Russia

From CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science

Jump to: navigation, search

Russia, or officially the Russian Federation but formerly called the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic is a country of eastern Europe and northern Asia.

Contents

History

Ancient Scythia

The lands north and east of the Euxine or Black Sea had the name of Σκυθια (Scythia) in the accounts by Herodotus and others, and ranged from the Carpathian Mountains to the west, to the Don River to the east. The inhabitants seem to have been a nomadic tribe of nature-worshippers. Apparently they displaced the original inhabitants of the region, called Cimmerii, by invading from the east (from the direction of modern China).

The first mention of them refers to their wars, on or about 634 BC, in which they gained control of Asia for twenty-eight years, and marched as far west as Egypt, where they demanded tribute of the then-ruling Pharaoh and withdrew. The Scythians eventually lost a key battle with Cyaxeres, king of the Medes. In 512 BC the Persian king Darius I invaded that country but could not hold it because of the constant harassment of his men by an enemy that fought in the hit-and-run fashion that a Roman general named Fabius would later make famous. Alexander the Great is said to have received envoys from then in 324 BC while he resided in Babylon. The Roman historian Horace mentions them as paying tribute to Emperor Augustus in 25 BC, five years after the end of the Second Roman Civil War.

The history of the region from that year to the 14th century AD is sketchy, beyond the region's having been overrun and dominated by Mongols for at least two hundred years.

Possible Biblical origin

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, namely, of Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood. The sons of Japheth: Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.

Genesis 10:1-2 (ASV)

Multiple sources, among them Flavius Josephus and the British monk Nennius, suggest that the Scythians descend from Magog, the second-named of the sons of Japheth.

Principate of Muscovy

This principate came to being in the 12th century AD. For two hundred years they fought against Mongol domination, until at last they were able to shake it. The Muscovites added to their holdings little by little, until they finally, in the 17th century, gained a leader with the ambition of a Caesar and a military genius to match: Ivan IV, of the Romanov dynasty.

Russian Empire

The Russian Empire begins with the leader called Иван Грозний (Ivan Grozny), or "Ivan the Terrible" (literally, "Ivan the Thunderer"). He was the first to take the title variously spelled in English as Tsar or Czar, which is a variant of "Caesar." He was a brutal man from a brutal age, and so were most of his successors.

The Romanov dynasty held continuous sway in Russia for nearly three hundred years. Some of the most famous Tsars of All the Russias include:

  • Peter I (the Great), who gave the Russian Empire its name and presided over an Empire from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific.
  • Catherine the Great. Sent by a conniving Frederick the Great of the Kingdom of Prussia to marry Tsar Peter III, she overpowered the feckless Peter in a civil war and, contrary to Frederick's intentions, ruled Russia as a Russian and not as a German.
  • Alexander III, assassinated in October of 1894. His son was:
  • Nicholas II, who lost the Russian Empire and his life to the Russian Revolution.

Union of Socialist Soviet Republics

The Russian Revolution

Nicholas II's disastrous decision to go to war with Germany proved his undoing. His army suffered multiple defeats at German hands, and this demoralization of the troops finally broke their loyalty. They revolted and imprisoned the Tsar and all the royal family.

Subsequently, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin led his Bolshevik faction to seize power from the weak democracy of Alexander Kerensky. He named the country the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, and later announced the formation of a new polity: the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. (The words "Socialist" and "Soviet" in that name were later interchanged.) Lenin later had Nicholas and all his family executed by firing squad, and the bodies chopped into multiple pieces and cremated. (Rumors persisted for decades that the Romanov family had a sole survivor of the mass execution, namely the Grand Duchess Anastasia. However, her death has since been established by positive DNA analysis of her remains.)

The Soviet Union between wars

Despite an unbroken history of despotism under the combined government and economic system called Communism, the Soviet Union enjoyed great favor among intellectuals in the West, enamored as they were with the socialistic ideals of Karl Marx, the spiritual father of the Communist and Soviet "movements." At least one instance of deliberate misreporting is alleged against an award-winning reporter for a major Western newspaper in connection with the tenure in office of Josef Stalin as Communist Party General Secretary, the highest actual office in the Soviet Union. The motive for this misreporting is alleged to be the hiding of the truth of a tremendous famine that broke out in the late 1930's, a famine that, some say, Stalin deliberately engineered.

The Great Patriotic War

Stalin was one of two world leaders (the other was Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) to sign non-aggression pacts with Adolf Hitler, the Chancellor and Führer (literally, "Leader") of Germany. Hitler later broke his agreements and went to war--the Second World War--against all his neighbors, including the Soviet Union. This was the so-called Great Patriotic War, as it was known in the Soviet Union, and was the only time that the Soviet Union ever had a military alliance with the United States of America. Hitler's losses on his Russian front, where his armies bogged down in the harsh Russian winter, arguably enabled the rest of the Allied Powers to drive Hitler out of Europe and ultimately to suicide in his capital city.

The Cold War

At the end of the war, Stalin's armies rushed into and dominated all the Slavic countries of eastern Europe and also helped organize the Russian Zone of occupied Germany as the German Democratic Republic, know as "East Germany" for decades thereafter. Stalin's intelligence apparatus also stole from the United States (or perhaps had furnished to them by the accused American traitors Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) the secret of the atomic bomb and constructed one of their own. Thus began the Cold War, essentially a standoff between two powers, each of which had the power to destroy utterly the civilization and infrastructure of the other.

Eventually, Stalin died. His successors pursued a policy largely designed to gain the confidence of Western intellectuals while also creating spectacular demonstration projects, such as Sputnik, to show off Soviet engineering prowess. The Soviets were actually the first to place a man into outer space, and the first to place a man into orbit around the earth. These demonstrations caused the Americans to fear that the Soviets might build a low-earth-orbit strategic bomber to deliver nuclear payloads to devastating effect against American cities. The Americans hastily created a space program of their own, under the newly renamed National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which created Project Mercury.

Project Mercury ended when Nikita S. Khrushchev signed a treaty with US President John F. Kennedy for a mutual ban on the testing of nuclear weapons in space, on land, or at sea--though not underground. But the arms race and space race between the two powers continued. Both powers first raced to place men on the moon--and with the successful landing of American astronauts on the moon under Project Apollo, the Soviets conceded that race. The Soviets were first to build a semi-permanent space station. In the early 1980s, NASA planned Space Station Freedom as a counterpart to the Soviet Salyut and Mir space stations, but it never left the drawing board and was cancelled at the end of the Space race. Mir currently holds the record for longest continuous human presence in space at just short of 10 years.

Winding Down

In 1981, Ronald W. Reagan became President of the United States. At his orders, the United States cast aside all restraint in the building of its nuclear arsenal. The Soviets frantically tried to keep pace, but could not. Faced with that, or perhaps also faced with the deaths of three General Secretaries in six years (Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko), the Soviet Communist Party ultimately chose Mikhail Gorbachev as its leader. Gorbachev made a last desperate attempt to gain Western confidence with his new policy that he called glasnost, or "openness," and perestroika, or "restructuring." The measures he took, whether they were sincere or not, led to a sudden collapse of Soviet institutions, and ultimately to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. Except for the vast Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, all fourteen of the other "republics" demanded and gained their independence. In addition, sympathetic regimes throughout Western Europe were, almost without exception, overthrown, some violently. In Germany, the German Democratic Republic dissolved, and the Federal Republic of Germany, or "West Germany," finally reabsorbed it.

Russian Federation

The former RSFSR is now known as the Russian Federation. Its first head-of-state was Boris Yeltsin. His government was quite turbulent and was marred by at least one episode in which he ordered a squadron of tanks to fire their turrets at the Duma (parliament) building in Moscow.

Citizen Yeltsin is also famous for restoring the tri-colored flag that dates back to the Romanovs (the "Tsarist Flag"). He never attempted to re-establish the Romanov-era national anthem, and instead attempted to establish a new anthem--which, however, remained unpopular, perhaps because it had no words. Subsequently the Duma established the "Hymn to the Russian Federation," essentially the old "State Hymn of the USSR" with three all-new stanzas and an equally new refrain.

The present head of the government, Vladimir Putin, has now begun re-centralizing power and, some say, attempting to re-create the Soviet Union as the viable and powerful entity it once was. This includes a renewal of independent diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East (see below).

The Place of Russia in Bible Prophecy

Ezekiel 38 describes a prince named "Gog" as the reluctant leader of a Russo-Arab-Iranian-North African alliance that will attack Israel on all sides, only to be defeated (Ezekiel 39 ) ignominiously, with eighty-three percent casualties and such losses of materiel that the inhabitants of Israel will "burn the weapons of war with fire for seven years." This could be a reference to the blending-down of weapons-grade uranium into reactor-grade uranium in fallen and non-detonated nuclear warheads. That Iran is now working, by all accounts, to develop a nuclear-weapons program of its own, together with the current posture of the Russian Federation, leads many observers to fear that Ezekiel's War will break out at any moment, and perhaps herald the Last Things that John the Revelator predicted would occur at the end of the Church Age.

Russia in the News Today

Related References

Retrieved from "http://creationwiki.org/Russia#Union_of_Socialist_Soviet_Republics"
Personal tools