The formation of a single Russian state is a very long process. Daniil Alexandrovich, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, founded the Principality of Moscow, which at first cooperated and eventually drove the Tatars out of Russia. Well located in the central river system of Russia and surrounded by protective forests and swamps, Moscow was at first only a vassal of Vladimir, but it soon swallowed up its parent state. This article examines the features of the formation of the Russian united state through the prism of history.
Moscow hegemony
The main factor in the dominance of Moscow was the cooperation of its rulers with the Mongol ones, who made them agents in collecting Tatar gifts from the Russian principalities. The prestige of the principality was further strengthened when itbecame the center of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its head, the metropolitan, fled from Kyiv to Vladimir in 1299, and a few years later established a permanent seat of the church in Moscow under the original name of the Kievan metropolitan. At the end of the article, the reader will learn about the completion of the formation of a unified Russian state.
By the middle of the XIV century, the power of the Mongols weakened, and the great princes felt that they could openly resist the Mongol yoke. In 1380, at Kulikovo on the Don River, the Mongols were defeated, and although this stubborn victory did not put an end to Tatar rule in Russia, it brought great glory to Grand Duke Dmitry Donskoy. The Muscovite administration of Russia was fairly firmly established, and by the middle of the 14th century its territory had expanded considerably through purchases, wars, and marriages. This was the main stages in the formation of a unified Russian state.
In the 15th century, the great Moscow princes continued to consolidate Russian lands, increasing their population and we alth. The most successful practitioner of this process was Ivan III, who laid the foundations of the Russian national state. Ivan competed with his powerful northwestern adversary, the head of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for control of some of the semi-independent Upper Principalities in the upper reaches of the Dnieper and Oka rivers.
Further history
Thanks to the retreats of some princes, border skirmishes and a long war with the Novgorod Republic, Ivan III was able to annex Novgorod and Tver. As a result, the Grand Duchy of Moscow tripled under his rule. DuringIn his conflict with Pskov, a monk named Philotheus wrote a letter to Ivan III with a prophecy that the latter's kingdom would be the Third Rome. The fall of Constantinople and the death of the last Greek Orthodox emperor contributed to this new idea of Moscow as the New Rome and seat of Orthodox Christianity.
A contemporary of the Tudors and other new monarchs in Western Europe, Ivan proclaimed his absolute sovereignty over all Russian princes and nobles. Refusing further tribute to the Tatars, Ivan launched a series of attacks that opened the way to the complete defeat of the waning Golden Horde, now divided into several khanates and hordes. Ivan and his successors sought to protect the southern borders of their possessions from the attacks of the Crimean Tatars and other hordes. To achieve this goal, they financed the construction of the Great Belt of Abatis and granted estates to nobles who were required to serve in the army. The estate system served as the basis for the emerging cavalry army.
Consolidation
Thus, internal consolidation was accompanied by external expansion of the state. By the 16th century, the rulers of Moscow considered the entire Russian territory to be their collective property. Various semi-independent princes still demanded certain territories, but Ivan III forced the weaker princes to recognize the Grand Duke of Moscow and his descendants as undisputed rulers in control of military, judicial and foreign affairs. Gradually, the Russian ruler became a powerful autocratic tsar. The first Russian rulerofficially crowned himself "tsar" was Ivan IV. The formation of a single Russian state is the result of the work of many leaders.
Ivan III tripled the territory of his domination, put an end to the rule of the Golden Horde over Russia, repaired the Moscow Kremlin and laid the foundations of the Russian state. Biographer Fennell concludes that his reign was militarily splendid and economically sound, and points especially to his territorial annexations and his centralized control of local rulers. But also Fennell, Britain's leading expert on Ivan III, argues that his reign was also a period of cultural depression and spiritual barrenness. Freedom was suppressed in the Russian lands. With his fanatical anti-Catholicism, Ivan lowered the veil between Russia and the West. For the sake of territorial growth, he deprived his country of the fruits of Western education and civilization.
Further development
The development of tsarist autocratic power reached its peak during the reign of Ivan IV (1547–1584), known as Ivan the Terrible. He strengthened the position of the monarch to an unprecedented extent, as he ruthlessly forced the nobles to his will, exiling or executing many at the slightest provocation. Nevertheless, Ivan is often seen as a visionary statesman who reformed Russia when he promulgated a new code of laws (Sudebnik 1550), establishing the first Russian feudal representative body (the Zemsky Sobor), curbing the influence of the clergy and introducing local self-government in the countryside. Formation of a single stateRussian - a complex and multifaceted process.
Although his long Livonian War for control of the B altic coast and access to maritime trade ended up being a costly failure, Ivan succeeded in annexing the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberia. These conquests complicated the migration of aggressive nomadic hordes from Asia to Europe through the Volga and the Urals. Thanks to these conquests, Russia acquired a significant Muslim Tatar population and became a multinational and multi-confessional state. Also during this period, the mercantile Stroganov family settled in the Urals and recruited Russian Cossacks to colonize Siberia. These processes proceeded from the fundamental prerequisites for the formation of a single Russian state.
Late period
In the later part of his reign, Ivan divided the kingdom into two parts. In the zone known as the oprichnina, Ivan's followers carried out a series of bloody purges of the feudal aristocracy (whom he suspected of betrayal), culminating in the Novgorod massacre in 1570. This was combined with military losses. Epidemics and crop failures so weakened Russia that the Crimean Tatars were able to plunder the central regions of Russia and burn down Moscow in 1571. In 1572, Ivan abandoned the oprichnina.
At the end of the reign of Ivan IV, the Polish-Lithuanian and Swedish armies carried out a powerful intervention in Russia, devastating its northern and northwestern regions. The formation of a single Russian state did not end there.
Troubled Times
The death of Ivan's childless son Fyodor was followed by a period of civil wars and foreign intervention known as the Time of Troubles (1606–13). An extremely cold summer (1601–1603) destroyed crops, leading to a famine in Russia in 1601–1603. and exacerbated social disorganization. Boris Godunov's reign ended in chaos, civil war combined with foreign invasion, the devastation of many cities, and the depopulation of rural areas. The country, shaken by internal chaos, has also attracted several waves of interference from the Commonwe alth.
During the Polish-Muscovite War (1605–1618), Polish-Lithuanian troops reached Moscow and installed the impostor False Dmitry I in 1605, then supported False Dmitry II in 1607. The decisive moment came when the combined Russian-Swedish army was defeated by the Polish troops under the command of hetman Stanislav Zholkievsky in the Battle of Klushino on July 4, 1610. As a result of the battle, a group of seven Russian nobles overthrew Tsar Vasily Shuisky on July 27, 1610 and recognized the Polish prince Vladislav IV Tsar of Russia on September 6, 1610. The Poles entered Moscow on September 21, 1610. Moscow rebelled, but the unrest there was brutally suppressed, and the city was set on fire. The history of the formation of a unified Russian state is briefly and clearly stated in this article.
The crisis sparked a patriotic national uprising against the invasion in both 1611 and 1612. Finally, an army of volunteers led by the merchant Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky expelledforeign troops from the capital on November 4, 1612.
Time of Troubles
Russian statehood survived the Time of Troubles and the rule of weak or corrupt tsars thanks to the strength of the government's central bureaucracy. Officials continued to serve regardless of the legitimacy of the ruler or the faction controlling the throne. However, the Time of Troubles, provoked by the dynastic crisis, led to the loss of a significant part of the territory of the Commonwe alth in the Russian-Polish war, as well as the Swedish Empire in the war in Ingria.
In February 1613, when the chaos ended and the Poles were expelled from Moscow, the national assembly, consisting of representatives of fifty cities and even some peasants, elected Mikhail Romanov, the youngest son of Patriarch Filaret, to the throne. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia until 1917.
The immediate task of the new dynasty was to restore peace. Fortunately for Moscow, its main enemies, the Commonwe alth and Sweden, entered into a bitter conflict with each other, which gave Russia the opportunity to make peace with Sweden in 1617 and conclude a truce with the Commonwe alth in Lithuania in 1619.
Restoration and return
The restoration of the lost territories began in the middle of the 17th century, when the Khmelnytsky uprising (1648–1657) in Ukraine against Polish rule led to the Treaty of Pereyaslav concluded between Russia and the Ukrainian Cossacks. According to the treaty, Russia granted protection to the state of the Cossacks in the Left-Bank Ukraine, formerly undercontrol of Poland. This provoked the protracted Russo-Polish War (1654-1667), which ended with the Treaty of Andrusov, according to which Poland accepted the loss of the Left-Bank Ukraine, Kyiv and Smolensk.
Making the problems worse
Instead of risking their possessions in a civil war, the boyars collaborated with the early Romanovs, allowing them to complete the work of bureaucratic centralization. Thus, the state demanded service from both the old and the new nobility, primarily from the military. In turn, the tsars allowed the boyars to complete the process of conquering the peasants.
In the previous century, the state gradually limited the rights of peasants to move from one landowner to another. Now that the state had fully sanctioned serfdom, the runaway peasants became fugitives, and the power of the landowners over the peasants tied to their land was almost complete. Together, the state and the nobility placed on the peasants a huge burden of taxation, the rate of which in the middle of the 17th century was 100 times higher than a hundred years ago. In addition, middle-class urban merchants and artisans were taxed and forbidden to change their place of residence. All segments of the population were subjected to military duty and special taxes.
Unrest among peasants and residents of Moscow at that time was endemic. These included the S alt Riot (1648), the Copper Riot (1662), and the Moscow Uprising (1682). Certainly the biggesta peasant uprising in 17th-century Europe broke out in 1667, when the free settlers of southern Russia, the Cossacks, reacted to the growing centralization of the state, the serfs fled from their landlords and joined the rebels. Cossack leader Stenka Razin led his followers up the Volga, fomenting peasant uprisings and replacing local government with Cossack rule. The tsarist army finally defeated his troops in 1670. A year later, Stenka was captured and beheaded. However, less than half a century later, the intensity of military expeditions led to a new uprising in Astrakhan, which was eventually crushed. Thus, the formation of a single centralized Russian state was completed.
