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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Russian Empire

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  • The Russian Empire announced itself to the world on the day the Treaty of Nystad was signed in 1721, when the Governing Senate and Synod bestowed upon Peter I the titles of Peter the Great, Pater Patriae, and Imperator of all Russia. In that single ceremony, a vast tsardom became something new: the third-largest empire in history, surpassed only by the British and Mongol empires. At its peak in the late 19th century, it stretched across roughly 22,800,000 square kilometres, one-sixth of the world's landmass, from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, from the Baltic to Alaska. A single census, conducted in 1897, counted 125.6 million people speaking dozens of languages and practicing faiths that ranged across the entire spectrum of the world's religions. How did a landlocked principality centred on Moscow become this colossus? And why, after nearly two centuries as a dominant European power, did it collapse in a matter of days in 1917?

  • Ivan III laid the groundwork for what would become the Russian Empire in the 15th century. He expanded his domain, established a centralized Russian national state, and secured independence from the Tatars. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, Moscow's rulers took deliberate symbolic steps toward imperial status: marrying into the Byzantine imperial dynasty, adopting the double-headed eagle as their emblem, and claiming the title of tsar. His grandson, Ivan IV, became the first Russian monarch to be crowned tsar of all Russia in 1547. Under Ivan IV, the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan fell to Russian conquest, transforming what had been an almost mono-ethnic realm into a multi-ethnic one. Russians then began pushing east into Siberia, initially drawn by the region's profitable furs. Between 1550 and 1700, the Russian state grew by an average of 35,000 square kilometres per year. That pace of expansion would not slow for another century.

  • When Peter I came to power in 1682, Russia's 14 million people were nearly all tied to the land, and grain yields trailed far behind those in the West. His ambition was a "window to the sea." In 1699 he made a secret alliance with Saxony, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Denmark-Norway against Sweden, whose territory enclosed the Baltic on three sides. The resulting Great Northern War ended in 1721 with an exhausted Sweden asking for peace. Peter acquired four provinces south and east of the Gulf of Finland, and on the Neva River he built Saint Petersburg in 1703 to replace Moscow as the Russian capital. Many of the new city's major buildings were designed under Italianate influence, a deliberate statement of Western orientation. Peter reorganized the government by replacing the old Boyar Duma with a nine-member Senate. He abolished the patriarchate of the Orthodox Church and replaced it with the Most Holy Synod, making the church effectively an arm of the state. The first Russian newspaper, Vedomosti, was published during his reign, and tax revenues tripled. Peter converted household kholops into house serfs in 1723, counting them for poll taxation. He also launched a war against the weakened Safavid Persians in 1722-23, temporarily annexing areas of Iran before they were returned by the 1732 Treaty of Resht and the 1735 Treaty of Ganja.

  • Catherine the Great came to power in 1762 after a coup d'etat against her deeply unpopular husband, Peter III. A German princess by birth, she had no dynastic claim of her own, which made the continued support of the Russian nobility essential to her survival. She strengthened their authority at the expense of the serfs, legalizing the sale of serfs separately from land in 1773. That decision ignited a major peasant uprising led by a Cossack named Yemelyan Pugachev, whose rebels proclaimed "Hang all the landlords!" and threatened to take Moscow before they were suppressed. Catherine also ordered the public trial of Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova, a high-ranking noblewoman accused of torturing and murdering serfs, a gesture that won her attention across Enlightened Europe. Yet she privately recognized that serfdom must eventually be ended. In her Nakaz, or Instruction, she wrote that serfs were "just as good as we are," a comment received with disgust by the nobility. On the battlefield, she waged war against the Ottoman Empire to seize territory near the Black Sea, and extended Russian control over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth through the Partitions of Poland alongside Austria and Prussia. In 1796, following a Persian invasion of eastern Georgia, she launched a new war against Persia. After Catherine died that same year, her son Paul brought Russia into coalition war against the French Republic in 1798, and Russian Field Marshal Suvorov inflicted a series of defeats on French forces, most notably at the Battle of the Trebbia in 1799.

  • In 1812, Napoleon launched an invasion of Russia following a dispute with Alexander I. The Grande Armee reached Moscow, but the Russians' scorched earth strategy prevented the French from living off the land. Thousands of French troops were ambushed and killed by peasant guerrilla fighters during the brutal winter. Russian troops then pursued Napoleon's forces all the way to the gates of Paris and presided over the redrawing of Europe at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which made Alexander the monarch of Congress Poland. Defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-1856, however, exposed how far Russia had fallen behind. Since playing a major role in defeating Napoleon, Russia had been regarded as militarily invincible, but the reverses it suffered on land and sea against a coalition of European powers revealed the weakness of the regime. When Alexander II ascended the throne in 1855, the desire for reform was urgent. In 1859, there were more than 23 million serfs living in usually poor conditions. The Emancipation Reform of 1861 freed them, described as the single most important event in 19th-century Russian history. The freed peasants did not receive their lands as a gift; they had to pay a special lifetime tax, while the government paid landlords a generous price for the surrendered land. All property turned over to peasants was owned collectively by the mir, the village community, which divided the land and supervised its use. Russia also sold what it called the indefensible Russian America to the United States for 11 million rubles in 1867, brokered by Secretary of State William H. Seward, in what many Americans initially dismissed as a wasteland purchase they called "Seward's Folly."

  • Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by the Narodnaya Volya, a Nihilist terrorist organization. His successor, Alexander III, revived the maxim of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality" and believed Russia could be saved only by insulating itself from Western influence. His most influential adviser, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, served as procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1895 and taught his imperial pupils to fear freedom of speech, the press, democracy, and the parliamentary system. Thousands were exiled to Siberia under his guidance. The Russian famine of 1891-1892 killed hundreds of thousands and deepened popular discontent. A social democratic party, the RSDLP, split at its Second Congress in 1903 into two factions: the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, who wanted a tightly organized vanguard of professional revolutionaries; and the Mensheviks, led by Julius Martov, who favored a broader movement. On a January day in 1905 known as Bloody Sunday, Father Georgy Gapon led an enormous crowd to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to present a petition to the emperor. Soldiers opened fire on the crowd, killing hundreds. A general strike was declared. Nicholas II reluctantly issued the October Manifesto, which conceded the creation of a national Duma, but by the end of 1905 he had already begun rolling back concessions through the new Russian Constitution of 1906. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks formally split in 1912, a division that would prove decisive when power was finally at stake.

  • Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on the 28th of July 1914, and Nicholas II ordered the mobilization of 4.9 million soldiers in response. Russia suffered a massive defeat at Tannenberg in August 1914, partly because a message was transmitted without coding, leading to the destruction of an entire army. At the Masurian Lakes, Russia suffered a hundred thousand casualties in the first battle and 200,000 in the second. By August 1915, exhausted Russian troops had withdrawn from Russian-held Poland, allowing Germany to capture Warsaw on the 5th of August. Nicholas then dismissed Grand Duke Nicholas as commander-in-chief and took personal command, a decision the source describes as the beginning of the worst disaster. On the southern front, General Aleksei Brusilov launched an offensive on the 4th of June 1916 that took 76,000 prisoners from the main attack alone; it was the most successful Allied strike of World War I. But it was halted by inadequate ammunition and cost approximately one million Russian casualties, ending Russia's capacity to sustain further major operations. By the middle of 1915, food and fuel were in short supply, inflation was rising, and factory workers were striking. The Empress Alexandra fell under the influence of the monk Grigori Rasputin, who was born in 1869 and assassinated by a clique of nobles in late 1916. On the 8th of March 1917, International Women's Day, a factory strike in Petrograd drew hundreds of thousands into the streets demanding the emperor's removal. Eighty thousand troops sent to restore order refused their officers' commands. Nicholas II abdicated; Grand Duke Michael declined to accept the throne without a constituent assembly's approval. Alexander Kerensky confirmed Russia's status as a republic on the 1st of September 1917. In July 1918, the Romanov family was murdered by the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg, ending more than a millennium of Russian monarchy.

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Common questions

When was the Russian Empire established and when did it end?

The Russian Empire was established in November 1721, when Peter I was granted the title of Imperator following the Treaty of Nystad. It ended in September 1917 with the proclamation of the Russian Republic after Nicholas II abdicated during the February Revolution.

How large was the Russian Empire at its height?

At its height in the late 19th century, the Russian Empire covered about 22,800,000 square kilometres, roughly one-sixth of the world's landmass. It was the third-largest empire in history, behind only the British and Mongol empires.

What was the population of the Russian Empire according to its census?

The Russian Empire conducted only one census, in 1897, which recorded a population of 125.6 million people. By 1914, that population had grown to approximately 164 million.

What caused the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917?

A combination of catastrophic military defeats in World War I, food and fuel shortages, mounting inflation, and mass strikes culminated in the February Revolution. On the 8th of March 1917, protests in Petrograd drew hundreds of thousands of people; 80,000 troops sent to suppress them refused orders. Nicholas II abdicated, and the Russian Republic was proclaimed on the 1st of September 1917.

Who freed the serfs in the Russian Empire and when?

Alexander II issued the Emancipation Reform of 1861, freeing all serfs. At the time, there were more than 23 million serfs. The freed peasants were required to pay a special lifetime tax in exchange for land, which was owned collectively by the village community known as the mir.

Why did the Russian Empire sell Alaska to the United States?

Russia sold Alaska in 1867 because it viewed the territory as indefensible. The sale price was 11 million rubles, equivalent to 7.2 million dollars, paid by Andrew Johnson's government. The deal was brokered by Secretary of State William H. Seward, and many Americans initially called it "Seward's Folly" before gold and petroleum were later discovered there.

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