The capital of the Russian SFSR and the USSR as a whole was Moscow and the other major urban centers included Leningrad (Petrograd until 1924), Stalingrad (Volgograd after 1961), Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Gorky and Kuybyshev.

By 1961, it was the third largest producer of petroleum due to new discoveries in the Volga-Urals region[6] and Siberia, trailing in production to only the United States and Saudi Arabia.

[5] The economy, which had become stagnant since the late 1970s under General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, began to be liberalized starting in 1985 under Gorbachev's "perestroika" restructuring policies, including the introduction of non-state owned enterprises (e.g. cooperatives).

Following these events, Gorbachev lost all his remaining power, with Yeltsin superseding him as the pre-eminent figure in the country.

[8] The 1978 constitution of the Russian SFSR was amended several times to reflect the transition to democracy, private property and market economy.

By 1919 they had coined the mocking label Sovdepia (Russian: Совдепия) for the nascent state of the Soviets of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies.

[14][better source needed] Internationally, the Russian SFSR was recognized as an independent state in 1920 only by its bordering neighbors (Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania) in the Treaty of Tartu and by the short-lived Irish Republic of 1919–1922 in Ireland.

According to Matthew White It was widely understood that the country's federal structure served as a facade for Russian dominance.

At a total of about 17,125,200 km (6,612,100 sq mi), the Russian SFSR was the largest of the fifteen Soviet republics, with its southerly neighbor, the Kazakh SSR, being second.

The initial stage of the October Revolution which involved the assault on Petrograd occurred largely without any human casualties.

[21] Conversely, the Bolsheviks also reserved a number of vacant seats in the Soviets and Central Executive for the opposition parties in proportion to their vote share at the Congress.

[22] At the same time, a number of prominent members of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries had assumed positions in Lenin's government and lead commissariats in several areas.

This included agriculture (Kolegaev), property (Karelin), justice (Steinberg), post offices and telegraphs (Proshian) and local government (Trutovsky).

[23] Lenin's government also instituted a number of progressive measures such as universal education, healthcare and equal rights for women.

The ruble collapsed, with barter increasingly replacing money as a medium of exchange[28] and, by 1921, heavy industry output had fallen to 20% of 1913 levels.

Just four months after Operation Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht was quickly advancing through the Russian SFSR, and was approximately 10 miles (16 km) away from Moscow.

In 1943, Karachay Autonomous Oblast was dissolved by Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), General Secretary of the Communist Party, later Premier, when the Karachays were exiled to Central Asia for their alleged collaboration with the invading Germans in the Great Patriotic War (World War II, 1941–1945), and territory was incorporated into the Georgian SSR.

On 3 March 1944, on the orders of Stalin, the Chechen-Ingush ASSR was disbanded and its population forcibly deported upon the accusations of collaboration with the invaders and separatism.

After reconquering Estonia and Latvia in 1944, the Russian SFSR annexed their easternmost territories around Ivangorod and within the modern Pechorsky and Pytalovsky Districts in 1944–1945.

On 17 April 1946, the Kaliningrad Oblast – the north-eastern portion of the former Kingdom of Prussia, the founding state of the German Empire (1871–1918) and later the German province of East Prussia including the capital and Baltic seaport city of Königsberg – was annexed by the Soviet Union and made part of the Russian SFSR.

As First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev's authority was significantly enhanced by Malenkov's demotion.

Even after Brezhnev's death in 1982, the era did not end until Mikhail Gorbachev took power in March 1985 and introduced liberal reforms in Soviet society.

On 23 August, Yeltsin, in the presence of Gorbachev, signed a decree suspending all activity by the Communist Party of the Russian SFSR in the territory of Russia.

[37] On 8 December 1991, at Viskuli near Brest (Belarus), Yeltsin, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian leader Stanislav Shushkevich signed the "Agreement on the Establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States", known in media as the Belovezh Accords.

The document, consisting of a preamble and fourteen articles, stated that the Soviet Union no longer existed "as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality".

On 12 December, the agreement was ratified by the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR by an overwhelming majority: 188 votes for, 6 against and 7 abstentions.

It appears that the RSFSR took the line that it did not need to follow the secession process delineated in the Soviet Constitution because it was not possible to secede from a country that no longer existed.

On 21 April 1992, the Congress of People's Deputies of Russia approved the renaming of the RSFSR into the Russian Federation, by making appropriate amendments to the Constitution, which entered into force since publication on 16 May 1992.

A huge military parade, hosted by the President of Russia, is annually organised in Moscow on Red Square.

The hammer and sickle and the full Soviet coat of arms are still widely seen in Russian cities as part of architectural decorations.