British and French troops land at Sebastopol, to besiege the port, and win a limited victory over the Russians at the river Alma

An inconclusive engagement at Inkerman means that the allies in the Crimea have to dig in for the winter besieging Sebastopol

After a siege of nearly a year the Russians abandon Sebastopol, but the Turkish alliance is too exhausted to pursue the conflict

Russian exile Alexander Herzen, publishes in London a radical newspaper called Kolokol (The Bell)

After four years of consultation, Alexander II issues a decree freeing Russia's millions of serfs

Dostoevsky publishes Notes from the House of the Dead, a semi-autobiographical novel about life in a Siberian labour camp

Dostoevsky publishes Notes from Underground, the bitter memories of a retired civil servant that is often described as the first existentialist novel

Leo Tolstoy publishes the first volume of his epic novel War and Peace, following the lives of several aristocratic families during the Napoleonic wars

Dostoevsky publishes Crime and Punishment, a novel narrated by Raskolnikov, a St Petersburg student and murderer

Modest Mussorgsky composes his orchestral work St John's Night on the Bare Mountain, based on a story by Gogol

Dostoevsky publishes The Idiot, a novel about the simple-minded and truthful Prince Myshkin

Dmitry Mendeleyev reads to the Russian Chemical Society in St Petersburg his formulation of the periodic table

Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov has its premiere in St Petersburg

Mussorgsky composes Pictures at an Exhibition as a piece for piano in memory of an exhibition by the Russian painter Victor Hartmann

Leo Tolstoy publishes the first volume of his novel Anna Karenina, in which the heroine develops a fatal love for Count Vronsky

Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky begins an intense correspondence with a wealthy patron, Nadezhda von Meck

The ballet Swan Lake, with choreography by Julius Wenzel Reisinger to music by Tchaikovsky, has its premiere at the Bolshoi in Moscow

Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin, based on Pushkin's poem, has its premiere in Moscow

Russian composer Alexander Borodin writes In the Steppes of Central Asia as part of the silver jubilee celebrations for Alexander II

Dostoevsky publishes his novel The Brothers Karamazov, featuring the four sons of the depraved Feodor Pavlovich Karamazov

The first pogroms, or officially sanctioned attacks on Jews and their property, take place in Russia

Russia's reforming tsar, Alexander II, is killed by hand-made grenades thrown at his carriage in St Petersburg

Alexander Borodin dies without finishing his opera Prince Igor (completed later by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov)

Lenin's elder brother Alexander, while still a student, is executed for his part in a plot to assassinate the tsar, Alexander III

Sleeping Beauty, with choreography by Petipa to music by Tchaikovsky, has its premiere in St Petersburg