Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Tsardom of Russia began on the 16th of January 1547, when Ivan IV was crowned tsar and grand prince of all Russia. It ended in 1721, when Peter the Great proclaimed the Russian Empire after his victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War.
From 1550 to 1700, Russia grew by an average of 35,000 square kilometers per year. During the reign of Ivan IV alone, the territory expanded from 2.8 to 5.4 million square kilometers between 1533 and 1584.
The oprichnina was the private domain that Ivan IV carved out of Russia in 1565, separating it from the public realm called the zemshchina. In this domain his agents attacked boyars, merchants, and commoners, executing some and confiscating land. Ivan abandoned the practice in 1572 after a decade of terror that culminated in the Massacre of Novgorod in 1570.
False Dmitriy I was a pretender who claimed to be Tsarevich Demetrius, the son of Ivan IV who had died in 1591. He gathered support in Poland and marched on Moscow after the death of Boris Godunov in 1605. He entered Moscow and was crowned tsar that year, following the murder of Tsar Feodor II.
The Sobornoye Ulozheniye, the comprehensive legal code introduced in 1649, officially attached peasants to the land they farmed and made runaway serfs state fugitives. Landlords received complete power over their serfs, and middle-class urban workers were simultaneously forbidden from changing their place of residence.
The Stroganov merchant family financed the initial push in 1581, hiring Cossack leader Yermak Timofeyevich to lead an expedition that defeated the Khanate of Sibir. Russian explorers and traders then pushed east from the Ob River to the Yenisei, then to the Lena, reaching the Pacific coast by mid-century. By 1648, Cossack Semyon Dezhnyov had navigated the passage between Asia and America.