Russian Empire

The Russian Empire was one of the largest empires in world history, a vast multiethnic state spanning Eastern Europe, the whole of northern Asia, and parts of Central Asia and the Caucasus.

It was formally proclaimed in 1721, when the Senate conferred the title of Emperor on Peter I (Peter the Great) following Russia's victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War, which secured access to the Baltic Sea and announced Russia's arrival as a major European power. Peter transformed the former Tsardom of Russia through sweeping modernisation, building a new capital at St. Petersburg, reorganising the army and administration along Western lines, and forcibly orienting the Russian elite toward European culture and technology. His successors continued the expansion. Catherine the Great, in the later eighteenth century, extended Russian territory dramatically into the Black Sea region at the expense of the Ottomans and into Poland through the partitions, while patronising the arts and Enlightenment ideas. The empire continued to grow through the conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia and the colonisation of Siberia, reaching across the Pacific into Alaska, which was sold to the United States in 1867. Russian society remained dominated by an autocratic tsar, a powerful Orthodox Church, a landed nobility, and a vast peasantry largely bound by serfdom until its abolition by Alexander II in 1861. Despite reforms, the empire struggled to reconcile autocratic rule with the pressures of industrialisation, nationalism among its many subject peoples, and demands for political change. Defeat in war, social unrest, and the upheaval of the 1905 Revolution exposed deep weaknesses. The catastrophic strains of the First World War proved fatal: in the February Revolution of 1917, amid food shortages and mass discontent, Emperor Nicholas II abdicated, ending the Romanov dynasty and the empire, which gave way first to a provisional government and then to Bolshevik revolution.

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