• Monarch – Nicholas II
• Chairman of the Council of Ministers –
  • until 2 February – Ivan Logginovich Goremykin
  • 2 February-23 November – Boris Stürmer
  • starting 23 November – Alexander Fyodorovich Trepov

• Baranovichi Offensive
• Battle of Kostiuchnówka
• Battle of Bitlis
• Brusilov Offensive
• Battle of Erzincan
• Erzurum Offensive
• Battle of Kowel
• Lake Naroch Offensive
• Trebizond Campaign
• Urkun

• 9 September — Ada Tschechowa, Russo-German actress (died 1966)

• February 9 – Anton Yegorovich von Saltza, general (b. 1843)
• March 19 – Vasily Surikov, painter (b. 1848)
• March 28 – Paul von Plehwe, general (b. 1850)
• May 1 – Lydia Zvereva, first Russian woman to earn a pilot's licence (b. 1890)
• May 13 – Sholem Aleichem, Ukrainian Yiddish writer (b. 1859)
• May 28 – Ivan Franko, Ukrainian writer and political activist (b. 1856)
• July 2 – Mikhail Pomortsev, meteorologist (b. 1851)
• July 3 – Jeremiah Lomnytskyj, Ukrainian Basilian priest, missionary and servant of God (b. 1860)
• July 15 – Élie Metchnikoff, microbiologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1845)
• September 2 – Gennady Ladyzhensky, Russian painter (b. 1852)

  Media related to 1916 in Russia at Wikimedia Commons