The Russian Empire existed from 1721, when Peter the Great took the title of emperor, until the revolution of 1917. Ruled by the Romanov dynasty from Saint Petersburg, it reached its greatest size in the late 19th century, about 22.8 million km² around 1895. That was roughly one-sixth of the world’s land, making it the third-largest empire in history after the British and Mongol empires. It stretched from Poland and the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the oases of Central Asia, and until 1867 it also held Alaska. Its only empire-wide census, taken in 1897 (Finland was left out), counted 125.6 million people, and fewer than half of them spoke Russian as their native language. The empire was built by conquest, by treaty and by Cossack fur-hunters pushing along Siberian rivers, often at heavy cost to the peoples already living there. Most of its former land now lies within Russia and the other states that emerged from the Soviet Union.
Each section below is anchored on the towns that marked a new frontier as the map spread outward from Moscow.
Kazan and Astrakhan, 1552–1556: the Volga opens
Before there was an empire there was Muscovy. Ivan III (r. 1462–1505) gathered the Russian principalities around Moscow, and his grandson Ivan IV became the first Russian ruler crowned tsar in 1547. Five years later he turned east. The siege of Kazan began on 23 August 1552 and the city fell on 2 October, ending the Khanate of Kazan on the middle Volga. In 1556 Russian troops occupied Astrakhan at the river’s mouth on the Caspian Sea and destroyed what had been the largest slave market on the Volga.
Those two victories gave Moscow the whole course of Europe’s longest river and turned an almost entirely Russian, Orthodox state into a multi-ethnic one with a large Muslim Tatar population. Growth was fast: between 1550 and 1700 the Russian state added, on average, about 35,000 km² a year.
Tobolsk, Yakutsk and Okhotsk: the fur frontier to the Pacific, 1582–1689
Siberia was taken river by river, chasing sable and other furs. In 1581 about 540 Cossacks under Yermak Timofeyevich crossed the Urals into the Khanate of Sibir, and on 26 October 1582 they entered its capital, Qashliq, on the Irtysh. Yermak drowned in 1584, but the Russians returned. They built Tyumen in 1586, the first Russian town in Siberia, and Tobolsk on the Irtysh the following year. Tobolsk became the base for the whole conquest and later the “capital of Siberia”; its kremlin, the only stone one in Siberia, rose from the 1680s onward.
The method was the same at every stop. Forts called ostrogs were built where rivers met or at short portages between river basins, and native peoples were forced to pay yasak, a tribute in furs. Mangazeya (1601) was built in the far north to bring the Nenets under tribute, Tomsk followed in 1604, Yeniseysk in 1619 and Krasnoyarsk in 1628. Pyotr Beketov founded Yakutsk on the Lena in 1632, and Russians reached the Pacific in 1639. Ivan Moskvitin’s men founded Okhotsk on the Sea of Okhotsk in 1647.
The cost for Siberia’s peoples was severe. Expeditions in the 1640s against the Yakuts of the Lena basin were violent; one estimate holds that the Yakut population fell by 70% within 40 years, and women and children were taken as slaves to force tribute payments. The advance stopped only on the Amur, where it met Qing China. The Treaty of Nerchinsk, signed on 27 August 1689 with its authoritative text in Latin, was China’s first formal treaty with a Western power and kept Russia out of the Amur basin, with the border running along the Stanovoy Range, until the Treaty of Aigun in 1858.
Saint Petersburg, 1703–1721: a Baltic capital and the birth of the empire
For all its land, Russia had almost no usable coast. Its only northern port, Arkhangelsk on the White Sea, was frozen nine months a year, and Sweden held the Baltic shore on three sides. Peter I joined Saxony, Poland–Lithuania and Denmark–Norway against Sweden in the Great Northern War, and in 1703, in the middle of it, founded Saint Petersburg on the marshy delta of the Neva. The Treaty of Nystad in 1721 gave Russia four provinces south and east of the Gulf of Finland, and on 2 November that year the Governing Senate and the Synod gave Peter the title of Emperor of All Russia. That date is taken as the start of the Russian Empire.
Saint Petersburg stayed the capital for almost all of the empire’s life. The Winter Palace on the Neva embankment was the main residence of the emperors from 1732 to 1917, and its storming in October 1917 became the lasting image of the revolution that followed the empire’s fall.
Sevastopol, Warsaw and Helsingfors: the southern and western edges, 1772–1815
Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796) pushed the frontier to the Black Sea. Victory over the Ottomans ended with the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, which prised the Crimean Khanate away from Ottoman control. Russia annexed it outright on 19 April 1783 and in the same year founded Sevastopol as the base of a new Black Sea Fleet. In the west, Russia joined Prussia and Austria in partitioning Poland–Lithuania between 1772 and 1795, taking most of its land and people; by 1795 Russia was the most populous state in Europe.
Alexander I (r. 1801–1825) added the last big pieces in Europe. The Treaty of Fredrikshamn in 1809 took Finland from Sweden as an autonomous grand duchy, the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812 brought in Bessarabia from the Ottomans, and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 made the Kingdom of Poland, known as Congress Poland, a realm joined to Russia through the emperor. Its autonomy was cut back after the uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863, and Russification was imposed on schools and courts.
Tiflis, Tashkent and Samarkand: the Caucasus and Turkestan
The eastern Georgian kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti was incorporated in 1801. Wars with Persia then brought Dagestan, eastern Georgia and most of Azerbaijan under the Treaty of Gulistan (1813), and the Treaty of Turkmenchay (1828) added what is now Armenia. The mountain peoples of the North Caucasus resisted for decades. Alexander II declared the Caucasian War over in June 1864, at the end of a campaign in which up to 1.5 million Circassians are estimated to have died and most survivors were expelled to the Ottoman Empire, events many historians describe as the Circassian genocide. Another war with the Ottomans, in 1877–1878, brought in Batumi, Ardahan and Kars.
After defeat in the Crimean War (1853–1856), Russia turned to Central Asia. Its forces took Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868 and Khiva in 1873, and from 1867 the conquered oases were run as the Turkestan Governorate-General. Bukhara and Khiva stayed as protectorates with internal self-rule. The advance alarmed Britain, which feared for India, and the rivalry known as the Great Game lasted until the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.
New Archangel and Fort Ross: the American colony, 1799–1867
Siberia’s fur trade carried on across the Bering Strait. From 1799 the Russian-American Company ran Alaska as a colony. After defeating the Tlingit at the Battle of Sitka in October 1804, the Russians founded New Archangel (Novo-Arkhangelsk), today’s Sitka, on Baranof Island, which became the colony’s informal capital in 1808. The company reached further south: Fort Ross, on the Sonoma County coast just north of San Francisco, operated from 1812 to 1841, and a short-lived Fort Elizabeth was built in Hawaii in 1817. The Russian River in California is named after these settlers.
Alaska was the one part of the empire not joined to the rest by land, and Saint Petersburg judged it impossible to defend. In 1867 Alexander II sold it to the United States for 7.2 million dollars, about 2 cents an acre. Most Americans welcomed the deal, though some opponents mocked it as “Seward’s Folly”, after the Secretary of State who arranged it.
Vladivostok and Port Arthur: the Pacific frontier and the end in 1917
While Alaska was being given up, Russia was gaining land in East Asia from a Qing China weakened by the Taiping Rebellion. The Treaty of Aigun (1858) took the north bank of the Amur, and the Convention of Peking (1860) took the coast that is now Primorsky Krai. A military post named Vladivostok, roughly “ruler of the East”, was set up there on 2 July 1860, and in 1872 the main Pacific naval base moved to it.
The final frontier was the railway. The Trans-Siberian, built between 1891 and 1916, eventually linked Moscow with Vladivostok over 9,289 km. In March 1898 Russia took a 25-year lease from China on the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, including Port Arthur, its only warm-water port on the Pacific, and Dalny (now Dalian). Japan saw this as a threat, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 ended with the Treaty of Portsmouth, which gave the lease to Japan along with southern Sakhalin. In 1914 Russia did gain Tuva as a protectorate, but in 1915 German offensives in the First World War cost it Poland and Lithuania. In 1917 the February Revolution in Petrograd forced Nicholas II to abdicate, and the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power.
Unlike the overseas British and French empires, this one was a single land mass apart from Alaska, so much of it held together, first as the Soviet Union and since 1991 as the Russian Federation. To see how that inheritance compares in size today, read our guide to how big Russia is. The rail line that finally tied Moscow to the Pacific has its own story in what the Trans-Siberian Railway is, and the 1867 sale is told in full in our Alaska Purchase guide.