The Full History of Russia: From Birch Bark to the Kremlin
Published · 1 hr 3 min
Watch on YouTube Subscribe to @Shadowfetchtube
In 1951, an excavation worker in Novgorod found a roll of birch bark covered in writing. More than 1,200 such letters have been found since, written by ordinary people. This is the full history of Russia, from Staraya Ladoga around 753 and the Rus of 862 and 882 to October 2026: how river trading towns became the largest country on Earth, and why power there has gathered, again and again, into a single pair of hands.
Narration in this film is a synthetic, cloned voice. Sources and image credits are in the YouTube description.
Chapters
- 00:00 The letter in the mud
- 01:14 Rivers and the Rus
- 05:33 Lord Novgorod the Great
- 07:30 The Horde and the rise of Moscow
- 11:16 The formidable tsar
- 13:57 Troubles, Romanovs and serfdom
- 17:08 Peter and the city on the marsh
- 19:38 Catherine and the empire of the south
- 23:26 Napoleon and the iron tsar
- 26:49 Freedom with a bill
- 30:04 Bloody Sunday to October
- 33:38 Red Terror and a new union
- 36:31 Revolution from above
- 40:15 The war and its price
- 44:20 Superpower
- 48:13 The end of the Union
- 52:14 Putin's Russia
- 1:01:03 The letters keep coming
