A timeline of Russian history -- from Napolean's invasion to the October Revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Russian Federation.
1812: Napoleon's army invades Russia. During its withdrawal, the "Grande Armée" is destroyed. Czar Alexander I. is regarded as Europe's savior.
1853-1856: A French-British-Ottoman alliance halts Russia's southern expansion during the Crimean War.
1904/05: Russia is defeated during the Russo-Japanese War. Czar Nicholas II suppresses emerging riots in a bloody crackdown, but he also bestows the giant empire with constitutional rights and a parliament, the Duma.
1914: World War I begins. Russia, France and Britain battle against the "Central Powers" of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
1917: October Revolution. Under Lenin, the Bolsheviks decide to take up peace talks with the Central Powers.
1918: Russia pulls out of the war. Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, it loses large parts of its Western territory.
1922: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is founded.
1924: Lenin's death. Joseph Stalin emerges as the next Soviet leader following a power struggle over Lenin's successor.
1928: USSR implements its first "Five-Year-Plan." Priority is given to building up Russia's heavy industry. Tens of thousands of large farm owners are brutally killed during Moscow's brutal collectivization of the country's agriculture. Millions die during the subsequent famine.
1939: Treaty of Nonaggression with Nazi-Germany. The so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact also included an agreement to divide Poland.
1941: On June 22, Hitler's Wehrmacht invades the Soviet Union. Soviet forces are able to stop the Germans before they reach Moscow.
1943: "The Big Three" -- United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Stalin -- meet in Teheran to plan the final strategy for the war: the borders for both Poland and the Soviet Union were pushed further to the west, despite protestations of the Polish government-in-exile in London.
1945: The Red Army seizes Berlin. Germany is divided into occupation zones. The Soviet occupation zone in the East later becomes the German Democratic Republic, communist East Germany.
1945-1949: Governments form, under the dominance of respective communist groups, in Eastern European states previously "liberated" by the Red Army. They follow the Soviet example.
1949: The explosion of the first Soviet nuclear bomb marks the start of an arms race with the US.
1961: During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US and USSR - the world's only superpowers -- are on the brink of a nuclear war.
1968: Moscow's tanks crush the Prague Spring uprising that had been proclaimed by Czechoslovakian leaders. Russian Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev announces a doctrine of "limited sovereignty" for Eastern European states.
1985: Following the death of the old Communist Party leadership circle, Mikhail Gorbachev becomes head of state. With his glasnost policies, Gorbachev introduces greater freedom of the press and remodels the corroding state and economic structures. The US and the USSR hold Strategic Arms Limitations Talks, which end with a treaty that helps bring an end to the nuclear arms race.
1989/90: The political thaw reaches Soviet satellite states, which rid themselves of their Communist dictatorships during mostly peaceful revolutions.
1990: The Soviet government agrees to German reunification.
1991: Eleven former Soviet republics establish the Commonwealth of Independent States. Boris Yeltsin becomes president of the new Russian Federation. Gorbachev resigns and the USSR is dissolved by the end of the year.
1994: The war in Chechnya, a bloody civil war, begins in the North Caucasus.
1998: Russia is given membership in the G-8.
1999: Vladimir Putin succeeds Yeltsin as Russian president. http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,426331,00.html
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