PICTURE SECTION
Rurik the Rus (centre) on the Novgorod Millennium Monument.
Thirteenth-century birch bark drawings from Novgorod.
Alexander Nevsky speaks to his troops ahead of the Battle on the Ice, in Sergei Eisenstein’s film of 1938.
Nestor the Chronicler.
The tomb of Ivan Kalita in the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael in the Moscow Kremlin.
Yermak Timofeyevich Conquers Siberia, by Vasily Surikov (1893).
Ivan the Terrible, by Viktor Vasnetsov.
Tsar Boris Godunov, in a scene from Mussorgsky’s opera
Monument to Minin and Pozharsky in front of St Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow.
Peter the Great, by Paul Delaroche (1838).
Catherine the Great, by Albert Albertrandi (c. 1770).
General Mikhail Kutuzov at the Battle of Borodino, by Anatoly Shepelyuk (1952).
The 1825 Decembrist Revolt on Senate Square, St Petersburg, by Karl Kolman (1830s).
Religious Procession in Kursk, by Ilya Repin (1880–3).
Alexander Pushkin, the founder of modern Russian literature, by Orest Kiprensky (1827).
The Monument to Tsar Alexander II at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.
Prison photograph of Nikolai Rysakov, member of the Narodnaya Volya group that assassinated Alexander II in 1881.
The Khodynka tragedy of 1886, in which 1,400 people were crushed to death.
The monk Grigory Rasputin, faith healer and confidant to Tsarina Alexandra.
Tsar Nicholas II with his family: (from left to right) Princess Maria, Tsarina Alexandra, Tsarevich Alexei, Princesses Olga, Tatyana and Anastasia.
Count Sergei Witte, author of the 1905 ‘October Manifesto’ and first prime minister of Russia.
Pyotr Stolypin, prime minister, assassinated at the Kiev opera house in 1911.
Memorial to Tsar Nicholas II on the site where his remains were unearthed in the 1990s.
‘There is such a party!’ Lenin urges the seizure of power in June 1917.
Demonstrators in Petrograd mowed down by pro-Government troops in July 1917.
Leon Trotsky in his uniform as Commander of the Red Army.
Lenin addresses the workers in 1917.
Taking of the Winter Palace on 25th October 1917, by Nikolai Denisov (1940s).
‘Iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka secret police.
Fanny Kaplan, the woman who shot Lenin.
Huge crowds gather on Red Square to mourn the death of Lenin.
Stalin, the second Soviet leader.
Alexei Stakhanov with his record-breaking miners.
‘Our forces are inexhaustible!’
Soviet cultural figures of the early twentieth century: Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dmitry Shostakovich, Osip Mandelstam, Sergei Prokofiev, Maxim Gorky, Anna Akhmatova, Isaak Babel, Marina Tsvetaeva.
Soviet troops advance in the ruined streets of Stalingrad, 1942.
The Red Army hoists the Hammer and Sickle on the Reichstag, Berlin, in May 1945.
Vyacheslav Molotov signs the Nazi–Soviet Pact on 23 August 1939 as Stalin looks on.
Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta conference in February 1945.
Marshal Georgy Zhukov leads the Victory Parade in Red Square on 24 June 1945.
Stalin leads the way, with (left to right) Mikoyan, Khrushchev, Malenkov, Beria and Molotov following closely behind.
Stalin lying in state, March 1953.
The USSR’s space pioneers, Gagarin, Leonov, Belyaev and Komarov.
Nikita Khrushchev meets John F. Kennedy in Vienna, June 1961.
Khrushchev’s ill-fated corn drive begins.
An ageing Leonid Brezhnev weighed down by his numerous medals.
Raisa and Mikhail Gorbachev are greeted by the Thatchers at 10 Downing Street.
General Secretary Gorbachev objects as Andrei Sakharov addresses the Congress of People’s Deputies, 1989.
Self-proclaimed Soviet president Gennady Yanayev (third from right) and his allies announce their takeover in August 1991.
Boris Yeltsin defies the coup plotters in front of the Moscow White House.
Tanks on the streets of Moscow during the August coup of 1991.
Pravda front pages from during and after the failed coup.
The Chechen capital, Grozny, after Russian bombardments in 1995.
A businessman shows off the spoils of his voucher-buying spree in 1992.
Yeltsin waves goodbye to the Russian people and ushers in the reign of Vladimir Putin (front left) in December 1999.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky (right) hears the judge sentence him to 14 years in jail at his second trial in December 2010.
Former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko on his deathbed, after being poisoned by his former colleagues.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s second president.
Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama toast the ‘reset’ in Russian–American relations.
Russia in the twenty-first century remains precariously perched between its Asiatic and European heritage. The path it takes will have consequences for the whole world.