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.

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Russia

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1898: The USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana, Cuba, killing more than 260 people in a tragedy that precipitated the Spanish-American War. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_%28ACR-1%29)

1942: General Tomoyuki Yamashita led the Japanese forces to capture the supposed "impregnable fortress" of Singapore. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Singapore)

1971: The value of a penny in the United Kingdom increased from 1/240 to 1/100 of the pound sterling on Decimal Day. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/penny)

1989: Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan: The Soviet Union officially announced that all of their troops had already left Afghanistan. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_invasion_of_Afghanistan)

2003: Millions of people around the world took part in the largest mass protest movement in history to protest against war in general, and specifically the military preparations for the impending invasion of Iraq. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_protests_against_war_on_Iraq)

_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." -- Galileo Galilei (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei)