Russia

1193

Peter the Great's tour of Western Europe was meant to secure allies against the Ottomans and instead produced a Russia modelled on Dutch shipyards, an outcome shaped less by diplomacy than by what a curious tsar happened to find fascinating along the way.

Two respected Soviet casualty analysts, working from the same war, arrive at figures more than two hundred thousand deaths apart, a gap that says as much about how armies count their dead as about the battle itself.

2004

1776

1854

1991

1919

More Russian soldiers died of disease than were ever killed in battle, and the nurse who became world-famous for treating them mattered less for what she cured than for what she made everyone else finally admit about military hospitals.

Historians still can't agree whether Reagan's pressure or Gorbachev's own convictions ended the Cold War, and the honest answer is probably that neither side wants to give up the credit.

1956

Hitler compared the Soviet Union to a rotten structure that would collapse the moment Germany kicked the door in, and by the time the door actually held, Germany had lost eight million combatants trying to prove him right.

A Russian official's plan to draft young Polish radicals into decades of army service to defuse unrest instead set off the very rebellion he was trying to prevent, and its defeat produced the single largest deportation in Russian history.

2002

1917

Japanese crowds rioted over the 1905 peace treaty believing their unbroken run of victories had earned far more than it delivered, unaware how close to exhaustion their own war effort actually stood by the time the fighting stopped.

1917

A contest with no agreed winner, because the two sides were competing for different kinds of proof: American landings against Soviet firsts.

Trotsky tried to end Russia's war by simply declaring it over without signing anything, a strategy called neither war nor peace that lasted exactly until Germany resumed advancing and proved it did not work.

His own dying warning about Stalin's growing power went largely unheeded, which makes the question of how much responsibility Lenin bears for what followed him one the sources themselves cannot fully settle.