THE WORLD ATLAS

Empire · 1547–1917 · Europe

Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire

Also known as Tsardom of Muscovy, Russian Empire

Moscow's grand princes threw off Mongol overlordship and gathered the Russian lands, and in 1547 Ivan IV, the Terrible, was crowned the first Tsar of All Russia. His conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan opened the Volga, and Cossacks and fur traders crossed Siberia to reach the Pacific by 1639.

After the chaotic Time of Troubles, the Romanov dynasty took power in 1613. Peter the Great built a modern army and navy, founded St Petersburg and proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721; Catherine the Great added Crimea, the Black Sea steppe and much of Poland. In the 19th century Russia took Finland, the Caucasus and Central Asia. The tsars ruled as autocrats over a peasant majority, most of them serfs until 1861. Defeats and hardship in the First World War led to revolution in 1917 and the end of the monarchy.

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Saint Basil's Cathedral on Red Square in Moscow, built 1555–61 for Ivan the Terrible
Saint Basil's Cathedral on Red Square in Moscow, built 1555–61 for Ivan the Terrible Jorge Láscar from Melbourne, Australia · CC BY 2.0
Years
1547–1917
Capital
Moscow; St Petersburg from 1712 (Moscow again 1728–1732)
Greatest extent
1895, about 22.80 million km²
Region
Europe

c. 22.8M km² (Taagepera 1997; Turchin, Adams & Hall 2006), after the conquest of Central Asia; Alaska had been sold in 1867

Legacy

Russia became the largest country on Earth, and the expansion that brought dozens of peoples under Moscow's rule still shapes politics from the Baltic to the Pacific.

Timeline of Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire

  1. Ivan III annexes Novgorod

    In the 15th century Novgorod was a wealthy merchant republic ruling a vast territory stretching to the Arctic and the Urals, and Moscow's Grand Prince Ivan III wanted to bring all the Russian lands under his rule. When Novgorod's leaders turned towards Lithuania, Ivan defeated its army at the Shelon River in 1471. In 1478 he besieged the city again and forced its surrender; the republic's assembly was abolished and its famous bell taken to Moscow. Annexing Novgorod added its vast northern lands to Muscovy and made Moscow the dominant Russian state.

  2. Great Stand on the Ugra River ends Tatar overlordship

    For two centuries the Russian principalities had paid tribute to the Golden Horde, the Mongol-Tatar state of the steppe. Ivan III stopped paying, and in 1480 Khan Akhmat of the Great Horde marched north to force him, hoping to join his Lithuanian allies. The two armies faced each other across the Ugra River, southwest of Moscow, for weeks in October and November, but the Tatars never managed to cross, Lithuanian help did not arrive, and winter set in. Akhmat withdrew without a battle. The 'Great Stand' is traditionally taken as the end of the Tatar yoke, leaving Moscow a fully sovereign state.

  3. Ivan IV crowned the first Tsar of all Russia

    Ivan IV, grand prince of Moscow since the age of three, took power in his own right as a teenager. On 16 January 1547 he was crowned in Moscow's Dormition Cathedral as 'Tsar of all Russia', a title derived from the Latin 'caesar' and meant as the equal of 'emperor'. The new title claimed a status equal to the greatest monarchs and marked the start of the Tsardom of Russia. Ivan, later known as 'the Terrible', went on to reform the law and the army and to begin Russia's expansion to the east.

  4. Kazan Khanate conquered (Astrakhan follows in 1556)

    The Khanate of Kazan, a successor state of the Golden Horde on the middle Volga, had fought Moscow on and off for more than a century. After failed campaigns, Ivan IV built a fortress at Sviyazhsk near Kazan and besieged the city in 1552 with a large army and siege engineers; on 2 October his troops blew up the walls with mines and stormed it. In 1556 Russian forces also took the Khanate of Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga. Russia now controlled the whole Volga route to the Caspian Sea and opened the way to the Urals and Siberia.

  5. c. 1582: Yermak's Cossacks defeat the Khanate of Sibir

    The merchant Stroganov family, who held vast lands in the Urals, hired a band of Cossacks under the ataman Yermak Timofeyevich to protect them against the Siberian Khanate of Kuchum Khan. In about 1581–82 Yermak led some 840 men across the Urals along the rivers; with firearms against bows, they defeated Kuchum's forces near the Irtysh and took his capital, Qashliq (Sibir). Yermak was killed in an ambush by Kuchum's men in 1584 or 1585 (sources differ), but Russian forts followed. The conquest opened Siberia, and by 1639 Russian explorers and fur traders had reached the Pacific Ocean.

  6. Mikhail Romanov elected tsar, ending the Time of Troubles

    After the old Rurikid dynasty died out in 1598, Russia fell into the 'Time of Troubles': famine, civil war, pretenders claiming to be the dead Tsarevich Dmitry, and invasion by Poland-Lithuania and Sweden. Polish troops even occupied Moscow until a volunteer army raised by Kuzma Minin and led by Prince Dmitry Pozharsky drove them out in 1612. In February 1613 an Assembly of the Land (Zemsky Sobor) elected 16-year-old Mikhail Romanov as tsar. The Romanov dynasty would rule Russia for over 300 years, until 1917, though peace with Sweden and Poland cost land to both.

  7. Treaty of Pereyaslav brings the Dnieper Cossacks under Moscow

    In 1648 the Zaporozhian Cossacks of Ukraine under Bohdan Khmelnytsky rose against Polish-Lithuanian rule and, needing a powerful ally, turned to the Orthodox tsar. In January 1654 a council of Cossack officers at Pereiaslav agreed to accept the authority of Tsar Alexis, which brought Russia into a long war with Poland-Lithuania. The exact meaning of the agreement, alliance or submission, is still disputed by Ukrainian and Russian historians. By the Truce of Andrusovo (1667) Russia gained Smolensk and the Ukrainian lands east of the Dnieper, plus the city of Kyiv, handed over at first for two years, a major shift of power in eastern Europe.

  8. Treaty of Nerchinsk fixes the border with Qing China

    As Russian explorers and fur traders pushed into the Amur River valley in the mid-17th century, they clashed with the Qing dynasty, which ruled Manchuria and besieged the Russian fort at Albazin in 1685–86. In 1689 envoys of the two empires met at Nerchinsk, with Jesuit priests acting as interpreters in Latin, and signed China's first treaty with a European state. Russia gave up the Amur basin and the border was set along the Argun River and the Stanovoy Mountains, but it gained the right to trade with China. The border held for about 170 years.

  9. Treaty of Nystad ends the Great Northern War; empire proclaimed

    Peter the Great wanted a 'window on the West' on the Baltic Sea, then dominated by Sweden. In the Great Northern War (1700–21) Russia, after an early disaster at Narva in 1700, crushed Charles XII's army at Poltava in 1709 and built a navy and the new capital of Saint Petersburg on conquered land. By the Treaty of Nystad, signed on 10 September 1721, Sweden ceded Livonia, Estonia, Ingria and part of Karelia. Russia became the leading power of northern Europe, and in 1721 Peter became the first Emperor of Russia, turning the tsardom into the Russian Empire.

  10. Catherine II annexes the Crimean Khanate

    The Crimean Khanate, long an Ottoman vassal that raided Russian and Ukrainian lands, had been declared independent by the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, but it was really under Russian influence. After repeated unrest, Catherine the Great formally annexed the khanate by a manifesto on 19 April 1783 (8 April, Old Style), on the urging of her adviser Prince Grigory Potemkin. Work soon began on a port at Akhtiar, the future Sevastopol, as the base for a new Black Sea Fleet. Russia now had a firm hold on the northern coast of the Black Sea.

  11. Final partition of Poland-Lithuania

    In the late 18th century the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, weakened by a paralysed political system, was partitioned three times by its neighbours Russia, Prussia and Austria. After the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794 was crushed by Russian and Prussian armies, the three powers agreed in 1795 to divide what remained, and Poland-Lithuania disappeared from the map for 123 years. In this third partition Russia took the rest of Lithuania. Over the three partitions Russia gained the largest share of the Commonwealth's people, and its border moved deep into central Europe.

  12. Convention of Peking: land north of the Amur and east of the Ussuri

    While Britain and France fought China in the Second Opium War, Russia pressed the Qing for the lands along the Amur River given up at Nerchinsk. By the Treaty of Aigun (1858) China ceded the left bank of the Amur, and after the Anglo-French capture of Beijing in 1860 the Russian envoy Nikolay Ignatyev obtained the Convention of Peking, which also gave Russia the land between the Ussuri River and the Pacific coast. Together the two treaties gave Russia roughly 1 million km² and a long Pacific coastline, where it founded Vladivostok, and cut China off from the Sea of Japan.

  13. Alaska sold to the United States

    Russian Alaska was valued mainly for sea-otter furs, but by the 1850s the otters had been hunted almost to extinction, few Russians lived there, and Russia, short of money after its defeat in the Crimean War, could not easily defend it. On 30 March 1867 the United States agreed to buy Alaska for 7.2 million US dollars, about 2 cents an acre; the transfer took effect on 18 October 1867. Russia gave up its only lands in the Americas. Its eastward expansion now ended at the Bering Strait.

  14. Defeat by Japan; Treaty of Portsmouth cedes southern Sakhalin

    Russia and Japan both wanted control of Manchuria and Korea, and Russia had leased Port Arthur in China as a naval base. In February 1904 Japan attacked the Russian fleet there, then besieged and took the port and won the land battle of Mukden; in May 1905 it destroyed Russia's Baltic Fleet at Tsushima. US President Theodore Roosevelt mediated peace, and on 5 September 1905 the Treaty of Portsmouth gave Japan the lease of the Liaodong Peninsula, Russia's railway in southern Manchuria and the southern half of Sakhalin. The defeat helped spark the Revolution of 1905 and checked Russian expansion in East Asia.

  15. February Revolution: Nicholas II abdicates; republic proclaimed

    Three years of the First World War brought Russia huge losses, food shortages and anger at Tsar Nicholas II's government. In late February 1917 (March, New Style) strikes and bread riots in Petrograd turned into revolution when soldiers of the garrison joined the crowds. On 2 March (15 March) Nicholas abdicated, ending more than 300 years of Romanov rule. A Provisional Government took power alongside the workers' and soldiers' soviets, and in September proclaimed Russia a republic. The empire's collapse let Finland, Poland and other borderlands break away, before the Bolsheviks seized power in October.

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