, the European Union, military support of Ukraine, and measures to deal with climate change 
• 2023, Dec: The International Olympic Committee announced that some Russians would be eligible to compete as neutral athletes at the upcoming Paris Olympics, removing a complete ban that came after the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The IOC decision confirmed moves it started one year ago to reintegrate Russia and its military ally Belarus into global sports, and nine months after it urged sports governing bodies to look at ways to let individual athletes compete. Russia sent 335 athletes to the Tokyo Olympics held in 2021 – winning 20 golds among 71 total medals – but only dozens are likely to compete in Paris as individuals. Russia remains banned from team sports. Those who are given neutral status must compete without their national identity of flag, anthem or colours. Ukraine have said any Olympic medal wins for Russians will be used as propaganda by the state. Russian medal winners are often linked to military sports clubs such as the CSKA which is tied to the army. Paris is the fifth straight Olympics where Russia and its athletes have faced calls to be banned since the steroid-tainted 2014 Sochi Winter Games. In Paris, Russian athletes will compete as Individual Neutral Athletes – using the French acronym AIN – at the fourth straight games where the simple team name “Russia” was not allowed 
• 2024, Jan: Kamila Valieva, the teenage Russian figure skater whose positive doping test upended her sport at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, was banned from competition for four years. The punishment, announced by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, was related to a tainted sample Valieva, who was 15 at the time, gave at a competition. The doping positive was made public, and from then on, and with the world watching her every move, Valieva began to crumble. In her final performance – the women’s free skate – she stumbled and fell, barely making it to the finish. Her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, was caught on live television giving her a stern look and reprimanding her by saying, in Russian: “Why did you let it go?” The positive result only emerged two months later – in the middle of the Olympics, and only a day after Valieva had led Russia to victory in the team competition. The ban will be retroactive to Dec. 25, 2021, the arbitrators ruled, meaning it will end in 2025, just in time for Valieva to compete at the next Winter Olympics, in 2026. Russia will be stripped of its first-place finish, with the victory awarded to the US team that finished second in Beijing. Japan will be elevated to silver from bronze and Canada, which finished fourth, will be awarded the bronze medal. For the first time in Olympic history, no medal ceremony was held 
• 2024, Feb: The dismissal of the Ukrainian military commander-in-chief, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. He was appointed by President Zelenskyy in 2021 and had commanded through the darkest hours of the Russian large-scale invasion in February 2022 and the successes of the Kharkiv and Kherson offensives. His dismissal had been the subject of rumour and speculation for some time. Zaluzhnyi’s public comment on Ukrainian strategy, his intervention in the mobilization debate, the inability to forge a military force that could execute a successful counteroffensive in 2023, and undoubtedly an array of other factors resulted in a breakdown in trust between the President and commander-in-chief. The commander of Ukrainian Ground Forces, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, was elevated as the new Ukrainian military commander-in-chief 
• 2024, Feb: Trump said he would disregard Article 5 – NATO’s mutual-defence clause – if the victim of aggression had not met NATO’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence. (The threshold by the way is not, as Trump appears to believe, a payment to America.) Worse still, he said that he would urge Russia to attack: “I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.” These are extraordinary comments and will be very disturbing in Europe. Trump came close to pulling out of NATO in his first term, according to John Bolton, his national security adviser. In 2016 just five members of NATO met the 2% threshold, which last year was turned into a floor rather than a target. A majority are likely to do so by the summer of 2024. Some members are arming themselves to the teeth: Poland is spending 4% of GDP. The Baltic Defence Line is being built and involves 600 or so small bunkers on the Estonian border alone. Europe has a long way to go before it can defend itself, but the complacency of 2016, when Trump was elected president, is gone for good 
• 2024, Feb: Alexei Navalny dies in a remote Russian prison. His death practically extinguishes the last real political opposition – albeit weakened – that still remained inside Russia following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, his crackdown on freedom of speech and the passage of increasingly draconian laws aimed at stamping out any dissent. In recent years, Navalny became a cautionary tale for others who chose to challenge the Kremlin. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, the vehicle for his political activism, was dismantled and his allies were either imprisoned or scared into exile. With continued access to social media through his lawyers, Navalny was able to needle the Kremlin with acerbic humour. This is a stark challenge for Russia’s opposition, which must now figure out how to sustain the unity he created and seize the movement he left behind. (See “2020, Aug”)
• 2024, Feb: The Ukrainians pulled their forces out of Avdiivka. They had held the town against continual Russian attacks for more than 4 months. This present battle started in early October (though Avdiivka had been a front line town in the war for 9 years). Shortages of equipment, in particular artillery ammunition which had been much of US aid, made holding the town too potentially costly. Ukraine is trying hard to preserve its soldiers lives, and can only risk them if they have a far greater chance of taking a toll on the enemy. With ammunition running low, that risk of significant Ukrainian losses without much larger Russian losses, apparently was too high. The fall of Avdiivka, a city that was once home to some 30,000 people but is now a smoking ruin, is the first major gain Russian forces have achieved since May of last year