1547 – 84 Reign of Ivan the Terrible
1584–1605 Boris Godunov rules Russia; after his death, the country sinks into the period of confusion known as the Time of Troubles
1703 Peter the Great founds St. Petersburg
1762 – 96 Reign of Catherine the Great
1825 Decembrist Revolt: an unsuccessful coup by liberal members of the aristocracy; Tsar Nicholas I comes to the throne
1842 Publication of Gogol’s Dead Souls
1861 Emancipation of the serfs
1881 Alexander II assassinated by members of The People’s Will
1891 Beginning of construction of Trans-Siberian Railway
1905 Birth of Vasily Semyonovich Grossman
1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicates after February Revolution; workers’ soviets (councils) are set up in Petrograd and Moscow; Lenin and his Bolshevik Party seize power in the October Revolution
1918 – 21 Russian Civil War, accompanied by the draconian economic policies known as War Communism; although there were many different factions, the two main forces were the Red Army (Communists) and the White Army (anti-Communists); foreign powers also intervened, to little effect, and millions perished before the Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, defeated the Whites in 1920 ; smaller battles continued for several years
1921 After an uprising in March by sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt, Lenin made a tactical retreat, introducing the at least relatively liberal New Economic Policy (NEP), which lasted until 1928 ; many of the more idealistic Communists saw this as a step backward, as a shameful compromise with the forces of capitalism; the NEP was not, however, accompanied by any political liberalization
1924 Death of Lenin; Petrograd is renamed Leningrad; Stalin begins to take power
1928 – 1937 The first and second of Stalin’s five-year plans bring about a remarkable increase in the production of coal, iron, and steel
1929 Collectivization of agriculture begins
1932–33 Between three to five million peasants die in the Terror Famine in Ukraine
1934 Foundation of Union of Soviet Writers; Grossman publishes the story “In the Town of Berdichev” and the novel Glyukauf, about the life of the Donbass miners
1934–39 The Great Purges; at least a million people are shot and several million sent to the Gulag
1939 Stalin–Hitler pact; beginning of Second World War
1941 Hitler invades the Soviet Union; Leningrad is blockaded and Moscow under threat; Grossman begins to work as a war correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda (the Red Army newspaper)
1945 End of Second World War
1946 Andrey Zhdanov, then seen as a possible heir to Stalin, tightens control over the arts
1948 Trofim Lysenko becomes more dominant than ever in Soviet biology, and especially agriculture; genetics is officially declared a bourgeois pseudoscience; around three thousand biologists are fired from their jobs and many are arrested
1953 January 13: Publication of article in Pravda about the Jewish Killer Doctors; preparations continue for a purge of Soviet Jews; Grossman’s recently published novel, For a Just Cause, is fiercely attacked; March 5: Death of Stalin; April 4: Official acknowledgment that the case against the Killer Doctors was entirely false
1956 Khrushchev denounces Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress; millions of prisoners are released from the camps; start of a more liberal period known as “The Thaw”
1958 Publication abroad of Doctor Zhivago ; under pressure from Soviet authorities, Pasternak declines to accept the Nobel Prize
1961 The KGB confiscates the manuscript of Grossman’s Life and Fate
1962 Publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
1964 Fall of Khrushchev. Death of Vasily Grossman.
1974 Solzhenitsyn deported after publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago
1985 Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power; beginning of the period of liberal reforms known as perestroika; the next few years see the first publication in Russia of Grossman’s Life and Fate and Everything Flows, and of important works by Krzhizhanovsky, Platonov, Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn and many others.
1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union