Wikipedia:Today's featured article/February 15, 2005

The history of Russia is essentially that of its many nationalities, each with a separate history and complex origins, but bound together by the thousand-year-old tradition of Russian statehood. From the late fifteenth century until the early twentieth century, Russia was constituted as an imperial monarchy ruling a tightly centralized, contiguous expanse of territories and peoples. The strains of the World War I led to the collapse of the empire, and eventually gave way to the creation of the Soviet Union. Despite its façade of federalism, the Soviet Union remained essentially an empire, held together by the Communist Party rather than the tsar. Most Russians gave little thought to any distinction between the two before the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, as Communist Party rule was collapsing, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic secured legislation giving Russian laws priority over Soviet laws and declared its independence in late 1991, forming today's Russian Federation. (more...)

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