Russia, By the Numbers

"Russia," it is said, "is never as strong as she appears, and never as weak as she appears." Nearly two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia is rising again--under the centralized (some say autocratic) leadership of Vladimir Putin. Putin practically insists that the world reckon with Russia as a great power. Clearly, we should weigh the Russian Bear.

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Russia's Roots, Part 1

Putin, a former KGB officer, has said that in "the United States or England . . . liberal values have deep historic roots." But Russia, he says, "Russia needs a strong state power and must have it." Let's travel back in time and see what he means. The first leg of our journey starts in Kiev, the capital of today's Ukraine, and ends in Moscow, in audience with a czar.

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Russia's Roots, Part 2

As the czars gained power, the land's peasants and nobles lost it--and lost it big. The czars wanted serfs. The czars wanted rich estates. They wanted to rule a great power. Enter the Kremlin with us now and meet three of these czars: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great.

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Russia's Roots, Part 3

By 1825, Russians were getting revolutionary ideas about civil rights and representative government. The czar heard them and responded. He created a secret police force, tightened government censorship, and pursued an explicit policy of "autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality." Still, by the time the last czar took power in 1894, revolutionary political parties had blossomed, including Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin.

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Russia's Roots, Part 4

The Soviet Union rose and fell in less than a century. But while it lasted, it was one of history's most powerful political unions. Among its official missions: to foster worldwide communist revolution.

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Russia vs. Chechnya

The newspapers say we're in the middle of the second Chechen war, with the first running from 1994 to 1996 and the second starting in 1999. That's true, but it's hardly the whole story. In fact, the Russian-Chechen struggle dates to 1732, when imperial Russian forces lost a minor battle in a Caucasian village called Chechen-aul.

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--Michael Himick and Steve Sampson