Russian Empire: A Visual History

The Russian Empire was proclaimed in 1721 when Peter the Great, fresh from beating Sweden, took the title Emperor. It inherited the Tsardom of Muscovy's already vast Siberian holdings and kept growing: into the Baltic, Poland, Ukraine and Crimea in the eighteenth century, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Pacific coast in the nineteenth. It was an autocracy sitting on top of a peasant society, and the strain of modernising while staying autocratic eventually broke it. Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the 1905 revolution and the catastrophe of World War I ended three centuries of Romanov rule in February 1917.

When it existed: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Russian Empire. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Territory of the Russian Empire

Approximate area, including Alaska until 1867 and Central Asian conquests after 1865.

Timeline of the Russian Empire

1. 1703
   Saint Petersburg foundedPeter's 'window on Europe'.
2. 1721
   Empire proclaimedPeter I takes the title Emperor after the Great Northern War.
3. 1762
   Catherine II seizes powerA coup deposes her husband Peter III.
4. 1783
   Crimea annexedRussia gains a Black Sea coastline.
5. 1795
   Third Partition of PolandThe Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ceases to exist.
6. 1812
   Napoleon invadesMoscow burns; the Grande Armee is destroyed in retreat.
7. 1825
   Decembrist revoltLiberal officers fail to block Nicholas I's accession.
8. 1853-1856
   Crimean WarDefeat by Britain, France and the Ottomans.
9. 1861
   Emancipation of the serfsAlexander II frees over 20 million people.
10. 1867
    Alaska soldTo the United States for 7.2 million dollars.
11. 1881
    Alexander II assassinatedKilled by a People's Will bomb in Saint Petersburg.
12. 1891
    Trans-Siberian Railway begunCompleted to Vladivostok in 1916.
13. 1905
    Bloody Sunday and revolutionNicholas II concedes a Duma.
14. 1914
    World War IRussia mobilises against Germany and Austria-Hungary.
15. 1917
    AbdicationThe February Revolution ends the monarchy.

Peter, Catherine and the making of a great power

Peter the Great dragged Russia toward Europe by force. He built a navy from nothing, founded Saint Petersburg on a Baltic swamp in 1703, made nobles shave their beards and put every landowner into state service. The Great Northern War against Sweden ended in 1721 with Russia as the dominant Baltic power and Peter as Emperor of All the Russias.

Catherine the Great (r. 1762-1796), a German princess who seized the throne from her husband, added the Crimea and the Black Sea coast after wars with the Ottomans and joined Prussia and Austria in wiping the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth off the map in three partitions. She corresponded with Voltaire while tightening serfdom on millions of peasants.

1812 and the gendarme of Europe

Napoleon's invasion of 1812 was the empire's defining trial. His Grande Armee of over 600,000 reached Moscow, found it burning and abandoned, and disintegrated on the winter retreat. Alexander I rode into Paris in 1814, and Russia emerged from the Congress of Vienna as the arbiter of the continent.

Under Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855) the empire became the 'gendarme of Europe', crushing revolutions in Poland and Hungary. The Crimean War of 1853-1856, in which Britain and France came to the Ottomans' aid, exposed how backward Russia's army, railways and industry had become. Defeat forced reform.

Reform, expansion and revolution

Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861, more than 20 million people, and pushed the empire deep into Central Asia (Tashkent 1865, Samarkand 1868, Khiva 1873) and to the Pacific, founding Vladivostok in 1860. He also sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. He was assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881, and his successors turned back to repression and Russification.

Rapid industrialisation under Sergei Witte in the 1890s built the Trans-Siberian Railway and a restless urban working class. Humiliating defeat by Japan in 1904-1905 sparked the 1905 revolution, forcing Nicholas II to grant a parliament, the Duma, which he then spent a decade undermining.

World War I and the end

Russia mobilised in 1914 to defend Serbia and suffered enormous losses at Tannenberg and in the 1915 retreat. By early 1917 the army was demoralised, cities were short of bread and the imperial family was discredited by the Rasputin scandal. Strikes in Petrograd in February 1917 turned into revolution when the garrison joined the crowds.

Nicholas II abdicated on 15 March 1917 (2 March in the old calendar) aboard his train at Pskov. A Provisional Government lasted eight months before Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power in October, and the Russian Civil War decided what would replace the empire: the Soviet Union, formally created in 1922.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Soviet Union (USSR) (1922 to 1991)
• Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569 to 1795)
• Ottoman Empire (1299 to 1922)
• Swedish Empire (1611 to 1721)
• Qing dynasty (1636 to 1912)
• Dzungar Khanate (1634 to 1758)

Wars of the same era and region

• Russian Civil War (1917 to 1922)
• World War I (1914 to 1918)
• French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792 to 1815)
• Crimean War (1853 to 1856)
• Great Northern War (1700 to 1721)
• Russo-Japanese War (1904 to 1905)
• Russo-Circassian War and Caucasian War (1763 to 1864)

10 surprising things about the Russian Empire

1. Peter the Great taxed beards. Nobles who insisted on keeping theirs had to carry a token proving they had paid.
2. The empire used the Julian calendar until 1918, so the 'October Revolution' happened in November by the rest of the world's reckoning.
3. Alaska was sold for about 2 cents an acre; critics called it 'Seward's Folly' after the US Secretary of State who bought it.
4. Catherine the Great was not Russian at all. She was born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst in Prussia and learned Russian as a teenager.
5. The 1897 census recorded over 100 languages spoken in the empire, and ethnic Russians were less than half the population.
6. Russia and Britain spent most of the nineteenth century in a cold war over Central Asia, the 'Great Game', without their armies ever meeting.
7. Fort Ross, a Russian settlement, operated in California until 1841, and Russian claims once reached as far south as Hawaii.
8. The Trans-Siberian Railway is still the longest railway line in the world at over 9,000 km.
9. Rasputin, the peasant faith healer close to the imperial family, survived poisoning and shooting before being drowned by aristocratic assassins in 1916.
10. The Romanovs ruled for exactly 304 years, from Michael's election in 1613 to Nicholas II's abdication in 1917.

Sources

• Russian Empire Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Russian Empire Wikipedia
• Emancipation reform of 1861 Wikipedia
• Purchase of Alaska, 1867 US Department of State, Office of the Historian
• Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (2000) Yale University Press
• Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy (1996) Jonathan Cape

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