Territorial evolution of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  The territorial evolution of Russia is a story that begins in 1480, when Ivan III ended Tatar rule by defeating them at the Great Stand on the Ugra River. From that single river crossing, Russia's borders would stretch outward for centuries, eventually reaching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean and touching three continents. How did a landlocked principality transform into one of the largest empires in human history? And what happened when that empire finally began to come apart? Those are the questions this documentary will follow, from the consolidations of the early tsars through the Soviet era's violent reshaping of the map, to the border disputes that remain alive today.

• 2. Building the Tsardom

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  Ivan III and Vasili III built the centralized Russian state one annexation at a time. The Novgorod Republic fell in 1478. Tver followed in 1485. Then came the Pskov Republic in 1510, Volokolamsk in 1513, Ryazan in 1521, and Novgorod-Seversk in 1522. Each of these was absorbed through a combination of political pressure and military force, creating the administrative core that later tsars would expand outward from.

  The reign of Ivan the Terrible added new dimensions to this expansion. By 1552, his forces had taken the Khanate of Kazan, and by 1556, the Astrakhan Khanate, securing Russian control of the critical Volga trade route. These were not peripheral victories. The Volga connected the heart of Russian commerce to the Caspian Sea, and controlling it meant controlling the movement of goods across a vast interior.

  The period between 1598 and 1613, known as the Time of Troubles, interrupted this momentum sharply. During those years Russia lost Ingria and Kexholm County to Sweden, and lost Severia, the Smolensk region, Sebezh, and Nevel to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Romanovs came to power in 1613 and steadied the state, but recovering those lost territories would take generations. The Smolensk region was not regained until 1667, under Tsar Alexis.

• 3. Overland to the Pacific

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  While Western European powers were sailing across Atlantic waters to plant flags in the Americas, Russia was moving overland. Historian Michael Khodarkovsky describes the result as a "hybrid empire" that combined elements of both continental and colonial empires. The direction was principally east, north, and south, with Siberia as the first great prize.

  Geographical expeditions mapped much of Siberia during the first stage of Asian expansion, which ran from 1582 to 1650. Russian control pushed from the Urals all the way to the Pacific in less than seventy years. Indigenous peoples were the ones from whom this vast territory was taken, according to the source's own accounting of the record.

  A second stage, from 1785 to 1830, turned Russian ambitions south toward the territory between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The key areas were Armenia and Georgia, with additional penetration into Ottoman and Persian lands. By 1829, Russia controlled all of the Caucasus, formalized in the Treaty of Adrianople. A third era, from 1850 to 1860, extended Russian reach to the East Coast, annexing the region from the Amur River to Manchuria through treaties with Qing China. The fourth era, running from 1865 to 1885, incorporated Turkestan and the northern approaches to India, which sparked British fears of a threat to India itself in what became known as the Great Game.

  Kazakh scholar Kereihan Amanzholov argued that Russian colonialism had "no essential difference with the colonialist policies of Britain, France, and other European powers." For a time, Russian territory even extended into the Americas, with colonies there lasting from 1732 to 1867, and briefly an unofficial colony in present-day Djibouti in Africa in 1889 that lasted only a month. Alaska, acquired by 1799, was eventually sold to the United States in 1867.

• 4. Conflict with China and Japan

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  Qing China defeated Russia in the early Sino-Russian border conflicts, though the balance later shifted. The 1858 Treaty of Aigun gave Russia Outer Manchuria, the territory north of the Amur River. The treaty came in the context of the Second Opium War, and by 1860 Russia had also acquired the territory east of the Ussuri River from the same weakened Qing state.

  During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the Russian Empire invaded Manchuria, and the Blagoveshchensk massacre took place against Chinese residents on the Russian side of the border. The Chinese Eastern Railway, a tsarist concession that had given Russia a foothold in northeastern China, later changed hands repeatedly. The Soviet Union retook it after the 1929 Sino-Soviet conflict, then returned it in 1952.

  The Russo-Japanese War brought the Russian Empire to its maximum territorial extent in Asia, but the outcome was a sharp reversal. After its defeat, Russia ceded Manchuria, southern Sakhalin, Russian Dalian, and Port Arthur to Japan through the Treaty of Portsmouth. Russia did keep the northern portion of the Chinese Eastern Railway from that settlement, a detail that would matter when the Soviet Union inherited the question of the railway's ownership decades later. The loss of south Sakhalin in 1905 under Nicholas II prefigured later disputes over the Kuril Islands that remain unresolved between Russia and Japan today.

• 5. The Soviet Reshaping

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  The October Revolution of November 1917 dissolved the Russian Empire and within years produced a new political entity. Poland and Finland became independent. The Russian Civil War, which ran from 1917 to 1922, left the area of effective Bolshevik control shifting dramatically before the revolutionary government regained most of the former empire's Eurasian territory. In 1922, the Russian SFSR joined with Belarus, Transcaucasia, and Ukraine as the four founding republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  In the Caucasus, the Treaty of Kars of 1921 returned the Kars Oblast and the southern portion of the Batum Oblast to Turkey. These were territories the Russian Empire had held since 1878, ceded back after fewer than fifty years.

  By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had absorbed a sweeping list of additional territories. The Kresy, encompassing modern western Belarus and western Ukraine, was annexed from Poland in September-October 1939. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were occupied in August 1940. Bessarabia, Hertsa, and part of Bukovina were taken from Romania after an ultimatum the same year. From Finland, the Soviet Union took parts of Karelia and Salla in 1940 and Pechengsky Raion in 1944, plus a fifty-year lease on the naval base at Porkkala. Carpathian Ruthenia was occupied in 1944. Tuva, which had been independent since 1921 and was previously governed by Mongolia and the Manchu Empire, was absorbed. From Japan in 1945, the Soviet Union took the Kuril Islands and southern Sakhalin.

  Meanwhile, territory flowed out of the Russian republic internally. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were separated off in 1924. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan followed in 1936. The Crimean oblast and the city of Sevastopol were transferred to Ukraine on the 19th of February 1954.

• 6. Dissolution and Disputes

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  The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought the Russian SFSR's declaration of independence in December 1991 and the new name: the Russian Federation. What followed was not a clean settlement of borders but a continuing series of disputes, some resolved, some not.

  The Chechen Republic of Ichkeria declared itself a secessionist government from 1991 to 2000. After a Russian defeat at the Battle of Grozny, the First Chechen War ended with Russia recognizing Ichkerian president Maskhadov's government in January 1997 and signing a peace treaty in May. Russia invaded again in 1999, and the Ichkeria government was exiled in 2000.

  Disputes with neighbors multiplied in the 1990s and 2000s. The dispute with Japan over the Kuril Islands persisted. The dispute with Latvia over the Pytalovsky Raion was settled in 1997. A dispute with China over parts of Tarabarov Island and Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island was settled in 2001. Russia agreed in the 1997 Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty that Sevastopol belonged to Ukraine, and gave up its claim to the uninhabited Tuzla Island in the 2003 Treaty on the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait.

  In 2008, Russian forces helped establish the breakaway states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia. Shortly after, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev laid out a foreign policy explicitly challenging the US-dominated "single-pole" world order and claiming a privileged sphere of influence in the near abroad. Both Transnistria and South Ossetia subsequently proposed joining Russia.

  In 2014, following the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, Russian troops occupied the Crimean peninsula and a referendum was held before the Kremlin announced annexation. On the 21st of February 2022, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree recognizing the independence of two Donbas republics in Ukraine. Two days later, Russian troops openly invaded Ukrainian-held territory. On the 30th of September 2022, Putin announced that Russia would annex four partially occupied Ukrainian regions: Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts. Russia does not control the full territory of any of the four regions it claims, and its government was unable to define the new international borders.