The monk Grigory Rasputin exercises a powerful influence over the Russian empress Alexandra

The Liberals win a majority in election for Russia's new duma and press ahead with proposals for land reform

Tsar Nicholas II issues a Fundamental Law emphasizing his own autocratic power

Tsar Nicholas II appoints as prime minister the reformist aristocrat Pyotr Stolypin

Tsar Nicholas II summarily dismisses Russia's new duma when it has been sitting for only three months

The Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin introduces land reform

Russian author Maxim Gorky completes his novel Mat ("The Mother"), written mainly during a visit to the USA

Anna Pavlova dances The Dying Swan, choreographed for her by Michel Fokine to music by Saint-Saëns

Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird is performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in a production by Stanislavsky

Bronislava Nijinska joins her brother Vaslav in the Maryinsky company in St Petersburg

Alexander Scriabin's orchestral work, Poem of Ecstasy, has its first performance in New York

Sergei Rachmaninov premieres his Third Piano Concerto during his tour of the USA as a pianist

Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Golden Cockerel has its premiere in Moscow

Alexander Scriabin completes Prometheus, the Poem of Fire, first performed in Moscow in 1911

Wassily Kandinsky's paintings entitled Compositions are the first examples of purely abstract art

The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, wandering from home in midwinter, dies of pneumonia in the stationmaster's house at Astapovo

The Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin is assassinated in a Kiev theatre

Sergei Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky leave Russia for the west

The 'Workers' Newspaper' Pravda (meaning 'Truth') publishes its first issue in St Petersburg

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova publishes Evening, her first collection of poems

Maxim Gorky publishes Childhood, the first volume of his autobiographical trilogy

The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam publishes his first collection, Stone

The Russian painter and sculptor Vladimir Tatlin develops an abstract style to which he gives the name Constructivism

Tsar Nicholas II changes the name of his capital city to Petrograd, because St Petersburg sounds German

The Austrian attack on Serbia causes Russia to mobilize her army