Tsarist Russia

For the specific phases of Tsarist Russia, see Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire.

Tsarist Russia Царская Россия
1547–1917
Flags: Left (1696–1917) Right (1858–1896)
Motto: Съ Нами Богъ! "God is with us!"
Anthem: Боже, Царя храни! ("God Save the Tsar!"; 1833–1917)
Coat of arms Left (1667–1703) Right (1883–1917)
Russia in 1500      Russia in 1600      Russia in 1700      Russia in 1778      Russia in 1914      Lost in 1856–1914      Spheres of influence      Protectorates
Status	Imperial state
Capital	Moscow (1547–1712; 1728–1732) Saint Petersburg (1721–1728; 1732–1917)
Official languages	Russian
Recognized languages	Polish German Finnish Swedish
Religion (1897)	88.2% Christianity 71.3% Eastern Orthodox (official) 9.2% Catholic 7.7% Other Christian 7.1% Islam 4.2% Judaism 0.3% Buddhism 0.2% Others
Demonym	Russian
Government	Unitary absolute monarchy (1547–1906) Unitary parliamentary semi-constitutional monarchy (1906–1917) Provisional government (1917)
Tsar
• 1547–1584	Ivan IV (first)
• 1682–1721	Peter I (last)
Emperor
• 1721–1725	Peter I (first)
• 1894–1917	Nicholas II (last)
Chancellor/Prime Minister
• 1810–1812 (first)	Nikolai Rumyantsev
• 1917 (last)	Alexander Kerensky
Legislature	Boyar Duma (1547–1549; 1684–1711) Zemsky Sobor (1549–1684) Governing Senate (1721–1917)
• Upper house	State Council (1810–1917)
• Lower house	State Duma (1905–1917)
History
• Annexation of the Novgorodian Republic	January 14, 1478
• Proclamation of the Tsardom of Russia	January 16, 1547
• Livonian War	1558–1583
• Time of Troubles	1598–1613
• Polish–Russian War	1654–1667
• Great Northern War	1700–1721
• Proclamation of the Russian Empire	November 2, 1721
• French invasion of Russia	1812
• Crimean War	1853–1856
• Emancipation of the serfs	March 3, 1861
• First Revolution	1905–1907
• February Revolution	March 1917
• Republic proclaimed	September 14, 1917
Area
• Total	22,800,000 km2 (8,800,000 sq mi)
1584	5,100,000 km2 (2,000,000 sq mi)
1650	9,700,000 km2 (3,700,000 sq mi)
1725	15,000,000 km2 (5,800,000 sq mi)
1895	22,800,000 km2 (8,800,000 sq mi)
Population
• 1897	125,640,021
Currency	Russian ruble
Preceded by Succeeded by Grand Principality of Moscow Russian Republic

Tsarist Russia was a transcontinental imperial state that existed in Eurasia from 1547 to 1917, encompassing the latter stages of the Russian monarchy. It evolved from the Grand Principality of Moscow, or Muscovy, in the 16th century. Under it, Russia expanded to become the largest contemporary contiguous country and one of the largest empires in all of history, and it was a major player in international politics during its existence. The history of Tsarist Russia is divided between the Tsardom of Russia, when the Russian monarch used the title of Tsar, and the Russian Empire, when they used the title of Emperor; collectively in colloquial and historiographic discourse, the monarchs of this period are often simply referred to as Tsars.

The East Slavs had coalesced into the Kyivan Rus by the 10th century, however, in the 12th century, the area had collapsed into various de facto independent polities. Following the Mongol subjugation of the area in the 13th century, what would become Russia would be under the so-called "Tatar Yoke," or overlordship by the descendants of the Mongols. In the 15th century, Muscovy was able to become the predominant native Russian force in the area, and were able to throw off their Tatar overlords under Ivan III. As the Sovereign of all Russia, Ivan began to use intermittently use the title tsar, the rough Slavic equivalent to the title emperor, in 1484, partially to derive legitimacy from the Byzantine Empire, which had fallen only a few decades earlier. Though used in foreign correspondence, no Muscovite monarch would be crowned tsar until 1547, when Ivan III's grandson, Ivan IV, crowned himself Tsar of all Russia, forming the Tsardom of Russia.

Starting in the 16th century, Russia began a large expansion of its borders, primarily eastwards into Siberia. Between 1550 and 1700, Russia grew on average 35,000 square kilometres (14,000 sq mi) annually. Ivan IV, better known as Ivan the Terrible, would go on to layout many of the foundations of the imperial state, though afterwards, Russia collapsed into an era of instability that ended in the Rurikid Dynasty being replaced by the House of Romanov. During this era, Russia was in frequent conflict with Poland-Lithuania and Sweden, and was somewhat backwards compared to the rest of Europe, but this began to change at the dawn of the 18th century under Peter the Great, who modernized the country, won the Great Northern War against Sweden, and moved the capital to an ex-Swedish fort on the Neva River, forming the city of Saint Petersburg (renamed Petrograd in the state's final years). Under him, as part of his westernization process, he replaced the title Tsar with the title imperator, closer etymologically to the English emperor and similar terms in other Western European languages, thus forming the Russian Empire. Afterwards, the country emerged as one of the great powers of Europe. It participated in most great power conflicts during the 18th and 19th centuries, including the Napoleonic Wars where it played a major role in France's defeat via repelling its attempted invasion of the country in 1812. During this era, it also advanced into Central Asia, parts of China, the former Poland-Lithuania, the Caucasus, and briefly the New World.

Until the 18th century, the boyars, or highest-ranking Russian nobility dominated the country's political system. In part due to the influence from the Mongol invasions and subsequent rule, the state became heavily stratified between classes, with a high, downtrodden serf population. Most directly from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, the latter of whom destroyed the power base of the boyars, the state took a very autocratic direction, with power concentrated into the Tsar. In the mid-19th century, in part due to the Russian defeat in the Crimean War against Britain and France, as well as the Industrial Revolution, the state began to undergo a series of reforms in its last six decades, including the emancipation of the serfs and increasing industrialization. However, antagonism towards the Tsarist model began to ratchet up in the late 19th century, especially with the ascendency of Nicholas II to the throne. His reign saw Japan defeat Russia in a surprise upset war in 1905, which then precipitated a revolution that resulted in a formal, somewhat democratic legislature being adopted. During World War I, Russia proved largely unable to effectively manage its war effort against the German-led Central Powers, and compounded with simmering tensions over the 1905 revolution, as well as the poor quality of life during the conflict, led to Nicholas II being ousted in a revolution in February; subsequentially, a republic was declared. Disunity between the participants of the February Revolution would lead to the later October Revolution that triggered a civil war, ending with the establishment of the Soviet Union.

Terminology and definition

Monomakh's Cap, the crown used during the Tsardom of Russia

Replica of the Imperial crown of Russia, used for most of the period of the Russian Empire

Colloquially, Tsarist Russia typically refers to the period between 1547 and 1917, when Russia was headed by a monarch crowned with an imperial title. This began with Ivan the Terrible, who formally crowned himself as such in the former year. Ivan the Terrible used the title tsar, which was a Slavicized corruption of the word caesar, which is also the origin of the words used as the imperial title in languages such as German (Kaiser). The word caesar was derived from the Roman Empire, which provided post-antiquity Europeans with their understanding of what imperial titles and symbolism meant. Coming from Julius Caesar, who was considered in Roman times as being the first emperor, it was one of a myriad of titles used by the Roman emperors. However, since the Roman Empire was not a formal monarchy and in practice more akin to a military dictatorship, there was never a formal title, and other ones such as princeps or imperator were also used. The latter term became the dominant evolved into being the common form in the Latin-derived Romance languages, such as Spanish and Catalan (emperador), Portuguese (imperador), Romanian (împărat), Italian (imperatore), Occitan (emperaire), and French (empereur). Germanic languages such as the aforementioned German tended to use variants derived from caesar, such as Swedish (kejsare), Danish (kejser), Norwegian (keiser), Dutch (keizer), or Luxembourgish (kesser). Old English used the term cāser, which evolved into Middle English as kayser. After England was invaded by the Normans, the English language underwent a process of gallicization, with the Normans bringing their French-influenced language to Britain. Through the dialect of the new Norman nobility, the French-derived emperor eventually became predominant.

Throughout the Middle Ages, it was generally understood that there was one, universal empire in Christendom, the rightful inheritors of the ancient Roman imperial legacy. As the western and eastern churches began to split, this became the Holy Roman Empire in the west and the Byzantine Empire in the east. When the Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, the title of emperor in the east became vacant in the east. As the Ottoman Empire began gobbling up the South Slavic and Byzantine rump states in the Balkans and Anatolia, Russia became in essence the only major part of Eastern Orthodoxy not under effective foreign domination; as such, many began clamoring for the Grand Principality of Moscow, or Muscovy, which had emerged as the dominant force in Russia, to become the successor to Rome. Grand Prince Ivan III, who would later formally throw off the Tatar Yoke, married Sophia Palaiologina, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, through his brother Thomas, the despot of the since-conquered Byzantine rump state of Morea, in 1472. In 1484, he began using the title tsar in foreign correspondence, which was accompanied by increased usage of Byzantine imagery. For this reason, as well as the foundations of future tsarist autocracy under Ivan III, some date the start of Tsarist Russia to Ivan III's reign. Ivan's grandson, Ivan the Terrible, would be the first to be crowned Tsar of all Russia in 1547, with the documents of the coronation referring to his domain as the Tsardom of Russia; this is typically interpreted as the start of Tsarist Russia.

In the late 17th century, Peter the Great came to power in Russia. Peter was influenced and fascinated by Western Europe, and he sought to orient Russia towards the setting sun. His reign was marked by a series of westernization reforms that integrated Russia further into Europe. This included many stylistic changes, such as forcing Russian nobles to shave their beards to fit into contemporary Western fashion. As part of this, in 1721, Peter dropped the Slavic tsar, and replaced it with the word imperator, becoming the Imperator (Emperor) of Russia, forming the Russian Empire. In addition to wanting to appear more western, this was done to help facilitate the long running Russian attempt to have their imperial status legitimized by the west, including most notably from the Habsburg-run Holy Roman Empire. Although the Habsburgs had somewhat accepted the title tsar, they did it on the pretense that a tsar was of lower rank than an emperor. Although several European states immediately recognized the new title, the Austrian Habsburgs would not recognize this until 1742, in exchange for Russian neutrality (and eventually support) during the Austrian War of Succession. Despite the name change, in colloquial discourse, the term Tsar remained in use, even domestically, with Emperor largely only being used in formal diplomatic and governmental language; this has persisted until the present.

History

Background (9th century to 1480)

Main articles: Kievan Rus' and Tatar Yoke

The Kyivan Rus in 1054.

At the time of the Roman Empire, the Slavs were inhabiting the woods of current day European Russia. As the Germanic tribes began migrating into the Western Roman Empire, a series of ethnic migrations began in the lands they vacated. The Slavs, being the largest ethnic group directly eastward of the Germanic peoples, largely filled this void, invading large parts of Eastern Europe. The ones that moved into these lands became the West and South Slavs. The ones that remained would become the East Slavs.

In 862, according to tradition, the Varangian chief Rurik was invited by the Novgorodians to become their ruler. Rurik brought his fellow Varangians to these lands, who became known as the Rus. His successor, Oleg, then proceeded to unite the East Slavs into the Kyivan Rus, which would go on to be ruled by Rurik's descendants (the Rurikids). The Kyivan Rus would go on to become a large and powerful polity in High Medieval Europe. Stretching from the White to Black Seas at its peak in the 11th century under Yaroslav the Wise, it encompassed a multitude of ethnic groups, including East Slavs, Finns, and Norsemen, and was a major center of Eastern Orthodoxy, trade, and culture. During this time, the Prince of Kiev held the most power (hence the name Kievan Rus), becoming known as the Grand Prince, since he held precedence over the other East Slavic principalities. After the time of Yaroslav, the state entered into decline due to various factors such as changing trade routes and the decline of the Byzantine Empire. By the 12th century, it had effectively disintegrated into various de facto independent principalities, with the Grand Prince of Kiev only having nominal power over the other princes. The lack of central authority, compounded with the fact that the Kievan Rus was right on the doorstep of Asia, meant that it was all too ripe for conquest by the growing Mongol Empire in the 13th century.

The Mongols invaded the Kyivan Rus first in 1223 with the Battle of the Kalka River, followed by a full-scale invasion from 1236 to 1240 that completely overran the area. The Mongols were absolutely brutal in their subjugation of the East Slavs, sacking and razing cities such as Ryazan, Yaroslavl, Pereyaslavl, Vladimir, Kiev, and Chernigov. The invasion effectively ended the Kyivan Rus and initiated the era of the Tatar Yoke. The destruction caused large scale disruptions and decline in cultural, economic, and political development. Following the conquest, the Mongol's included the ex-Kyivan Rus in their Golden Horde administrative division, which later became independent following the partition of the empire in 1259. The East Slavic principalities remained, but as tributary states of the Mongols and their descendants known as the Tatars. Following the destruction of Kiev, the Princes of Vladimir became the new preeminent leaders among the East Slavs under the famous Alexander Nevsky, though by the end of the 13th century, the Principality of Vladimir had also undergone feudal fragmentation, and for the next few decades, preeminence over the East Slavic principalities was contested between the Princes of Moscow and the Princes of Tver, with the Khan of the Golden Horde often playing kingmaker. East Slavic geopolitics during this time period proved to be incredibly violent, Machiavellian, and unstable, with at least ten princes being executed during the reign of Özbeg Khan, who led the Golden Horde from 1313 to 1341. Özbeg gave preference to the Principality of Moscow over Tver, which gradually set the stage for the former (also known as Muscovy) to establish itself as the dominant East Slavic power as the Grand Principality of Moscow.

Vasily II, as illustrated in the Tsarsky titulyarnik (1672).

During the 14th century, the Pagan Lithuanians repeatedly invaded the Golden Horde, annexing the East Slavic lands in the west and south. The separation of these peoples, also aided by Poland in a joint war against the Kingdom of Ruthenia, would lead to a cultural and linguistic divergence that culminated in the ethnogenesis of the Ukrainians in the south and the Belarusians in the west. The remaining parts of the East Slavs (save for the Rusyns who were under Hungarian control) would evolve into the Russians. Over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, Muscovy was able to further its dominance amongst the Russian polities, in large part due to the weakening power of the Golden Horde, caused by internal succession crises and external invasions like the aforementioned Polono-Lithuanian invasions. After briefly regaining stability under the adept Khan Tokhtamysh, the Timurid invasions just before the turn of the 15th century undid his progress and relegated the Golden Horde to a rump state. The weakening of Tatar authority allowed Muscovy to centralize its power, but precipitous Tatar raids forced them away from formally ending tribute. Under Vasily I, Muscovy expanded greatly in regards to territory. His son, Vasily II, declared the Russian Orthodox Church to be autocephalous in 1448, following the Council of Florence, which attempted to annul the East-West Schism in a desperate Byzantine attempt to secure western aid as Ottoman conquest seemed increasingly likely. The union was wildly unpopular with most Eastern Orthodox Christians, and following the Ottoman seizure of Constantinople, the Russian Church's independence was effectively confirmed; the patriarchs of Constantinople would formally recognize it in 1589. Vasily II also began adopting the title "Sovereign of all Russia", positioning himself further as not just the ruler of Muscovy, but the Russian lands as well.

Independence of Russia and growth of the Grand Principality

See also: Ivan III of Russia and Grand Principality of Moscow

Ivan III, as depicted in the Tsarsky titulyarnik.

Vasily II was succeeded by his sun Ivan III. Ivan, nicknamed the great, would become the so-called gatherer of the Russian lands. Under his over four decade reign, Muscovy greatly expanded in size through conquest, purchase, inheritance and the seizure of lands from his dynastic relatives. He started with the Novgorodian Republic, which had supported Dmitry Shemyaka's attempts to overthrow his father in the Muscovite Civil War. The Muscovites had held sovereignty over Novgorod since their princes has inherited the title of Princes of Vladimir in the 14th century, who the Novgorodians were subject to. The Novgorodian support of Shemyaka, compounded with competition over resources such as furs in the lands of the republic, led to Muscovy increasingly encroaching on Novgorodian autonomy and territory in the late 15th century. Novgorod became divided between a pro-Muscovite and an anti-Muscovite factions. Those who favored Muscovy wished to see lessened disruption to Novgorodian trade and closer connections to the Grand Principality as the new center of Eastern Orthodoxy. Anti-Muscovite factions were worried that the wealth of the boyars, or highest ranking nobility, would flow to the Grand Prince and Muscovite boyars, and generally sided with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL). In 1470, the pro-GDL faction that was in charge of the republic questioned Muscovite authority, and negotiated with Lithuania to have Ivan's cousin, Mikhailo Olelkovich, be installed as Prince of Novgorod. Ivan responded by invading Novgorod in 1471, defeating the Novgorodians at the Battle of Shelon. Afterwards, the Novgorodian state's independence became increasingly limited, being effectively abolished by Ivan in 1478, following years of harassment and persecution of the remaining pro-Lithuanian boyars.

Ivan III overthrows the Mongol-Tatar yoke, breaking the image of the Khan and ordering the killing of the ambassadors. 1862 painting by Nikolay Shustov.

Novgorod's direct integration into Muscovy was succeeded by several more spats of annexations, as the remaining Russian principalities were absorbed directly into the Grand Principality. Having already annexed the Principality of Yaroslavl, after Shelon, the Principalities of Rostov, Tver, and Vyatka Land would all be integrated directly into the Muscovite domain by the end of the 15th century. Furthermore, Ivan increased Muscovite control over Pskov, various Finno-Urgic peoples such as the Yugra, as well as the frontiers with the GDL, where several local princes defected to Muscovy. He ended the practice of partible inheritance that had fueled the longstanding division of the East Slavic princes, allowing for Muscovy to remain a consolidated realm. Most importantly, in 1476, Ivan began to refuse paying tributes to the Golden Horde. When their Khan Ahmed attempted to invade in 1480 in response, Ivan famously confronted the Tatars on the banks of the Ugra River for a month until Ahmed withdrew, thus effectively solidifying Russian independence and the end of the Tatar Yoke.

Ivan III began to use the term tsar in 1484, as his newly formed Russian state began to take on a new form. With the Byzantine Empire gone, and with Muscovy no longer under Tatar domination, many in the Eastern Orthodox world began to look at it as the new center of the faith and the successors of the Byzantines. Ivan heavily leaned into this and various Byzantine aesthetics in general. He married Sophia Palaiologina, who was the son of the last Despot of the rump Byzantine state of Morea, Thomas Palaiologos; through this, he became the niece-in-law of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI. He combined the Roman double-headed eagle with Muscovy's coat of arms, Saint George slaying the dragon, which became the basis for the Russian coat of arms used until today. He attempted to make Moscow reminiscent of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, and his reign saw the expansion of the Moscow Kremlin into much of its current form. Ivan attempted to get his title of tsar accepted by Latin Europe, however, the degree to which this occurred was middling at best, and strongly rejected by the Austrian Habsburgs who ran the Holy Roman Empire, which had been interpreted in the west at the time as the true successor of the Roman Empire since 800. As part of this transformation, the foundations of an increasingly autocratic Russia were laid, with the Kyivan Russkaya Pravda being replaced by the Sudebnik of 1497, which brought capital and corporal punishment to Russia for the first time in its history as an organized civilization.

Following his death in 1505, Ivan was succeeded by his son Vasily III. Vasily III formally integrated Pskov and Ryazan during his reign, and he also seized Smolensk from Lithuania in a war. He also began pursuing campaigns over the remain Tatar polities on the southern and eastern frontiers, including the Crimean Khanate and, most notably, the Khanate of Kazan, with campaigns against the latter intensifying during his reign. He continued the practice of using the title tsar in foreign correspondence. Vasily III perished in 1533; his son and heir, Ivan, was only three years old. At the request of his father, the new Grand Prince was overseen by his mother, Elena Glinskaya, as regent until 1538, when she died, possibly as the result of poisoning. What followed next was a regency council dominated by various feuding boyar families who neglected the young Ivan; this is often seen as greatly influencing the actions of Ivan as monarch regent.

Ivan the Terrible, the Troubles, and expansion

Main article: Tsardom of Russia

See also: Ivan the Terrible, Time of Troubles, and Russian conquest of Siberia

1897 portrait of Ivan the Terrible by Viktor Vasnetsov

On January 16, 1547, at the age of 16, Ivan IV Vasilyevich was crowned Tsar of all Russia at the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin. As established in the coronation document, as well as numerous other official texts, this formally established the Tsardom of Russia. While Ivan III and Vasily III had intermittently used the title tsar, often in foreign correspondence, Ivan IV would be the first Russian monarch to be crowned Tsar, and as such the first Russian monarch to be crowned with any imperial title. Via crowning himself Tsar, Ivan sought to send a message after years of the country being controlled by various boyars that his rule in Russia would be challenged by none other. His nearly four decade long reign would see him become one of Russia's most important and famous monarchs, and his personality and ruling style would see him become nicknamed "Ivan the Terrible".

Ivan IV began his reign with a series of modernizing reforms, including a revised legal code in 1550, the establishment of the streltsy, or Russia's first standing army, and the Zemsky Sobor, a parliament of the feudal estates. He introduced the printing press to Russia and constructed the magnificent St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. In foreign policy, he reached out to Western Europeans for trade and diplomatic regions; in particular, he engaged with the English and their eventual queen, Elizabeth I, on a frequent basis, leading to the establishment of the English Muscovy Company. He conquered Kazan in 1552, and continued his conquest of the regional Tatars via the conquest of the Astrakhan Khanate shortly afterwards; these conquests solidified Russian control of the Volga region. He also won a war against the Ottomans in what would the first of many conflicts between the two realms.

In 1558, Ivan invaded Livonia, a region corresponding to current-day Estonia and Latvia, and at the time under a confederacy of various polities and estates. Ivan did this to increase Russian access to the Baltic Sea. This initiated the Livonian War, in which Russia faced a coalition of the Livonian Confederacy, Poland and Lithuania, Sweden, Denmark–Norway, and the Ottoman tributary state of Transylvania. Although Russia would initially fare militarily well in the quarter of a century long conflict, upon the election of the Transylvanian Prince Stephen Báthory as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1576 (both of which had been reconstituted into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth [PLC] in 1569), the coalition was able to eventually force Russia into submission. Far from gaining access to the Baltic, Russia instead lost all of its access to the sea. The exhaustion and defeat from the war worsened his already volatile mental state, which was further aided by treason by nobles and the death of his wife, Anastasia. In 1564, he announced his abdication and left Moscow, citing embezzlement and treason at the hands of the boyars. Fearing the wrath of Muscovites, the boyars begged Ivan to come back, who only did so under the condition that he be granted absolute power.

Upon his return, Ivan created the oprichnina, which was a separate territory, mostly concentrated in the former Novgorodian Republic, where he held exclusive power. In them were a force of around six thousand Oprichniki, the first secret police in Russian history. Ivan began aggressively persecuting the princely families of Russia, with executions, torture, tonsuring, and exile becoming prominent. The Orpichniki themselves enjoyed large privileges from Ivan, being loyal only to him and being granted large estates with essentially no restrictions on their behavior; they quickly devolved into rapaciousness, taking as much as they could from the peasants to the degree that many started fleeing their land, exacerbating Russia's economic crisis. Conditions worsened as plague gripped Russia in 1570. During it, Ivan suspected the Novgorodian nobility of planning to defect to the GDL; this was used as the pretext for the violent sack of the city by the Orpichniki. The raid permanently devastated the city, once one of the crown jewels of Russia, and it has not recovered since. As their Orpichniki's excesses grew and following their inability to effectively combat Crimean and Turkish forces in the south, they were abolished by Ivan in 1572.

The Poles surrender the Moscow Kremlin to Prince Pozharsky, by Ernst Lissner (1938)

Ivan IV died in 1584 at age 53. Although he laid the foundations for much of the Russian state, by the end of his reign, he had left Russia in somewhat poor shape. Russia was dealing with significant instability from his proscriptions, and significant economic issues, partially induced from himself, plagued the Tsardom. After his death, his son, Feodor I, took power, but he was disinterested in ruling, and the state was in effect administered by Boris Godunov, his brother-in-law. After Feodor's death, Godunov seized power, as Feodor produced no children, ending centuries of Rurikid rule over Russia. The ensuing instability from this would precipitate the Time of Troubles, where Russia was gripped by a succession crisis that triggered mass lawlessness and social crisis across the realm for fifteen years. The time period also saw serf revolts, a Swedish invasion, and crippling raids from the Crimean Khanate. Most humiliating of all, Poland–Lithuania launched an invasion of Russia in 1609, which was successful enough to have the PLC briefly hold the city of Moscow for a few years. In 1613, the Time of Troubles ended when the Zemsky Sobor elected Michael I as Tsar. He heralded from the House of Romanov, who would rule Tsarist Russia for the remainder of its existence and became one of the most influential and well known monarchical houses in history. Under his reign, Russia was able to narrowly secure its independence at the hands of the Swedes and Commonwealth.

The early Romanovs were weak rulers, and affairs continued to often be managed by other higher-ranking men. One of the most notable was Boris Morozov, who served as de facto regent during the reign of Tsar Alexei I, son of Michael. Morozov became known for his tyranny and rapaciousness, and he was eventually dismissed following the Muscovite Salt Riot in 1648. Despite this, tsarist autocracy managed to persist via the power of the Russian state bureaucracy, which expanded dramatically during this era. The Sobornoye Ulozheniye, a new legal code implemented in 1649, largely served to consolidate this system, as well as codify the power of the Russian nobility over the serfs. With peasants becoming increasingly unfree, the number of escapees began to swell in the 17th century, with many fleeing south to Little Russia, or current-day Ukraine, organizing themselves into the Cossacks; they would come to be an important force in early modern Eastern European politics and have held a lasting legacy on the culture of the East Slavs.

Yermak's Conquest of Siberia, 1895 painting by Vasily Surikov

Under the reign of Ivan the Terrible, Russia had begun to significantly expand eastward into Asia. Following Kazan's conquest, the Khanates of Sibir and Nogai pledged allegiance to Ivan, hoping to remain in his good graces and gain protection from rival powers on the Steppe. However, the Siberian Khan, Yadegar, failed to provide tribute, and as such Ivan did not intervene when he was fatally overthrown by Kuchum Khan, who openly refused to acknowledge Moscow's authority. Ivan granted the House of Stroganov authority to colonize the rich lands around the banks of the Kama River in 1558; continued Siberian raids compelled them to enlist the help of the Cossack Yermak Timofeyevich in 1577. Yermak began his famous conquest of Siberia in 1580, initiating the broader Russian conquest of the broader region of Siberia. Over the next several decades, Russian explorers and adventurers would prowl eastward, forming forts, cities, and routes, first going to the Ob, than the Irtysh, than the Yenisei, then the Lena, and then finally the Pacific Ocean by the middle of the 17th century. Between 1550 and 1700, Russia grew on average 35,000 square kilometres (14,000 sq mi) annually. The Cossack Semyon Dezhnev became the first to traverse the Bering Strait in 1648, and the first Russian to explore the New World. The Russians had also reached the Amur River by this time, putting them in contact with Qing China; after successive border conflicts, the two parties signed a treaty in 1689 that formally delineated the borders and made Russia the first country China ever recognized.

Throughout the 17th century, Russia continued to compete with the Scandinavians and Commonwealth for power in Eastern Europe. The Russians launched an invasion of the PLC in 1632, attempting to recapture Smolensk, which had been ceded to them during the prior war during the Time of Troubles. The attempt failed. Then, in the middle of the century, the Commonwealth underwent an era of severe internal turmoil and disunity that paved way for Swedish and Russian invasions of the Rzeczpospolita which in turn resulted in Russia regaining Smolensk, as well as acquiring Left-bank Ukraine, pushing Russia further into the Wild Fields. Compounded with the Swedish War, which saw Swedish control of Livonia and Estonia confirmed, this era of history, referred to as the Deluge, marked the decline of the PLC, which Russia would greatly benefit and personally accelerate.

Peter and Catharine the Great, linkage with the west, and continued growth

Main article: Russian Empire

See also: Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and French invasion of Russia

1717 portrait of Peter the Great by Jean-Marc Nattier

In 1676, Alexei died, and was succeeded by his sickly son Feodor III; after he died in 1682, Alexei's two other sons, Ivan V and Peter I, succeeded him under nominal co-rulership. Despite this, although Ivan was the more senior of the brothers, his mental inhibitions resulted in Peter eventually becoming the actual runner of the country, though during their minorities, his half-sister, the princess Sophia Alekseyevna exerted autocratic control as regent for the remainder of the 1680s, and then a series of nobles and his mother, Natalya, in the 1690s. Following his mother's passing in 1694, Peter became the effective sovereign of Russia, which would be formalized following his brother's death in 1696.

In his youth, Peter had been exposed to Western Europe via his interactions with western technology and people in Preobrazhenskoye, where Sophia banished him and his mother during her effective reign to limit their political influence. He regularly frequented Moscow's German Quarter, and garnered a Protestant understanding emphasizing competition and hard work. He viewed the Russian people as lazy, uncultured, unlearned, unintelligent, and borish, and saw it as his mission to bring them into the modern world through the autocratic power of the state. He implemented sweeping westernization efforts, targeting the economy, government, and society at large. He began intermarrying the Romanovs more with the Houses of Europe and forced Russian nobility to follow contemporary western fashion via acts such as the beard tax. He ruled with an iron fist, organizing Russia into a police state, and brutally suppressing revolts, most notably Bulavin Rebellion and Streltsy uprising. He continued the campaigns against the Ottomans, seizing the port city of Azov in 1696, resulting in Russian control of the mouth of the Don River.

To further Russia's integration with the west, he sought to re-establish Russian access to the Baltic Sea to gain a warm water port. Sweden, which had emerged in the 17th century as the preeminent power in Northern Europe under men like Gustavus Adolphus, still retained control of Ingria, Latvia, and Estonia, which prevented Baltic access. However, the Swedes had made many enemies by the dawn of the 18th century, and with the Swedish throne passing to the teenage Charles XII, a coalition of Poland–Lithuania, Denmark–Norway, and Russia were able to organize against Sweden and invade the Swedish Empire in 1700, using the pretence of Livonian nobles led by Johann Patkul asking for separation. However, the Swedes had underwent military reforms in the preceding decades, forming the so-called Caroleans, and the dashing, brilliant, and energetic Charles XII, Latinized as Carolus Rex, was able to hold off this multinational coalition for several years, forcing out Denmark–Norway and Poland–Lithuania in 1700 and 1706 respectively. In the meantime, Russian forces had managed to seize the Swedish fortress of Nyenschantz on the mouth of the Neva, where they founded the city of Saint Petersburg — named after Peter's eponymous patron saint, Peter — on May 27, 1703.

Victory in Poltava on 27 June 1709, by Alexander von Kotzebue (1862)

After the Dano-Norwegians and Polish-Lithuanians were forced out the conflict, Carolous Rex turned to Russia, where he launched his invasion in 1707. Peter pursued a policy of evading the Caroleans and scorched earth tactics. In what would become a famously familiar pattern in Russian history, the Swedes began to be bogged down by the Russian Winter, worsened by the fact that the particular winter of 1708/1709 was one of the coldest during the mini ice age. After being forced to turn to the rich fields of Ukraine, Carolous Rex was decisively defeated by the Russians at the Battle of Poltava on July 8, 1709. The catastrophic Swedish loss forced them on the defensive for the rest of what became known as the Great Northern War. The PLC, Denmark–Norway, and Saxony eventually re-entered the conflict, with the Hanoverians and Prussians also joining towards the end. The war would formally conclude with the 1721 Treaty of Nystad, following Carolus Rex's killing at the Siege of Fredriksten in 1718. Sweden ceded large parts of Karelia, and all of Ingria, Estonia, and Livonia to Russia. This formalized the control of Saint Petersburg, which officially became the Russian capital in 1712. In 1721, to further symbolize Russia's westernization, Peter replaces the Slavic title Tsar, with the Latin Imperator, becoming what is translated into English as Emperor of Russia and establishing the Russian Empire on November 2, 1721.

Dying in 1725, Peter the Great had left a great mark on the Russian imperial realm; however, his changes were not without controversy. Many boyars, whose powerbase he destroyed during his rule, were outraged by his reign, and there were several plots and attempts on his life, including by his son and one-time heir, who Peter tortured and executed in response. Following the ascension of Catherine I, these elements did their best to revert the Petrine changes. Under Peter's degenerate and indifferent grandson, Peter II, the capital was moved back to Moscow in 1728. However, when he died in 1730, his successor, Anna, moved it back to Saint Petersburg in 1732. Following her death in 1740, the throne nominally passed to the several month old Ivan VI, under the regency of his mother, Anna Leopoldovna. The Russian absorption of the Swedish territories in the eastern Baltic had resulted in the influx of Baltic German nobility, descendants of German settlers that had moved into the area during the Northern Crusades. Due to their more western nature, Peter the Great tended to give them favor, much to the chagrin of the native Russian nobility. Under Anna's regency, the Baltic Germans continued to be favored, comprising most of the regency council. This, compounded with broadly unpopular policies, led to the ethnic Russian nobility ousting Anna in 1741, replacing her with Elizabeth Petrovna and locking her and the year-old Ivan away in poor conditions for the rest of his life.

During the early 18th century, Russia continued being present in foreign affairs. Under Peter the Great, it had taken advantage of a weakening Safavid Persia to invade the empire's Caspian coast in the early 1720s. It continued to support the weakening of the PLC, enforcing the liberum veto device in the Sejm that mandated uniformity of the szlachta in decision-making; previously, although this rule technically existed, decisions in practice simply required a two-thirds supermajority. The inability to enact decision stemming from this would greatly weaken the Commonwealth, especially as members of the szlachta would be repeatedly bribed by foreign powers like Russia to purposely disrupt sessions. Furthermore, in the Polish War of Succession, Russian military might resulted in Augustus III being put on the throne, despite the fact that the Sejm had voted for Stanisław Leszczyński. In the Austrian War of Succession during the 1740s, Russia initially stayed neutral; Austria finally agreed to recognize the Russian monarchs as equals to the Holy Roman Empire in exchange for it and later Russian support.

Battle of Kunersdorf on 1 August 1759, by Alexander von Kotzebue (1848)

Russia's most important war during this era was the Seven Years' War, fought in Europe between 1756 and 1763. Russia was in an alliance with France and Austria, fighting against Great Britain and Prussia. The Russians invested much energy and effort into the war, facing off the Prussians under their mighty king, Frederick the Great. After years of conflict, they were on the verge of breaking the militaristic Prussian state, with the Russians even briefly occupying Berlin. Then, in 1762, Elizabeth perished. She was succeeded by her nephew, Peter III. Peter was a Prussophile who was more concerned with old territorial claims in Schleswig against Denmark–Norway than waging war with Prussia. In what became known as the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, he sued for peace with Prussia, not forcing them to cede any land and essentially making the Russian war effort worthless. The outrage from this, coupled with general broad domestic unpopularity, led to the Russian nobility conspiring to put his more thoughtful, devoted, and capable wife, Catherine, on the throne. Catherine II was put on the Russian throne on July 9. Peter would go into exile and die a week after under suspicious circumstances.

Coronation portrait of Catherine the Great, by Stefano Torelli

Catherine, an enlightened despot, became known for helping bring the Enlightenment into Russia, a process started by Elizabeth. She implemented many reforms, including an Enlightenment-based legal treatise named the Nakaz, and removed the beard tax. She also sponsored the first form of inoculation against smallpox, with millions of Russians being inoculated against it by the end of her reign. Under her reign, Russia continued to expand. The PLC was further weakened, being turned essentially into a Russian puppet state. In what became known as the Partitions of Poland, the Russians, Austrians, and Prussians teamed up together to territorially annex parts of the Commonwealth, first in 1772, then in 1793, and then finally in 1795, when all of the PLC was annexed by the three realms. The Crimean Khanate was annexed into Russia, forming the nucleus for New Russia, where millions of Slavs would go and settle in, becoming a new center of the Russian Empire. She also started campaigns and integrations against various Caucasian groups, most notably against the Circassians, leading to a century long war that would evolve into a genocide. Despite this, tensions between the nobility and serfs persisted, with her adopting more restrictive policies towards the latter and expanding serfdom into Ukraine; her reign would see the largest peasants' revolt in human history — led by a man who claimed to be Peter III and stated that he had only been ousted due to planning to end serfdom — in the mid-1770s.

In 1789, France erupted into revolution, with the Bourbons being violently ousted and the Kingdom of France becoming a constitutional monarchy and then a radical republic. The rapid developments in France prompted renegations of Enlightenment ideals across Europe, including in Russia, where Catherine began walking back on her enlightened despotism, banned many works, persecuting dissidents, and rolling back the improvements to the lives of the serfs. She was succeeded in 1796 by her son Paul, who, likely due to neglect from her, was a weak ruler who idolized his father Peter and angered the nobility with his reforms that improved the lives of the serfs; he was subsequentially ousted and assassinated by the nobility in 1801, being replaced with his son Alexander I. Alexander oversaw Russia's involvement in the Napoleonic Wars. After initially being forced to ally with Napoleon in 1807, the Russians reneged began to gradually renege on the alliance in the early 1810s, following economic disruptions caused by Napoleon's Continental System and the creation of the Napoleonic Polish client state of the Duchy of Warsaw. France launched an invasion of Russia in 1812, but much like with Sweden a century earlier, the Russians started off by evading the enemy and practicing scorched earth tactics. After being somewhat pyrrically defeated by France at the Battle of Borodino, the French briefly occupied Moscow, but the Russians refused to respond to requests of surrender, and Napoleon was forced to start withdrawing as the Russian winter set in, losing large chunks of his men and effectively starting the collapse of his imperial project.

1853 painting of the Decembrist revolt, Georg Wilhelm Timm

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Russia gained the lion's share of Poland, under a nominally separate and reconstituted Kingdom of Poland; in practice, this functioned as little more than a province of Russia. Russian control of Finland, acquired from Sweden in the Finnish War, was also confirmed, with the Russian Emperor becoming Grand Duke of Finland. In addition, Russia occupied parts of France during the first few years of the Bourbon Restoration. The French Revolution had arisen in the context of longstanding social issues and developments that had been unfolding in Europe during the Enlightenment, and the continental order afterwards was intensely reactionary and conservative in response to it and Napoleon; despite this, the core issues that led to the revolution remained present across Europe, including in Russia. In December 1825, following Alexander's death, a group of liberal army officers attempted to overthrow the tsarist autocracy what became eponymously as the Decembrist revolt; the poorly organized uprising failed and the leaders persecuted. The rebellion precipitated on the fact that Alexander's brother and presumptive heir, Konstantin Pavlovich, had privately renounced his claim to the throne, meaning that the younger brother Nicholas would come to power; the Decembrists planned to convince the rest of the army that Nicholas was fomenting a coup against Konstantin, but in spite of this confusion, he was still ultimately sworn in.

The revolt prompted the newly crowned Nicholas I to take a more reactionary position, and under his reign, crackdowns on schools and universities occurred, as well as the slowing down of the Petrine modernization program, and increased surveillance to combat what he viewed as threats to the Russian order. During the Spring of Nations in 1848, Nicholas intensified his persecution of liberalism, and sent armies to crush revolutionary waves in neighboring states, most notably Hungary. Divisions over Russia's orientation to the west, which have been long present in Russian history and had been growing since Peter the Great, resulted in the emergence during Nicholas I's tenure of a definitive Europhilic, liberal faction, and the so-called "Slavophilic", anti-western, ultraorthodox faction, who viewed Western Europe with contempt as decadent and weak. The former were embodied by men like Mikhail Bakunin, Alexander Herzen, and Nikolay Chernyshevsky, while the latter by figures such as Konstantin Aksakov, Aleksey Khomyakov, and Ivan Kireyevsky.

1828 depiction of Fort Ross, a Russian outpost in contemporary San Francisco.

The Russian Empire continued to expand outside of Europe during its lifetime. The Circassian War helped promulgate a long conquest of the whole Caucasus, with multiple wars being fought against the Ottomans, Qajar Persia, and several native Caucasian groups and polities, most notably the Caucasian Imamate. Forays into Central Asia had started since the early 18th century, when the Russians began to subjugate the Kazakh Khanate. Competition with the United Kingdom, based out of India, led to all of Central Asia being absorbed into the Russian Empire by the end of the 19th century. In the annexed lands of the PLC; namely Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine, large-scale Russification efforts often occurred, which, as the Age of Nationalism began, prompted backlash; in particular, the Poles would launch two major uprisings against Russian rule in the 19th century: one in 1830 and one in 1863. They were all brutally crushed and resulted in further clamping down on the Polish people, but nevertheless helped strengthen the resolve of the Polish nation. In the east, Russia took advantage of a declining Qing Dynasty embroiled in civil war to force the Amur Annexation, seizing control over large, valuable chunks of Manchuria, in these lands, the city of Vladivostok would be founded in 1860. After reaching the Bering Strait, the Russians began exploring and colonizing North America in the mid-18th century, acquiring control of the contemporary US state of Alaska, and establishing trading posts as far south as San Francisco.

Later years and fall

See also: Russian Revolution

Depiction of the Battle of Sinope, by Ivan Aivazovsky (1853)

As the Ottoman Empire began to seriously decline in the 19th century, the so-called "eastern question" emerged, in which the Great Powers of Europe sought to take advantage of the state of the empire to further their own geopolitical interests. Competition over this, most directly from the rights of Christians inside the Balkans and the Levant, would lead to the eruption of the Crimean War in 1853, in which Russia fought against a coalition of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom, and Sardinia-Piedmont. Since the triumph over Napoleon, Russia had been regarded as a formidable military threat on the continent, but the Crimean War ended in 1856 with a Russian loss, with them being forced in the Treaty of Paris to cede the Danube Delta and Southern Bessarabia to the Ottomans and their (now de facto independent) tributary state of Moldavia respectively. Towards the end of the conflict, Nicholas I died and was succeeded by Alexander II, his son. As calls for reform grew widespread, especially in the wake of the Russian defeat, Alexander II would begin to implement a series of reforms that would mark Tsarist Russia's last ditch attempt to save itself.

Reading of the 1861 Manifesto, by Grigoriy Myasoyedov

In 1861, Alexander II finally terminated the institution of serfdom in Russia, emancipating 23 million people. It majorly disrupted the power base of the Russian nobility, and prompted an inflow of free labor into the cities, promulgating the Russian Industrial Revolution and the growth of the middle class. However, the lives of the newly freed serfs remained grim; they were not gifted any land and were forced to purchase it under the best circumstances. They also had to pay a lifetime tax to compensate the obviously angered nobility. As such, revolutionary sentiment in Russia still mounted. Karl Marx had begun publishing his works only a decade prior, and Marxism soon began to take hold in Tsarist Russia. In 1881, Alexander II was assassinated by a bomb planted by a nihilist-socialist terrorist organization called the Narodnaya Volya. His strong and gigantic son, Alexander III, already disagreed with his father's liberalization, and the assassination only furthered this, with him reverting to Nicholas I's creed of Slavophilia and "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality". He reduced the power of the democratic zemstvos, or post-emancipation peasant councils. He remained committed to a form of Russian-centered Slavic nationalism, with intensified Russification campaigns that were also coupled with a sharp increase in antisemitism and pogroms. Alexander III also set up the Okhrana, a secret police force aimed at combating revolutionary activity; in 1887, they exposed and destroyed a follow-up plot by the Narodnaya Volya to assassinate him, and as part of their crackdown, arrested Aleksandr Ulyanov, the older brother of a certain Vladimir Lenin. Following Alexander III's sudden death in 1894, his son, Nicholas II, took power. He was wholly unprepared to rule, and his reign, starting with a disastrous stampede following his coronation that he was seen as ignoring, marked a sharp decline in the popularity of the tsarist system.

The construction (pictured) of the Trans-Siberian Railway helped link the large empire, and facilitated Russian activity in East Asia.

In foreign policy, Russia continued attacking the Ottoman Empire, in a stated attempt at liberating the various Eastern Orthodox Christians from their Muslim overlords as well as seizing Tsargrad, or Constantinople, for sentimental reasons as the former center of Eastern Orthodoxy, as well as to open up the Bosporus Strait for Russian vessels. Starting with the Serbian Revolution and Greek War of Independence, large scale rebellions of independence began emerging in the Ottoman Balkans, often being met with vicious and brutal retaliation. In 1877, the particularly savage crackdowns of a rebellion by Bosnian Serbs, as well as a revolt by ethnic Bulgarians promulgated a diplomatic crisis that resulted in Russia invading the Ottoman Empire in the most important Russo-Turkish War. Allied with Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, the Orthodox coalition triumphed over the Ottomans, nearly reaching Constantinople before the Royal Navy intimidated them into suing for peace. The resulting Treaty of San Stefano confirmed Serbian, Montenegrin, Romanian, and Bulgarian independence, set up autonomous areas in the remaining parts of the Ottoman Balkans, and saw cessions of land in Ottoman Armenia. Fearful of Russian influence, the other Great Powers convened at the Congress of Berlin, where the autonomous areas were scrapped, Russian gains were reduced, and Bulgaria was split into two autonomous areas of the Ottoman Empire; Austria-Hungary also occupied Bosnia. The partial reversion embittered Slavic nationalists while further intensifying revolutionary sentiment across the empire. During the American Civil War, Russia was notable for being the European power that most actively supported the Union, and after the war, Alaska, which was viewed as a resource sink that, in the wake of the Crimean War, could be seized by the British from neighboring Canada, was sold to the Americans. The two countries would ally with the other western powers to colonize parts of Qing China via the spheres of influence system, culminating in the Eight-Nation Alliance formed in 1900 that successfully countered the anti-Western Boxer Revolt. Russia began projecting its interests into Manchuria, Korea, and Mongolia, greatly aided by the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway that linked the two sides of the empire together.

The massacre of a group of demonstrators in St. Petersburg (pictured) led by Father Georgy Gapon initiated the First Russian Revolution in 1905.

Russia acquired Port Arthur on the Liaodong Peninsula from Qing China in 1900, as well as the railways connecting it to Russia proper. The rising Empire of Japan opposed Russia's presence in Manchuria, and went to war in 1904. It was widely assumed that Russia, a western country, would easily triumph over the oriental Japan, and Nicholas II initially hoped to use the Russo-Japanese War as a way to shore up public support. However, Russia lost the war spectacularly, and after a US-brokered peace treaty, was humiliated on the global stage. Discontent over this failure convinced many that the time was ripe to rise up. In the middle of the war, a revolution broke out, which ultimately resulted in Russia finally becoming a constitutional monarchy in 1906, with the first constitution in Russian history and a somewhat democratic legislature dubbed the State Duma. The new Duma proved to be a place where the political factionalism of Russian politics could be demonstrated. By the dawn of the 20th century, several political parties had emerged. There existed liberal-reformists such as the Octobrists and Kadets, who supported the constitutional monarchy, gradual reform, and the eventual phasing out of the nobility; though they wanted them to receive financial compensation in return. On the far-right, there were the Black Hundreds, who opposed any retreat of tsarist autocracy, and were noted for their extreme xenophobia, inciting pogroms and propagating Polonophobic, Ukrainophobic, and Cathophobic sentiment. On the left, there existed the Trudoviks, a moderate agrarian and democratic socialist party, as well as the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) and Social Democrats (RSDLP), who called for a communist revolution. Divisions emerged in the latter, where the now grown Lenin caused a split in the organization in 1903, creating the Mensheviks, led by Julius Martov, and the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin.

The Napoleonic Wars initiated 99 years of general peace on the European continent. As a result of the wars, the Holy Roman Empire was abolished, replaced at the end with the German Confederation. The 19th century saw German nationalism grow, culminating in the unification of Germany in 1871. The new German Empire proved to a powerful force, and especially under the aggressive foreign policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II, frightened many of the other Great Powers. Russia initially attempted to reduce tensions with Germany in 1887, under a treaty organized by the brilliant German statesman, Otto von Bismarck; following Wilhelm II's dismissal of Bismarck in 1890, the treaty was reneged upon, prompting Russia to ally with France in 1892. With France and the UK restarting cooperation in 1904, this meant that the three powers had begun to organize themselves into the Triple Entente against Germany by 1907. The Germans had allied in turn with Austria-Hungary and Italy, forming the Triple Alliance. When World War I erupted in 1914, following a crisis precipitated by the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne by a Serb nationalist, these alliances formed the basis for the Entente and Central Powers respectively.

Russian POWs following the Battle of Tannenberg

Russia was swept with nationalistic fervor, with Germanophobia swelling dramatically. The Baltic and Volga German minorities became viewed with immense public and governmental suspicion, while the city of Saint Petersburg was renamed to Petrograd to sound less German, now directly instead of indirectly being named after Peter the Great. Nearly five million troops were raised by Nicholas II at the onset of the war. The Russians started off with an initially successful invasion of Austrian Galicia, coupled with a major offensive into German East Prussia, ending with a defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg. German offensives into Poland resulted in eventual Russian withdrawal from it and Galicia, allowing a German occupation that resulted in the Kingdom of Poland switching from being a Russian province to a German client state. To the south, the Ottoman entry into the conflict prompted a Russian invasion of Armenia, which later precipitated the Turks commencing a genocide against the pro-Russian Armenians; the Russians also attempted to aid the western Entente in the failed Gallipoli campaign.

Crowd on the Nevsky Prospect in Saint Petersburg during the February Revolution.

By the middle of 1915, war-weariness among the Russian public was mounting, and the successful but bloody Brusilov offensive against Austria-Hungary in 1916 failed to alleviate concerns. Nicholas II and the Russian imperial family grew increasingly unpopular due to concerns of Germanophilia, their association with the flamboyant mystic Rasputin, and the declining living standards at the home front. With continued military failures on the Eastern Front, Nicholas II took personal command of the army, but this was to no avail, as his ineptitude failed to remedy the loses against the Central Powers. This propagated dissent and revolutionary sentiment in Russia. On March 8, 1917 (International Women's Day), a large crown of female workers organized together in a strike; the demonstrations swiftly grew into what became the February Revolution. The demonstrators, of liberal and Marxist leanings, demanded the overthrow of the emperor and a Russian withdrawal from the war. Facing mounting pressure, and defections from the military, Nicholas was forced to abdicate on March 16; his officers advised him to cede the throne to his heir and son, Alexei, but since he was only twelve and battling haemophilia, he instead offered it to his brother Michael. Michael was reluctant to rule, and only stated he would so so if offered to by the constitutional assembly that was to be eventually established. The new Russian Provisional Government became unpopular, due to continuing the war with the Central Powers and failing to address the standards of living; revolutionary and dissident activity as such continued. Although these groups generally had differing opinions, they increasingly became generally uniform in their republican leanings. Following an attempted coup by the right-wing general Lavr Kornilov in September, Alexander Kerensky, who chaired the provisional government, formally declared the creation of the Russian Republic on September 14; as such, the abdication of Nicholas marked the end of nearly four centuries of tsarist autocracy in Russia.

Boris Kustodiev's 1920 depiction of the October Revolution

The Russian Republic continued to be unstable, and as it became apparent that the February Revolution was just the first episode of the broader Russian Revolution, fighting between the Bolsheviks and the liberals erupted into the October Revolution on November 7. The incident initiated the Russian Civil War, in which the Bolsheviks fought against a broad, ideologically diverse, anti-Bolshevik coalition known as the Whites, fought across the former Russian Empire for control of it; the was buttressed by various independence movements that were furthered by the eventual defeat of the Central Powers, such as Finland, Poland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The war was marked by vicious atrocities from both the Whites and Bolsheviks, with the Russian imperial family, including Nicholas, being executed by a mob of Bolshevik soldiers on the night of July 16–17, 1918, possibly on the orders of Lenin. The war finally ended with the Bolsheviks seizing most of the former Tsarist Russia by the end of 1922, controlling Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Transcaucasia. These new Soviet republics signed a treaty of union together on December 29, and the following day on December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), better known as the Soviet Union, was declared, with Lenin as its leader.

Government

The Kremlin in Moscow, residence of the Tsars under the Tsardom of Russia

The Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg (right), residence of the Tsars under the Russian Empire.

As the tsarist system began to develop with the formation of the centralized Russian state in the late 15th century, a political system emerged characterized chiefly by the extraordinary dominance of the central Russian monarch. The government of tsarist Russia was an autocratic monarchy, first in practice and theory for most of its history, and then briefly only in practice during its final decade of existence. This form of governance, dubbed Tsarism, became the staple feature of Russia under the Tsars, and held influence on subsequent governments of Russia such as the Soviet Union.

Under the Kyivan Rus, appanages among the various principalities were common, contributing to the feudal disintegration that led to the eventual collapse of the state. Muscovy initially followed a similar system, but overtime, the appanage system was largely abolished to make way for a more centralized state, ending the era of Appanage Russia. This was a personal project of Ivan the Great, and by the end of his reign in 1505, only one appanage principality remained. Appanage princes were instead increasingly merged into the service class, becoming boyars.

The vast growth of Russia under Ivan necessitated the overhaul of the administrative system. Under him and his successor Vasily III, the origins of the Russian bureaucracy began to be seen with the establishment of the dyaki. The Russian bureaucracy continued to grow over the Tsardom period, growing greatly during the 17th century as a result of a string of weak rulers under the House of Romanov. By the time of Peter the Great, the chinovniki, as they were called following the codification of the Tsarist bureaucracy in 1722, grew to be a large and integral part of the state apparatus, controlling administrative and even judicial functions. The Tsarist bureaucracy proved to be very corrupt, and Peter and Catherine the Great attempted in various ways to make them more meritocratic. The system proved to be an adept method of social mobility throughout the 18th century, though reforms in the 19th century reduced this to limit the influx of rank careerists and commoners into the Russian nobility.

The Russian leadership generally adhered to a certain form of conservative-traditionalism, occasionally (and staring in the mid-19th century, increasingly) buttressed by reform. Much like how the Byzantine Empire's governance and institutions were imported into Russia in a more crude form, the Enlightenment came to Russia in a limited form as well, with Russia rejecting rationality and instead prioritizing a romantic narrative of a state oriented around the beliefs, values, and behavior of their distinctive people. In addition, "progress", as understood in the west, entailing the gradual liberation of peoples and betterment of the individual, was replaced in Russia with modernization meant to serve the existing structure. The notion of progress and development in service of autocracy frightened some; the 19th century Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen warned of a Russia that was like "Genghis Khan with a telegraph."

The capital of Russia before Peter the Great was Moscow, as the eponymous center of the Muscovite Principality; the Tsars resided in the city's Kremlin in various palaces. During the Petrine era and amid the Great Northern War, the capital was moved to a Swedish fortress seized by Russian forces named Nyenschantz at the mouth of the Neva, right on the Gulf of Finland. A new city was named after Peter's eponymous patron saint, Saint Peter. This new city, Saint Petersburg, officially became the capital in 1712. The city was rapidly built up using serf, slave, and Swedish POW labor from across the realm; up to 200,000 people died during the process. Backlash against the Petrine reforms on the part of the Russian nobility prompted the capital to be moved back to Moscow under Peter II in 1728; following his death in 1730, his successor, Anna, relocated the capital back to Saint Petersburg. Saint Petersburg would go on to surpass Moscow in population by the late 19th century, however, Moscow would remain an important symbolic, cultural, and administrative center as the nexus of the Russian state. The imperial family continued to use the city as a residence, expanding the Kremlin to include new palaces, including the Grand Kremlin Palace in 1849, which served as their principal Muscovite residence; after the end of Tsarist Russia, it would go on to house the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and now serves as the official workplace and residence of the Russian President. The official imperial residence in Saint Petersburg was the Winter Palace, built in its current form in 1762.

Tsar

Main articles: Tsar of all Russia and Emperor of Russia

See also: List of Russian monarchs

Several notable Tsars and a Tsarina. Clicking on any of the images will take you to their respective article.

From 1547 to 1917, Russia was formally governed by a Tsar, stylized from 1547 to 1721 as the Tsar of all Russia, and from 1721 to 1917 as the Emperor and Autocrat of all Russia. The name change of the title in 1721, as well as the accompanying change of the state name from Tsardom to Empire, was meant to further assert their imperial rank to Western Europeans. The feminine term for Tsar was Tsarina (officially Empress after 1721). The Russian Tsars ruled as autocratic monarchs.

Even after the capital was moved to Saint Petersburg in the 18th century, Russian Tsars were always coronated in Moscow, at the Kremlin's Dormition Cathedral. These coronations were huge affairs, with up to half a million people attending; festivities after the final coronation in 1896 precipitated one of the deadliest stampedes in history. Under the Tsars, starting from Ivan the Great, they took on imagery from the coronation of the Byzantine emperor to solidify their imperial status and claim to be the inheritors of the Byzantine legacy. From the Muscovite Prince Dmitry Donskoy in the mid-14th century to Peter the Great in the late 17th century, the monarch used Monomakh's Cap, a crown inspired by those of Central Asia. Following the Petrine reforms, a series of western-influenced diadems were used until the new Imperial crown of Russia was designed by the Swiss jewelers Georg Friedrich Ekart and Jérémie Pauzié in 1762 for the coronation of Catherine the Great.

The imperial claim originated from the fall of the Byzantine Empire. As the Byzantine Empire went into decline, many in the Eastern Orthodox world looked to the rising Muscovite Principality as being the new defenders of Eastern Orthodox Civilization and inheritors of the Roman imperial legacy. Under Ivan the Great, the term tsar, a Slavicized corruption of the word caesar, began to be used in 1484, mostly in foreign correspondence. The term had already been used commonly among other Slavic peoples to describe their greatest rulers, such as the Bulgarians for their first and second empires and the Serbs for their empire. Having already adopted the title of "Sovereign of all Russia", Ivan began using tsar to assert his connection to the Byzantine Empire, and the move was accompanied with increased Byzantophilic influences in Russia, such as the adoption of the double-headed eagle. Ivan's grandson, Ivan the Terrible, would become the first to be domestically crowned Tsar in 1547, establishing the Tsardom of Russia.

As Russia consolidated into a centralized state, Tsarism began to take hold. A new political system emerged centering the Grand Prince and later Tsar as the preeminent and dominant force in the realm, who held it as his personal patrimony. This was in part due to the influence of the Mongols, whose destructive force they levied against the East Slavs during their invasions in the 13th century, as well as the centuries of suzerainty under their descendants, resulted in a powerful, autocratic, and centralized state emerging to forcefully protect itself and organize society. The Tsar held full control of his realm and its people. He carried himself in a paternalistic manner, and was essentially unrestrained; there existed only two limits: that he be a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and after 1796, that he follow the Pauline Laws of succession. Although the First Russian Revolution in 1905 resulted in the last Tsar, Nicholas II, reluctantly creating an elected assembly, to reinforce his power and demonstrate that he was still supreme autocrat of Russia, the subsequent 1906 constitution essentially kept him as such, with him being able to dismiss the new State Duma at will.

In addition to Tsar or Emperor (and their respective feminine equivalents when appropriate), the gender-inverted forms of their titles would be used to refer to their spouses (since none of the Tsarina-regents had publicly documented spouses during their reigns, the consorts of Tsarist Russia were always Tsarina-consorts). Before the Petrine reforms, in accordance with Byzantine tradition, wives of the Tsars were often selected from bridal-shows, or beauty pageants where often poor but good-looking noblewoman would gather in an attempt to make the Tsar choose them. This closed Russia off from the benefits of royal intermarriage, such as alliances or reduction of tensions, but also prevented inbreeding and the influence of foreign royalty; the only foreign Tsarinas before Peter the Great was the Kabardian princess, Maria Temryukovna, who married Ivan the Terrible in 1561, as well as the Polish noblewoman Marina Mniszech, who married False Dmitry I for nine days in May 1606 until his murder during the Time of Troubles. As part of the Petrine reforms, the Tsars began intermarrying with European royalty; no consort following Peter's first wife, Eudoxia Lopukhina, would be of Russian extraction. In accordance with the westernization of Tsarist Russia during this era, Peter's reign saw the increased normalization of imperial mistresses and lovers; beforehand, stricter adherence to Eastern Orthodox piety rendered public displays of infidelity amongst the Tsars more taboo, though their remained numerous allegations of such during the Tsardom period. The legitimate sons and daughters of a Tsar would be given the title of tsarevich and tsarevna respectively until the Pauline Laws were enacted; following this, they were given the respective titles grand prince and grand princess. The exception was the heir apparent or presumptive, who would be granted the title tsesarevich.

Councils and legislatures

The Mariinsky Palace, where the State Council convened in the 20th century.

The Tauride Palace, the building at which the State Duma convened.

The Tsars were formally aided by a series of parliaments and councils subordinate to him. These were under various degrees of importance throughout the centuries. As an autocratic monarchy, these councils never seriously challenged the Tsar's power, until somewhat towards the end of Tsarist Russia. Before 1906, they generally consisted of high-ranking members in the estates of the realm.

Under the Grand Principality, the monarch was assisted by the boyar duma, an advisory council consisting of the boyars and okolnichies. Contemporarily referred to as simply "the boyars", or "the duma", it was also accompanied with the blizhnaya duma, or close duma, who maintained closer ties with the Tsar. Under Ivan the Terrible, the Zemsky Sobor, or a parliament of the three Russian estates: the nobility and bureaucracy, the high-ranking Eastern Orthodox clergymen (organized into the Holy Sobor), and representatives of the commoners (usually the bourgeoisie), was established. The Zemsky Sobor largely existed as a rubber-stamp organization, but did also address issues from the estates. It garnered great prominence during the Time of Troubles, where it elected new Tsars to help mend the crisis.

As absolutism grew into Europe, so did Russia, especially as the ascendent Romanovs entrenched themselves into power, and these councils and assemblies saw a contraction in their power. The 1654 Zermsky Sobor, held to ratify the agreement that made the Cossack Hetmanate a vassal of the Russian Tsar, would be the last for three decades, until the 1680s, when it was held to abolished the mestnichestvo hierarchal system and the Treaty of Perpetual Peace with the Commonwealth. As part of the Petrine reforms, absolutism increased, and the Zemsky Sobor was never summoned again by the dawn of Peter the Great's reign. In 1711, during the Great Northern War, he transferred the functions of the boyar duma to the newly created Governing Senate, based in Saint Petersburg, initially meant to help administer the state in Peter's absence while he was on campaign. The Procurator General chaired the Senate, which, despite being initially for wartime governance, was never dissolved following the conclusion of the war in 1721, becoming the highest judicial, administrative, and legislative body in Russia. It included a multitude of departments, such as cassation courts and a heraldry department. Under Alexander I, the State Council was established in 1810. As part of the reforms implemented by Mikhail Speransky, it was initially meant to be the upper chamber to the Senate, forming the basis for a proper Russian legislature, but it instead became the closest advisory body to the Tsar for the first century of its existence.

Session of the first Duma, 1906

In 1905, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to create a proper legislature following a domestic revolution. As part of this, the State Council, now the Imperial Council, was made into the upper chamber of the Russian legislature, with the newly created State Duma forming the lower chamber. The latter convened in the Tauride Palace, and consisted of around 500 legislators. Despite this concession, Nicholas II maintained his right as an "supreme autocrat" in the 1906 Russian constitution. The first Duma elections in that year brough a delegation consisting mainly of moderates; the session was unable to accomplish much and was quickly dismissed. At its end, Pyotr Stolypin was appointed prime minister, and he would implement an incredible degree of reform in Tsarist Russia's final years until his assassination in 1911. Elections in January 1907 saw more radical parties, such as the Social Democrats (RSDLP) and Socialist Revolutionaries (SR) gain seats; in the prior election, they had boycotted participation. Stolypin accused the SR and RSDLP of fomenting a violent revolution, and the session was dismissed for another round of elections in October. In violation of the 1906 constitution, rules and laws regarding elections were amended without the Duma's consent prior to the election to favor ethnically Russian landowners, businessman, and the nobility. The subsequent parliament had more cordial relations with the Tsar as a result, and a record 200 pieces of legislation were passed, becoming the only session to finish out its full five-year term in 1912. The subsequent session elected in that year grew largely irrelevant as World War I and the Russian Revolution kicked off, and the Duma was dissolved by one of its most prominent members, Alexander Kerensky, on October 6, 1917, under the newly established Russian Republic. It was to be replaced by the Provisional Council, which was to be subsequentially replaced by the Constituent Assembly, but the October Revolution and subsequent Russian Civil War prevented this.

The Senate and Synod Building housed both the Governing Senate and Most Holy Synod

The Russian Orthodox Church had various degrees of influence throughout the Tsarist era, gradually becoming weaker as time went on. The church declared autocephaly from Constantinople in 1448, following the widely unpopular Florentine Council that saw a flailing Byzantine Empire attempt to garner western support via mending the Great Schism. Constantinople formally recognized the Russian Church's autocephaly in 1589. In 1652, Nikon was elected Patriarch, and he began a series of wide-ranging reforms that saw the Russian Church become very powerful, often rivaling the Tsar Alexis in matters of state. In 1667, Alexis convened a synod in response, where Patriarch Nikon was deposed and reduced to being a simple monk; his liturgical reforms were preserved however, leading to a longstanding schism with the so-called Old Believers. Attempts by the Russian state to enforce the Nikonian reforms was accompanied by the ever-increasing involvement of the Tsarist government in the control of Russian's lives, often prompting violent resistance such as the Solovetsky Monastery uprising from 1668 to 1676 and the Moscow uprising of 1682. Under Peter the Great, who wanted to secularize Russia to a greater degree, the schism largely subsided, but he would also continue to reign in the power and independence of the church. Upon the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700, he refused to have another be elected. In 1721, he established the Most Holy Synod, the supreme organ of government of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was presided over by a lay procurator, representing the tsar, and consisted of the three metropolitans of Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Kiev, and, following the Russian conquest of the last Kartvelian kingdom in 1801, the Exarch of Kartvelia, as well as a number of bishops sitting in rotation. This effectively transformed the church into a stooge of the state until the February Revolution, when the patriarchy would be reestablished and the Most Holy Synod abolished.

Administrative divisions

Main article: History of the administrative division of Russia

First, second (uezd), and third (localities) level division map of Russia in 1897.

The gathering of the Russian lands in the late 15th century prompted reforms to the administrative structure of the Muscovite state. Ivan the Great and Vasily III largely chose nobles from their court to serve as provincial administrators, much like their predecessors, to help centralize Moscow's control over the disparate regions, however, local tradition remained strong, with Novgorod maintaining its own currency, while many regions retained independent measuring systems; internal trade barriers also remained common. Local governors typically served for a year or two before returning to Moscow. In times of great strife, a member of the Tsar's inner circle may be sent instead. Vasily III established the gorodovoy prikazchik under his tenure; these were the commandants of certain towns who headed its garrison, as well as managed food, weapons, and logistical supplies for local fortresses. They also undertook certain gubernatorial actions such as tax collection and maintaining order.

Under the Tsardom, Ivan the Terrible utilized various strategies to strengthen his control over the tsarist state, including his oprichnina, a secret police system, and anti-nobility proscriptions and laws. This destabilized Russia and precipitated the Time of Troubles, which saw Russia nearly collapse before being taken over by the Romanovs. Under the Romanovs, the issue of local administration was largely resolved; by the 1620s, most districts were run by town voevody who held financial, military, and judicial power. They reported to the prikazy, or central Muscovite offices. The guba, or police and self-governing zemsky assemblies that perviously operated with much autonomy, were placed under their control. The prikazy, which served as administrative departments, ballooned from 22 in 1613, to around 80 by the mid-17th century. Certain departments administered entire regions like Siberia, and the system was extensively bureaucratized.

In spite of this improvement, the prikazy system was still somewhat haphazard, and amidst the Great Northern War, their territorial divisions were dissolved and replaced by Peter the Great. In their place came the governates. Initially numbering eight, they were headed by a powerful governor handpicked by the Tsar, who assumed complete control over local tax generation, conscription, judicial appeals, and military defense. The prikazy system would later be formally abolished in 1718, when their offices were replaced by nine collegia. The number of governates would increase via division and territorial expansion; in 1914, towards the end of Tsarist Russia's existence, there would be eighty one. In addition, there were twenty oblasts, and one okrug; including the vassal/protectorate states of Bukhara, Khiva, and Tuva, this amounted to there being 105 administrative divisions in Russia. Additionally, various large areas like Poland and Finland were under formal personal union with Russia with varying levels of autonomy, and were headed by a governor-general. Several larger cities also had their own governing systems, with the chief of police serving as governor, and following the freeing of the serfs in 1861, the zemstvo emerged as a system of local governance; all in all though, Tsarist Russia was a unitary state.

Society

Culture

The Cathedral of Christ the Savior, built initially during the imperial era. Rebuilt in 2000 following its destruction by the Soviets to make way for a planned legislative chamber, it is an icon of Eastern Orthodoxy in Russia. Under the Tsars, the church penetrated into every facet of Russian society, and was a tool of state power.

The culture of Tsarist Russia was heavily influenced by the Byzantine inheritance, the climate and geography, and the legacy of the Tatar Yoke. The Eastern Orthodox Church had enormous influence on Russian society, controlling art, education, and moral law, especially prior to the Petrine reforms. Serving as the bedrock of society, the Church was a stooge of the broader Russian autocracy, and linked people with the Tsar, who was assumed to be divinely appointed to rule the Russian lands. The trauma from the Mongol conquest helped give way to a strong cultural aura of collectivism, as well as an emphasis on strong, central leadership that paved way for Tsarist autocracy and the severe social stratifications of Russian society that ultimately contributed to its demise.

Byzantine, Eastern Orthodox, and Slavic cultural influences helped shape the collective Russian identity over this time period, with Russia often being one of, if not the only independent Eastern Orthodox or Slavic countries during the Tsarist era. Russia's status as the main Slavic and Eastern Orthodox power reinforced the idea of it being the vanguard of Orthoslavic civilization, with the adoption of the title Tsar being used to reinforce the Byzantine connection, who previously held the title as the preeminent Eastern Orthodox state. The division of the East Slavs into lands under Russian control and the domains of the union of Poland and Lithuania, who would later form the Commonwealth, gave way to the development of an independent Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnocultural identity; as the Russians continued to understand these two emergent peoples as part of Russia, which was considered coextensive with the old identity of Rus, the irredentist concept of a triune Russian nation developed, arguing that what were now often called the Ruthenians were actually Russians, with Ukrainian and Belarusian just being a dialect of Russian and their national identity being the result of confusion from the separation and deliberate propagandization from the Commonwealth. As Ruthenia, or the lands of the Ukrainians and Belarusians, were largely absorbed into Russia following the Partitions of the Commonwealth, this narrative informed aggressive Russification policies in Ukraine and Belarus in an attempt to mend the unity of the East Slavs; backlash to this in the age of nationalism would lead to run-longing conflicts and disputes between the three peoples and their respective states that last until this day in both Belarus and Ukraine.

Russian propaganda booklet released in 1877 during the ongoing war with the Ottomans. Russia entered the war on a casus belli of saving the Christians of the Ottoman Empire, following the savage crushing of Bosnian Serb and Bulgarian revolts in the years prior.

The conception of Russia as a Slavic and Eastern Orthodox defender helped enforce its image as a defender of said peoples. From the 18th century onwards, starting with the Orlov revolt in Greece, Tsarist Russia continually intervened in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire as it entered into decline, seeking to liberate the South Slavic and Christian (often Eastern Orthodox) peoples under Turkish rule. Throughout this era, Russia supported the Serbian Revolution that led to an independent Serb state, as well as the Greek War of Independence; they also went to war with the Turks in the 1850s and 1870s over the oppression of Christians in the empire, the latter of which saw at least effective independence of Bulgaria and Romania. In the First Balkan War from 1912 to 1913, the Russians supported the Christian Balkan League that nearly drove the Ottomans out of Europe, and Russian support of Serbia following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand helped precipitate the events that initiated World War I. Even following the Petrine reforms, this conception of Russia helped distinguish it from the rest of Europe, and its association with cultural traits common in Eastern Europe helped pave the way for the notion of a Europe divided between East and West, as well as fueling the age-old conflict in Russia of its relationship with the rest of Western Civilization.

The top-down nature of Russian governance, compounded with the intense social stratification, rendered regional differences and importance in Russia to be of far smaller importance than other societies. The largest cultural differences, especially amongst ethnic Russians, often varied more by class than by region, in large part due to intermingling and interbreeding with foreigners on the part of the Russian nobility, be it the Tatars or Western Europeans. Russification policies throughout the state also limited this, especially during the Imperial era as the Tsars attempted to consolidate together the vast peoples of the empire.

Arts and literature

Tsar Ivan III assigns Aristotle Fioravanti an order for coinage in 1479, painting by Pyotr Basin (19th century)

By the 15th century, a distinct form of painting and architecture had emerged in Muscovy, dubbed eponymously the Moscow School. Coming from the gradual integration of various styles native to individual Russian principalities as Muscovy consolidated, it developed throughout the century, being buttressed by the wider Renaissance as Italian artists moved to Russia and spread knowledge of the cultural revolution underway in their homeland. Described as "cooler" and "silvery" compared to the warmer tones of Novgorodian art, the school was exemplified by figures such as Andrei Rublev, Dionisius, and the Italian Aristotele Fioravanti. Works exemplified by the school include the first's icon, The Trinity, and the Dormition Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin.

Under Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible, expansive construction works were undertaken in Moscow in an attempt to make it one of the most splendid cities on Earth, ala the grandeur of Constantinople, who they furthered their claim to by formally adopting the title of tsar, with Ivan the Terrible crowing himself Tsar and establishing the Russian Tsardom in 1547. The Kremlin was significantly expanded and renovated by Ivan the Great, with works such as the Spasskaya Tower, Palace of Facets, and Ivan the Great Bell Tower being built. Saint Basil's Cathedral began construction in 1555 just outside the Kremlin under Ivan the Terrible, and would be completed with its colors in 1683, becoming arguably Russia's most famous landmark and a hallmark of Russian Renaissance architecture.

1667 portrait of Patriarch Nikon. His reforms initiated a move towards more westernized icon paintings, though this was rejected by the Old Believers.

Russian architecture and painting remained distinct from that of Western Europe well into the 17th century. Russian art for decades during the early modern era missed out on many of the developments unfolding in the western artistic tradition. The Russians continued the practice of having art largely uphold preexisting artistic traditions, rather than prioritizing personal creativity and ownership of work, as had begun to occur in the west during the Late Middle Ages. This began to shift with Simon Ushakov, a 17th-century icon painter who undertook influences from both Catholic and Protestant Europe. The reforms of Patriarch Nikon to the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-17th century also saw reforms to icon painting, enabling greater western influence, though the raskol meant that this was rejected by the Old Believers, who continued icon painting in the traditional manner. Before Peter the Great, the last major development in Russian icon painting was the Stroganov school, or the style prominent in the 16th and 17th centuries that thrived under the patronage of the merchant House of Stroganov.

The Petrine reforms saw the importation of greater western influences into Russia, as Peter the Great sought to link Russia to the rest of the continent. As part of this, he moved the capital to Saint Petersburg in 1712, having seized the area from the Swedes in the Great Northern War. Western Baroque influences had already arrived in Tsarist Russia by the end of the 17th century, with the Church of the Intercession at Fili, built by the House of Naryshkin in 1689, ushering in a unique Russian Baroque style. Under Peter the Great, Baroque architecture continued to proliferate inside what was becoming the Russian Empire, under a style that derived more from Dutch and Scandinavian influences. The new capital of Saint Petersburg, which was built by a collection of peasants, slaves, and Swedish POWs, as well as had construction overseen by western men such as the Swiss architect Domenico Trezzini, the new city on the mouth of the Neva in the Gulf of Finland took inspiration in its urban design from Amsterdam and Versailles, and became an epitome of Baroque architecture. Some notable buildings from this are the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral and Alexander Nevskii Monastery, both of which show marked departures from earlier Russian ecclesiastic architecture, as well as the original new primary imperial palace, the Peterhof, all designed by Trezzini. He also designed the Winter Palace in an originally modest form; over the next few decades, it would be renovated and expanded to become the main imperial palace and an icon of the city and Tsarist autocracy. Western influence would continue under Catherine the Great and Alexander I, who both helped import Neoclassism and the Empire style to Russia.

The lubok, or a sort of popular print depicting common narratives and simplistic graphics, garnered prominence in the 17th century, and remained common for the rest of the state's history. As western influence increased, Russian illustration became more westernized as well. The Russian Academy of Arts was founded in 1757 to increase the prominence of Russian artists on the global stage. Russian painting from the 18th century onwards took influences from and embraced Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Realism.

Symeon of Polotsk

In the 14th century, South Slavic clerks revised Church Slavonic to align more with the original Greek texts. This revised Church Slavonic became the literary language of Muscovite Russia. The Bulgarian-born Metropolitan of Kiev, Cyprian, helped make Moscow the new center of Russian culture by writing, translating texts, and aligning Russian religious practice with those of the Byzantines. The fall of Constantinople and subsequent claim to the Roman legacy by Moscow helped initiate a world of literature justifying said claims, such as Nestor Iskander's Tale on the Taking of Tsargrad in the late 15th century, as well as the The Tale of the Princes of Vladimir, authored in the early 16th century by Dmitry Gerasimov, Pachomius the Serb, or possibly someone else. 16th century Russian literature was largely dominated by state-control, with the written word being used to reinforce Tsarist supremacy; following the Time of Troubles around the turn of the 17th century however, control floundered as the instability weakened central authority. This shift began with men like Avraamy Palitsyn, who was known for his complex characters and story arcs. Western influence began creeping in in the late 17th century, as Tsar Alexis sought to import Baroque writing to his court and as members from the Kiev Academy brough with them Polish-influenced texts to Russia. Men like the Belarusian Symeon of Polotsk, as well as Demetrius of Rostov are all examples of Baroque writers from this era.

In the 18th century, Russian literature was influenced by the Petrine reforms and the broader Enlightenment raging across Europe. Early writers such as Antiochus Kantemir, Alexander Sumarokov, and Mikhail Lomonosov, defined Russian literature for much of the 18th century, often extolling Peter the Great's legacy as a tribute to lifting Russia out of its perceived backwardness. Under Catherine the Great, literature took a more controversial and political tone as the Age of Revolution kicked in; the author Alexander Radishchev regularly lauded the French Revolution and illustrated the brutal realities of Russian serfdom, prompting Catherine to force him into Siberian exile and destroy much of his work. The 19th century is known as the Golden Age of Russian literature, and featured great men such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Tyutchev, Vladimir Odoyevsky, and Konstantin Batyushkov. Many of these fellows wrote for the mid-19th century Russian magazine Sovremennik.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, one of the most acclaimed and famous Russian composers

Classical music came to Russia under the Russian Empire, with secular and religious folks song predominating during the Tsardom era. Russian classical music seriously took off in the 19th century, as new composers combined Russian folk with western influenced traditions. A group dubbed the Mighty Handful, consisting of César Cui, Alexander Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mily Balakirev held large sway over Russian music between 1856 and 1870. They were responsible for works such as Scheherazade, Boris Godunov, and The Snow Maiden. They were often influenced by the emerging Russian operatic tradition, itself undergoing a golden age under men such as Stepan Davydov, Alexander Dargomyzhsky, and Anton Rubinstein. The year 1859 saw the founding of the Russian Musical Society (RMS), often presented as the rival of the Mighty Handful. The RMS' most famous member, and arguably the most famous Russian composer in history, was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who produced works such as Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, and 1812 Overture.

In the Belle Époque, as realism and modernism took hold in Russia and as anti-Tsarist sentiment began to mount, the Russian government attempted to crack down on Russian artists, often through the state-run Bureau of Censorship. Despite this, architecture, painting, music, and literature continued to flourish, often containing serious themes of social critique. The Peredvizhniki were a group of Russian painters who protested the restrictions of the Imperial Academy of Arts and left to form a realist collective active during the fin de siècle. The group consisted of men such as Ivan Kramskoi, Vasily Polenov, and Ilya Repin. On the musical front, Russian music was dominated by figures such as Feodor Chaliapin, Alexander Scriabin, and Igor Stravinsky. Throughout the 19th century, eclecticist architecture, often of a revivalist sense and incorporating Byzantine architecture, became common, and the decades preceding World War I saw the rise of Art Nouveau and Neoclassical Revival. The Silver Age of Russian literature consisted of the final developments of Russian literature during the Tsarist era, seeing the rise of Russian Symbolism and an influx of writers of peasant origin following the emancipation of the serfs. Following the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, the new Soviet Union subsumed the developments of Russian culture under the Tsars, but transformed it to meet their strict Communist, anti-religious, anti-capitalist, and anti-monarchical ideology, often using even more state control to enforce it.

Galleries

Architecture

• Selected works of Tsarist era Russian architecture
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  Dormition Cathedral, Moscow (1479)
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  Church of the Deposition of the Robe (1485)
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  Ivan the Great Bell Tower (1508)
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  Spasskaya Tower (1491) and Saint Basil's Cathedral (1561 [completed with colors in 1683])
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  Rostov Kremlin (16th-17th centuries)
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  Kazan Cathedral, Moscow (originally constructed in 1625, destroyed by the Soviets under the orders of Joseph Stalin in 1936, reconstructed in 1993)
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  New Jerusalem Monastery (1656)
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  Church of the Intercession at Fili (1694)
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  Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg (1712)
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  Alexander Nevsky Lavra (1713)
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  Oranienbaum (1727)
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  Hermitage Museum complex (18th century), including the Winter Palace (originally constructed in 1711, built in current form in 1762)
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  Main Admiralty Building (built initially in 1706, rebuilt in current form in 1823)
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  Saint Isaac's Cathedral (1858)
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  New Michael Palace (1862)
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  State Historical Museum (1872)
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  Eliseyev Emporium (1903)
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  Singer House (1904)
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  Moscow Yaroslavsky railway station (originally built in 1904)
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  Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, Petergof (1905)
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  Church of the Savior on Blood (1907)
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  Benois House (1911)
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  Wood carved Art Nouveau building, Gorokhovets, Vladimir Oblast
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  Wood carved Art Nouveau building, Rostov, Yaroslavl Oblast
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  Saint Sophia Cathedral, Harbin, China (1932). Harbin had a large Russian population, especially White émigrés.

Music

• Selected works of Tsarist era Russian music
• "The Song of the Volga Boatmen", a traditional Russian folk song collected by Mily Balakirev in 1866. Performance by Feodor Koenemann in 1928.
• Contemporary rendition of "The Song of the Volga Boatmen" by Kevin Macleod
• Elvira's aria from Le faucon, by Dmitry Bortniansky (performed by Oksana Petrykova)
• "Flight of the Bumblebee", by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Performed by the US Army Band.
• "The Old Castle" from Pictures at an Exhibition, by Modest Mussorgsky. Performed by David Hernando Vitores.
• "March" from Prince Igor, by Alexander Borodin. 1913 performance by the Berlin State Opera.
• Chopin Suite, Op. 11 – Mazurka, by Mily Balakirev. Performed by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
• 1812 Overture, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Performed by the US Marine Band.
• Swan Lake Op.20 - Act II, Tchaikovsky.
• Swan Lake Op.20 No.13. Tchaikovsky.
• Waltz of the Flowers, from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker. By US Army Band.
• Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky
• Russian Dance from The Nutcracker, by Tchaikovsky. Conducted by Philip Milman and funded by jschlatt and Ludwig Ahgren.

Painting

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  Trinity, Andrei Rublev (early 15th century).
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  Triptych with the images of the "Annunciation", "Trinity" and "Presentation" (end of 17th century)
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  Koren Picture-Bible (1692–1696). Lubok
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  Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, Ilya Repin, 1885
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  Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Ilya Repin, 1891

Social stratification

See also: Social estates in the Russian Empire

Tsarist Russia was defined by its extremely rigid social order; among the most so in European history. The stratification of Russian society was unique in how much it was legally dictated, with various ordinances over the centuries explicitly defining the manner of the social order, unlike the comparably more informal class systems elsewhere in Europe. Additionally, this stratification was explicitly tied to state service. From the closing years of the Grand Principality to the Russian Revolution, Russian society was generally organized around a massive, often unfree and dispossessed peasantry, a tiny noble elite, and a weak middle-tier of persons.

Under the Kyivan Rus, a more meritocratic system was in place. Although still largely stratified, the Kievan Rus maintained a greater degree of social mobility than what was to succeed it in post-Mongol Russia, and also had a stronger merchant class. The annihilation of the pre-existing, largely aristocratic social orders of the East Slavs by the Mongols, and its subsequent replacement during the Tatar Yoke with suzerainty towards the Khan, compounded with the trauma response from the sudden destructive wave brought by the Mongols, and the shift of feudalism away from Western to Eastern Europe during the Early Modern Period, led to a more entrenched social order and the increased concentration of power into the Tsar, and where service to the state was the primary legitimizing force of elite status, unlike in Western Europe where nobility was inbounded with certain contractual obligations and hereditary rights that theoretically made the royal monarch a first among equals.

Russian Nobility

Main article: Russian nobility

Appearance of Catherine II, by Alexandre Benois, 1912 painting showing 18th century Russian nobility

Beneath the Tsar were the Russian nobility. Comprising 1.38% of the Russian population in 1914, they traced their origins to the time of the Kievan Rus, initially through the boyars, who were an established force at the time of the polity's founding in the 9th century. The boyars in Russia dominated Russian political and military life throughout the Tsardom, controlling vast estates worked by serfs and exercising power via the Boyar Duma, through which they advised the Tsar. The preeminence of the boyars made them a natural target of the Tsar, and going as far back as Ivan the Great, there were efforts to limit and curtail their power and influence. Under Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century, they were subjected to increasingly sustained assault, with the oprichnina targeting them extensively, with mass executions, land confiscations, and exile becoming prominent. The mestnichestvo, used to govern precedence in hereditary rank, was terminated by Feodor III in 1682, with the convoluted network of ancestral records used to inform the system being famously burned to prevent feuding between noble families. Replaced with the purely symbolic Velvet Book, the abolition of the system removed one of the last formal guarantees of boyar privilege.

The Petrine reforms saw the complete destruction of the boyars as a serious political force, enabling Peter to govern more as he saw fit and more effectively embark upon westernizing Russia. The Boyar Duma was dissolved during this period, replaced by advisors largely imported from Western Europe, while the boyars were subjected, largely against their will, to cultural and sociopolitical westernization, which they had long opposed. Peter reorganized the Russian nobility in 1722, with the Table of Ranks, placing them, as well as the broader Russian elite, into a single hierarchy of fourteen civil, military, and courtly ranks each. Via the Table of Ranks, nobility could now be earned via service, with rank 14 and 8 in the military and civil rank system conferring hereditary nobility. This new meritocratic system created a new class of service nobleman who usurped the boyars as the predominant elite class.

The nobility's position got significantly strengthened throughout the 18th century as successive Tsars made major concessions to them to elicit support. In 1762, Peter III issued the Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility, which reversed the Petrine principle of mandated noble service; this was followed with the 1785 Charter to the Gentry under Catherine the Great, which resulted in the expansion of noble privileges, such as tax exemptions, not receiving corporal punishment, freedom from compulsory service, and fully property rights over their serfs and estate. The Russian nobility at the dawn of the 19th century was very heterogeneous. The most elite nobility consisted of a few hundred wealthy magnate families, possessing tens of thousands of serfs and sprawling estates. They were above a middle-tier of provincial gentry, who were responsible for local administration, who in turn were above a large class of serfless petty nobility who in practice where no better off than prosperous peasantry.

The 18th century privileges created a peculiar situation in which the Tsarist autocracy had granted Russian nobles a level of freedom that had not been greater, but level of political influence that was preciously little. Throughout the 19th century, the nobility began to seriously struggle financially, with indebtedness running rampant. By 1861, the majority of serf-owning estates were mortgaged to state credit institutions, while the subsequent emancipation of the serfs did not aid matters. The latter half of the 19th century saw a prolonged decline of the landowning nobility as a result.

The Serfdom

Main article: Serfdom in Russia

At harvest time, by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, 1909 (Yaroslavl Governorate)

The Russian serfdom composed of roughly 80 to 90% of the Tsarist state's population prior to the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Comprising the overwhelming majority of Russia's population, they too were subdivided into various inner stratas. There existed krepostnye krestiane, or privately owned peasantry controlled by the landed nobility, as well as the gosudarstvennye krestiane, or state peasantry, with obligations to the crown and lived on crown lands. The latter were generally more well off than the former, enjoying in practice more freedom to their subjugation being more distant, as well as having more land, but were nonetheless still burdened by taxation and obligations.

During the Middle Ages, the state of peasantry varied throughout Europe, but generally, serfdom predominated in the west while the average peasant in the east was free. Following the economic and social shifts caused by the Black Death in the west and the increasing prominence of the cities in that part of Europe in the early modern era, serfdom shifted to the east as the rising urbanized populous of Western Europe demanded a surplus of food to make up for the individuals leaving the farm. In Russia, this occurred. Before the Mongol conquest, the Kievan Rus was fairly economically prosperous, with extensive trade networks and free peasantry; however, the Mongols destroyed the economic base of the region and their tributary system of governance applied to the regional peasantry, and percolated downwards to the nobility. All these factors amplified the spread of serfdom eastwards into Russia by the 16th century.

From the 16th century onwards, the conditions of the serfdom would deteriorate increasingly. The Sobornoye Ulozheniye of 1649 permanently bound serfs to their lords and made their status hereditary; it also terminated the statute of limitations on the recapture of runways. Overtime, their legal personhood was gradually eroded institutionally. Lords gained the power to sell them without land, inflict corporal punishment without recourse, exile them to Siberia, and interfere in their personal lives. It was common for Russian lords to sexually abuse their female serfs, with many keeping a company of them in a haremesque manner and prostitute them in brothels. By the dawn of the 18th century, the practical distinction between a slave and a serf in Russian society was narrow, with many historians comparing the institution to that of the contemporary slavery in the New World. Legally, the primary distinction was that lords could not formally kill their slaves, though in practice, this was rarely enforced.

The Bargain, by Nikolai Nevrev (1866), depicting two landowners haggling over the price of a serf girl

Serfs in Russia fulfilled their obligations via obrok and barshchina. The former was a monetary payment of some sort, while the latter was a form of corvée labor, often three days a week on the lord's land. Obrok was more common in northern and central Russia, which were overall less fertile and where as such peasant incomes were typically supplemented with seasonal urban work and cottage industry. Basrschina was more common in the fertile south and west, which enabled a life fully on the fields. Siberia, due to its distance and climate, never saw widespread establishment of serf labor as an institution.

The oppression of the Russian serfdom led to frequent resistance, with peasant revolts remaining common in Russian history. The most notorious of these was the revolt in the 1770s led by Yemelyan Pugachev, a peasant leader who claimed to be the overthrown Peter III, husband of the then Tsar Catherine the Great. Pugachev alleged that Peter III had been overthrown since he was planning on liberating the serfs, leading to the Russian nobility conspiring to depose him and install Catherine on the throne. Such a tactic was not new in Tsarist history, with many of the False Dmitries, who claimed to be the assassinated Tsarevich, Dmitry of Uglich, during the Time of Troubles also utilizing similar narratives, with that particular period seeing widespread serf revolts such as the Uprising of Bolotnikov. In fact, Pugachev was not even the only impersonator of Peter III. This was often predicated on the belief that the Tsars themselves were not actually responsible for their misgivings and were actually attempting to aid them, but that the nobility were conspiring to impede their efforts; this belief has become known as the "Good tsar, bad boyars" phenomenon and has become a byword for attempting to ascribe blame not onto a central person by their associates. Serfs also resisted via arson, feigning illness, fleeing, and deliberate sabotage.

By the 19th century, serfdom was becoming a greater drag on Russia as a whole. Under the Tsar Alexander II, a period of reform began, hallmarked by the serf's emancipation in 1861. Although the peasantry were now free, they were still left in a precarious predicament; to compensate the nobility, the resulting land agreements were unfavorable to them and had to spend the next four decades paying their ex-lords. The Russian peasantry's liberation nonetheless helped stimulate Russia's industrialization and urbanization, however, they continued to make up the majority of the population for the remainder of Tsarist Russia's existence, and remained desperately impoverished. Marxism gained currency among many of them as a result, helping to contribute to the Russian Revolution.

Russian clergy

See also: History of the Russian Orthodox Church

Highest authority of Russian Orthodox Church in 1917

Strata-wise, the Russian clergy consisted of two groups. There were parish clergy, who formed a de facto hereditary class, being able to marry and their sons being expected to go into the clergy. These individuals were generally poor and lacking in sophisticated religious education, being closer to the peasantry than the upper clergy, which consisted of monastic individuals where the bishop class was drawn from. They were substantial landowners, celibate, and wealthy, at least before Peter the Great. Parish and monastic clergy were also classified as white and black clergy respectively.

During the Petrine era, the autonomy of the Russian Orthodox Church was terminated, and it subsequentially became a stooge of the Tsarist state. Clergymen during this era in many ways became state religious figures, with the Russian Patriarchate being abolished and replaced by the governmental Holy Synod. Despite this, clergymen remained an important part of Russian cultural life, though the Patriarchate would not be reestablished until shortly after the end of Tsarist Russia in November 1917, with the election of Metropolitan Tikhon.

The Urban middle classes and Intelligentsia

Street in Kitay-Gorod. The beginning of the XVII century, 1900, by Apollinary Vasnetsov, showing a marketplace in Tsardom-era Moscow

Unlike Western Europe, which saw the proliferation of a strong urban middle class during this era, the Russian equivalent faltered in comparison for most of this era. Although the cities of the Kievan Rus were highly prominent and prosperous, under the Tatar Yoke and the growth of serfdom, Russian cities shrunk in importance. The Russian merchantry, or kupechestvo, existed as a legally defined class with its own guild structure, but was heavily marginalized and stigmatized by Russian society and the government. The kupechestvo lacked real political power, unlike Western European merchantry, and although reforms under Peter and Catherine the Great attempted to rejuvenate their strength to boost commercial activity, their social prestige remained low compared to the Russian nobility, with successful merchants often attempting to utilize their wealth to acquire noble status and shift away from trade.

The 19th century saw the Russian intelligentsia emerge, or a class defined primarily by their education, dejection over the Russian order, and critical consciousness. They were largely sourced from the nobility and the raznochintsy, or people of miscellaneous rank. Throughout Tsarist Russia's final century, they were the primary force behind both liberal and radical politics in the empire, characterizing many of the sociopolitical disputes of the late Russian Empire such as the Slavophile-Westernization debate or the rise of Communism.

As industrialization kicked in the empire in the late 19th century, a new class of bourgeoise factory owners, managers, doctors, lawyers, and engineers emerged. They were largely centered in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, which still today serve as Russia's economic hubs. They had political say in the Duma through parties such as the Octobrists and Kadets, but proved too poorly organized to stabilize the Russian political system before the revolution of 1917.

The Industrial working classes

See also: Industrialization in the Russian Empire

Factory workers' dormitory, c. 1900; such conditions created political unrest

The industrialization of the 19th century, much like elsewhere in the world, compounded by the abolition of serfdom, resulted in an influx of workers to the cities, as the free serfs and other migrants came to the urban areas to pick up industrial work. They concentrated in a select few regions; Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and the Donbass being a few; compounded with their poor working conditions and legal inability to collectively organize, this made them highly susceptible to political radicalization. They swiftly became the primary base for the Russian left, particularly Marxists.

Factory strikes were a persistent feature of the late Empire period, with multiple strike waves gripping Tsarist Russia, especially during the revolutionary tumult of 1905 and 1917. Pyotr Stolypin and Sergei Witte attempted to mitigate these with their reforms during their tenures in the final days of the state. They were moderately successful; ultimately however, it proved to be too little to prevent the eventual radical wave that toppled Tsarist Russia.

Cossacks

Main article: Cossacks

Ural Cossacks engaging with the Kazakhs, 19th century

Serfs in Russia chafed under their system of oppression, and lashed out in many cases. The Razin revolt and the Bulavin Rebellion at the turn of the 18th century were such instances. The second serfdom had led to individuals in Eastern Europe, from Ruthenia, Russia, and the Commonwealth fleeing to the Pontic Steppe in search of freedom, forming what would become known as the Cossacks. The Cossacks were a motley crew of people, consisting of fleeing serfs, escaped criminals, decommissioned soldiery, poor nobility, and even members of the tribes of the Steppe who had converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. Cossack communities developed all over the so-called Wild Fields, where they were proud of their free status; the term Cossack is derived from the Turkic kazak, meaning "free man". They developed their own military culture, organizational structures, dialects, customs, and strong collective identity centered on martial values, personal freedom, Orthodox Christianity, and fierce egalitarianism within the community; decisions were made by the rada, and elected leaders (atamans and hetmans).

The democratic governance of the Cossacks put them at odds to a degree with the Tsarist state, however, both sides did find uses for one another. Early Tsaro-Cossack relations saw genuine reciprocity, with the Russian government viewing the Cossacks as useful auxiliary guards in the frontier, while the Cossacks liked the state assistance they would get without surrendering their independence. The Cossacks helped spearhead many of Russia's frontier conquests during this time, primarily in Siberia, often with little state intervention. The 17th century saw a shift in the dynamic. As the Cossacks had settled on the Steppe, they had formed a number of polities, called hosts and siches. The principal one, the Zaporozhian Sich, rebelled against Commonwealth authority under their hetman, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who established the quasi-independent Cossack Hetmanate. Seeking Russian aid, they signed an agreement with Russia in 1654 - the Pereiaslav Agreement - in which the latter became the suzerain of the former. As the Zaporizhian Cossacks were a major part of the ethnogenesis of the Ukrainians, the exact nature of this agreement - whether this amounted to a formal and fully consensual union with Russia as stated in Russian historiography or a temporary alliance made out of pragmatism as outlined in Ukrainian historiography - remains debated; but generally, this saw in practice Left-bank Ukraine under increasing Russian control. The Don Cossacks in this area gradually lost more and more autonomy under Tsarist rule for the remainder of the 17th century, resulting in several revolts, such as those led by Stenka Razin and Kondraty Bulavin. They were brutally crushed, and by the end of the 18th century, Cossack autonomy had disappeared.

From the late 18th century onwards, Cossacks and their hosts were integrated as a specialized hereditary class. Service became compulsory, with all male Cossacks being required to provide their own horses and equipment and to serve a specified term, typically around twenty years spread across active service and reserve obligations. In exchange, Cossack communities retained substantial land grants (stanichnye zemli), exemption from the standard conscription system, and a degree of internal self-governance through their host administrations. As such, Cossacks were an important part of the Imperial Russian Army. They were also employed in internal security, which brought some internal ire; they were extensively used to crack down on various demonstrations, revolts, and strikes, which gradually transformed their reputation from being romantic freedom fighters to instruments of Tsarist violence; in the Russian Civil War and early Soviet period, the Bolsheviks adopted a policy of De-Cossackization, which amounted effectively to a mass genocide campaign.

Other classes

Lamellar armor traditionally worn by the Koryak people (circa 1900)

The meshchane were the legally defined lower urban estate, being above the peasantry and below the merchant guilds. They consisted of small tradesmen, artisans, petty shopkeepers, and urban workers who were registered in a town but unable to qualify for membership in the guilds. Membership in this class was hereditary and people in it were subject to poll tax and conscription. They were initially essentially the Russian equivalent of Western European petty bourgeoisie, though as usual with less legal and political weight. As the Russian Empire industrialized, the lines between the industrial working class and the lower reaches of the merchantry became increasingly blurred. At the time of the 1897 census, the meshchane were the largest defined urban estate, numbering at 13 million, but many of them lived in conditions not too dissimilar from that of the rural peasantry.

The raznochintsy, or people of various ranks, were an eponymous miscellaneous estate consisting of all educated people outside the clergy and nobility who did not fit in to any established estate category. This included the sons of merchants, lesser clergymen, minor officials, and even emancipated serfs who attained education. Its from this class that many of the Russian intelligentsia came from starting from the 1860s onwards, who chafed under current system and had less stake in it despite their education, helping to contribute to the radicalization of Russian politics in its final years.

Amongst the peoples of Siberia, a variety of differing development levels existed, with some being semi-sedentary agricultural folk and others being nomadic hunter-gatherers. Government policy towards the Siberian indigenes was oriented around the yasak system, where furs were paid as tribute to the Russian state; beyond that, the Tsarist state meddled little in the affairs of the Siberians. Violence and disease were common during the conquest. The 1822 Statute on the Administration of Siberian Peoples, drafted by the reformist administrator Mikhail Speransky, was the most comprehensive attempt to regularize the legal position of indigenous Siberians. It divided them into three categories: sedentary, nomadic, and wandering, with differing administrative arrangements for each; it also terminated the worst abused of the yasak system. In practice, exploitation by traders and local officials persisted, with the late 19th century seeing increasing pressure from Russian settlers on native Siberian land; nevertheless, their situation differed from that of Central Asia and the Caucasus in the relative absence of organized military resistance and lessened Russification efforts due to the miniscule population.

Education

The Zaikonospassky Monastery, where the Slavic Greek Latin Academy used to be located.

Education in Tsarist Russia was of limited access to the majority of its population for most of its history. The Tsarist state prioritized training a coherent administrative and military class to maintain, defend, and expand itself, but was weary of literacy's widespread politically destabilizing effects. Expansions and liberalization of education were followed by periods of contraction; nonetheless, the arc of the period was one of gradual expansion.

In Muscovy, education was almost entirely ecclesiastical, with the Church controlling literacy, which principally existed at the time to serve the Church. Parish priests taught reading and writing to a small minority of boys, usually those prepping for a career in the clergy, using the Psalter and Book of Hours as primary texts. The quality of this education varied from region to region. The first major development was the Slavic Greek Latin Academy of Moscow, established in 1687 under Tsarevna Sophia Alekseyevna. Initially directed by Greek scholars, it was Russia's first institution of higher education, and eponymously offered instruction in Greek, Latin, and Slavonic, as well as rhetoric, philosophy, and theology. It mainly sought to train clergy and correct theological errors, playing a role in the contemporary Schism of the Russian Church, but also educated a generation of intellectuals and officials.

Peter the Great sought to implement a series of educational reforms, which were amongst the most consequential of his entire westernization program. Before him, formal schooling was a privilege of the few, and literacy was low, even for contemporary European standards. Technical, scientific, and secular learning were virtually absent. His acute awareness of this and need of technically trained men led to significant educational reforms under his reign. He opened the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation in 1701, followed by the Saint Petersburg Naval Institute in 1715. He also established basic mathematical and technical educational institutes known as the tsifirnie shkoly, or cipher/arithmetic schools, in 1714. Most lasting of all was the Academy of Sciences, established in Saint Petersburg in 1724, which became the center of Russian scientific life for the next century. Under his reign, elite education in Russian was secularized, with western languages (German, Dutch, French) being introduced.

The 18th century saw the consolidation and expansion of his institutions, accompanied with a shift away from militaro-technical education to a more broader humanist education. In 1755, Moscow University was established under Tsarina Elizabeth, the first university in Russia proper, which was the preeminent Russian educational institution during the imperial period. The associated Moscow Gymnasium, established alongside it, was the first secular secondary school in Russia. Catherine the Great attempted to create a broader educational network, with her 1786 Statute on Public Schools establishing a two-tiered system of main schools in provincial capitals and minor schools in district towns, derived from contemporary Austrian educational reforms.

The 19th century was characterized by dramatic strides in Russian education that were nonetheless juxtaposed against concerns that it was being used for political radicalism. Under Alexander I, an initial period of educational improvement began, with six new universities - Warsaw, Kazan, Kharkov, Vilinus, Dorpat, and Saint Petersburg - being founded. Much autonomy was granted to academic staff, making this the most liberal era of Russian higher education before its final years. However, in the age of the French Revolution, state weariness over this state of affairs was maximizing, which was intensified following the Decembrist revolt in 1825. Nicholas I's conservative temperament resulted in a sustained assault in higher education, with university autonomy and cirricula being severely curtailed. Sergei Uvarov, the head of the imperial Ministry of Education, explicitly framed Russian educational policy as a tool for inculating correct political and religious values instead of independent thought. At one point, philosophy was banned as a subject, and student numbers were capped at 300 per university following the Revolutions of 1848.

Under Alexander II, another period of liberalization began, with the University Charter of 1863 restoring much of the academic autonomy that had been lost and removing the student caps. Secondary education expanded under his tenure as well. His successor, Alexander III, once again reverse course, with the 1884 University charter terminating elected governance, placing universities under direct ministerial control, upped fees as an explicit attempt to limit university access to reliably conservative classes, and stricter supervison of university life. In 1887, the education minister, Ivan Delyanov, effectively banned the lower classes from secondary education.

Zemstvo school in Sumy, Ukraine

Despite this, the 19th century saw a universal revolution in Russian education just due to the fact that the peasantry was receiving any sort of formal education at all. The Eastern Orthodox Church operated an extensive elementary school network throughout the country via parish schools, which provided reading, writing, arithmetic, and religious knowledge. After the serfs were liberated in 1861, zemstvo schools became common, with generally secular and better educational standards than the parish schools. The tension between zemstvo and parish schools became a proxy for the broader culture war between the more liberal and conservative elements of Russian society; intelligentsia of the former sought to utilize the zemstvos to push their agenda, leading to state intervention to protect the primacy of the parish schools. Nevertheless, they both contributed to a rise in literacy amongst the Russian people, with 21% being literate according to the 1897 census. While still low compared to the rest of Europe, it was still a marked increase from before when the literacy amongst rural populations was virtually absent, and in certain areas such as the Baltics and Finland literacy was around 90%. On a similar note, technical schools, such as the Medical-Surgical Academy in Saint Petersburg, the Institute of the Corps of Engineers of Ways of Communication, the Moscow Technical School, and the Technological Institute of Saint Petersburg, continued to be founded and prosper.

Radical politics continued to simmer in the educational apparatus, with the Going to the People of the 1870s, where young Russian students left for the countryside to work amongst the peasantry to raise their political consciousness, being one such manifestation of this. Clamping down upon this was a key priority of the Tsarist state, with many students being exiled, expelled, and imprisoned; this did nothing but create a steady supply of educated, politically sophisticated youths with no career prospects who were even more radicalized, as recognized by contemporary governmental officials such as Sergey Witte. After the 1905 revolution, educational opportunities were expanded dramatically, with Russia having around 10 million children in elementary schools, 130 thousands in secondary institutions, and 35 thousand in university by 1914, with 127 thousand in secondary education overall. World War I disrupted education significantly, and much of the work would be picked up by the Soviet Union through their mass literacy campaign.

Women

The terem of tsarevnas, painting by Mikhail Petrovich Klodt, 1878

Women in Tsarist Russia faced a series of interlocking customary, economic, legal, and religious frameworks that varied via class. The foundation of the legal framework governing female lives was built on Eastern Orthodox canon law and secular civil law that was largely codified with the Sobornoye Ulozheniye of 1649. Under both, women were subject to a principle of legal subordination; for unmarried women, via her father and for married women, via her husband. Marriage itself was governed by the Eastern Orthodox Church for Eastern Orthodox Christians, with civil marriage or provisions for divorce outside ecclesiastical courts not existing until the Bolshevik takeover.

During the Tsardom era, the seclusion of women became common practice amongst the imperial and boyar families, being placed in terems, or often cloistered apartments or chambers frequently only connected to where the men lived via an outdoor passageway. The women's quarters of the Tsar's palace were particularly elaborate and were equipped with a separate courtyard, dining room, and children's apartments, as well as a large group of maidservants, wet nurses, nannies, and ladies in waiting. Daughters were often brought up solely in the terem, isolated in accordance with traditionalist Eastern Orthodox teachings regarding virginity, and rarely leaving the place until marriage. Terems were as much a political thing as they were a cultural one; as in Islamic and Near Eastern societies, the veiling of women enabled greater control over a woman's marriage choices, which often had immense political and economic implications.

Women in Russia at the time had superior property rights to those of their Western European counterparts, and also managed their own dowries. Noblewomen in particular could and did manage estates, engage in commercial transactions, and conduct legal proceedings in their own names when circumstances permitted. High-class women could also divorce much more easily then their lower class counterparts, as they held the wealth and connections to navigate the convoluted ecclesiastical bureaucracy; amongst commoners, the divorce rate was extremely low, even for contemporary European standards.

By the late 17th century, the terem, especially amongst the imperial family, was on its way out, and it was formally abolished by Peter the Great. The Petrine reforms touched women's status in several ways, with noblewomen were mandated to participate in his new western-style social gatherings that he introduced. The most significant change came as part of the broader wave of reform raging throughout Russia in its last six decades. The 1914 reform of familial law, passed by the State Duma, relaxed some of the restrictions placed on women, being the first legal acknowledgement that married women had independent legal personhood.

Territory

See also: Geography of Russia

The period of Tsars coincided with the expansion of Russia from a large, but peripheral domain on the fringes of the European continent to a transcontinental realm that was the largest country on Earth. At its territorial peak in 1866, Tsarist Russia encompassed 8.8 million sq mi (23 million km²), spanned three continents — Europe, Asia, and North America — and was (and remains) the second-largest contagious empire in history, behind only the Mongols; at the time, it was also flatly the second largest empire, behind the British.

In its final form, Tsarist Russia stretched from the eastern fringes of the North European Plain to the Bering Sea. It was bounded to the north by the Arctic and to the south by the Black and Caspian Seas, the southern fringes of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and the steppe frontiers of Mongolia and Manchuria. In Europe, it consistently bordered Sweden, the Poles and Lithuanians, the Ottomans, Germany, and Romania. In Asia, they bordered various Central Asian and Caucasian polities that after years of conquest resulted in a border with Persia, as well as Afghanistan and briefly British India. Through their expansion westwards, they bordered China, and also had a border with British North America.

Evolution

Main article: Territorial evolution of Russia

1525 map of Muscovy by the Genoese cartographer Battista Agnese

In 1478, the Grand Principality of Moscow, which encompassed the central portions of what became to be known as European Russia, completed its annexation of the Republic of Novgorod, the end of decades of rivalry between what were once the two preeminent Russian states and in effect unifying Russia. Shortly afterwards, Russia acquired independence from the Great Horde after the Great Stand on the Ugra River. With this, the newly independent Russian state stretched from the White Sea, the Gulf of Finland, the Urals, and the respective northeastern and northwestern fringes of Ruthenia (contemporary Belarus and Ukraine) and the Volga region. The acquisition of Novgorod resulted in the inheritance of the Novgorodian border with Swedish Finland. Both Sweden and Novgorod had competed for zones of influence amongst the peoples of Greater Finland via conquest, conversion, and trade, and had entered into conflict with one another. This was resolved with the Treaty of Nöteborg in 1323, which regulated their border in the region; the follow-up Treaty of Novgorod in 1326 did the same with Norway, who was also competing with the Novgorodians over influence amongsy the local Sámi in the area. This border situation, which largely granted Karelia to Novgorod, was inherited by Muscovy.

The new Russian state would have its borders begin to be significantly altered via war and conquest. War with the Lithuanians would be omnipresent during this era, most notably in the war of 1500 to 1503, where Muscovy annexed the now Ukrainian cities of Chernigov and Novgorod-Seversk, as well as Starodub and lands around the upper Oka River. The Lithuanians would recover some of these lands in the later Livonian War in the middle of the century. Wars with the Khanate of Kazan were also common, culminating in its annexation in 1552, precipitating Russian control of the Volga region. Afterwards, in 1581, Yermak Timofeyevich began his campaign against the Khanate of Sibir, initiating the conquest of Siberia. From 1550 to 1700, Russia grew by an average of 35 thousand km² (14 thousand sq mi) annually. The conquest of Siberia was largely undertaken by zemleprokhodtsy, or explorers and settlers who largely went east for the fur trade. The Russians reached the Bering strait in 1648 under Semyon Dezhnev, and would have largely consolidated their holdings in Siberia by the end of the century, with them signing a treaty with China in 1689 to delineate the border in Manchuria.

After suffering losses against the Poles and Lithuanians, who had reconstituted themselves in 1569 as the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, culminating in a temporary PLC occupation of Moscow in the early 1610s, the Russians dealt a decisive blow to the Commonwealth in the mid-17th century, capitalizing on a period of instability to invade and conquer large chunks of its eastern frontiers from 1654 to 1667. The period saw the PLC enter into decline and Russia begin its rise to great power status. During the PLC's troubles, the Ukrainian Cossacks under Bohdan Khmelnytsky led a major uprising and turned to Russia for support. In the Treaty of Pereiaslav in 1654, the Cossack Hetmanate pledged allegiance to the Tsardom of Russia. Although done with the understanding that the Hetmanate would be an autonomous area of Tsarist Russia, already beginning in 1659, there were efforts to limit its independence, and in 1667, the area, without input from the Cossacks, was partitioned between the PLC and Russia in a system of joint-administration. With Ukraine being one of the Rus peoples, the Russians viewed themselves as reunifying the East Slavs, and sought to further incorporate the area into their domain.

English cartographer Robert Morden's 1695 map of the Tsardom of Russia

The Swedes went to war with Russia in 1610 the Ingrian War. The resulting Russian defeat caused the country to loose its access to the Gulf of Finland, with Sweden absorbing the region of Ingria, as well as parts of Karelia. This resulted in Russia losing access to decent western-facing warm water ports, limiting trade and communication with Western Europe, as well as naval capabilities. Russia's main oceanic outlet was via the White Sea through Archangel. Under Peter the Great, an occidentophile, the Russians sought to retake the area. In the Great Northern War, a coalition of Russia, the PLC, Denmark–Norway, and Saxony, with later intervention from Prussia and Hannover, waged war with Sweden for nearly two decades. After initial Swedish success under their young and energetic king, Carolus Rex, he was defeated by the Russians at Poltava in contemporary Ukraine in 1709, which was followed by Sweden fighting on the defense for the remainder of the war until Carolus Rex was assassinated during the Siege of Fredriksten in 1718. Sweden sued for peace in the Treaty of Nystad, which saw Ingria and Livonia annexed into Russia. Peter had already seized an Ingrian fort built by the Swedes known as Nyenskans during the war, and began building a new city to serve as his capital. The new settlement, Saint Petersburg, would symbolize his dreams for a link to the west, as well as the fall of one empire and the rise of another.

Also during the Petrine period, Peter campaigned against the Ottomans, seizing the coastal Fortress of Azov in 1696, however, he was forced to cede it back during the war with Sweden after he was defeated whilst campaigning against the Turks when they were harboring Carolus Rex. He also campaigned against Persia in the early 1720s, seizing the northern coasts of the Caspian and Persia's territories in the Caucasus. The Russian control of this area was strenuous, with 36 thousand Russian soldiers dying during the administration of these areas, largely from disease. With Russo-Turkish relations still tense, the Russian Empire ceded these territories back to Iran in an exchange for an alliance against the Ottomans. In the next war with the Ottomans, the Russians, allied with Austria, retook Azov. A Swedish attempt to recover some its lost territories in the early 1740s resulted in failure, with even more of Karelia being ceded to Russia.

The Swedish war was partially backed by France, which sought to sufficiently distract Russia to the degree that it would not honor its alliance with Austria and intervene against the French-led, anti-Habsburg coalition in the War of Austrian Succession. Russia later joined anyway, though did not receive any territory from the concluding Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. They would receive land however in the next great European war; the Seven Years War. Prussia was pummeled by the joint Austro-Russian force, with East Prussia being temporarily annexed by Russia; however, following the death of Tsar Elizabeth, the Prussophilic Peter III came to power, ended the war with Prussia, and ceded the annexed lands passed. Compounded with his conflict with the Russian nobility, he was overthrown by his wife Catherine the following year in 1763. Under her, the already effectively integrated Hetmanate was abolished, which was then followed by the integration of the Ottoman-influenced Crimean Khanate in 1783. Wars with the Ottomans from 1768 to 1774 and 1787 to 1792 saw the Russians gain territory in Ukraine, the Balkans, and North Caucasus.

European Russia and Asio-Tartar Russia respectively, by the American cartographer Samuel Augustus Mitchell, 1853

Catherine's most significant territorial acquisitions came to fruition in the west, where a declining PLC was subject to a spat of joint-annexations by the Russian Empire, the House of Austria, and Prussia known as the Partitions of Poland. These annexations in 1772, 1793, and 1795, ended Polono-Lithuanian independence, and saw Russia annex the remainder of Ruthenia and Courland. The country subsequentially got involved in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, where after the War of the Fourth Coalition and the 1807 Treaties of Tilsit, Russia switched from being an enemy to ally of France, while Austria and Prussia lost large chunks of their annexed Commonwealth territory. Subsequentially after Napoleon was defeated, the Russians received the lion's share of Poland, reconstituted as a nominally separate kingdom in personal union with Russia; this so-called Kingdom of Poland, better known as Congressional Poland, was really just a direct extension of the Russian state with little autonomy, especially after an 1830 uprising. It would later be in effect abolished in 1867 after another Polish revolt in 1863, reconstituted under the name Vistula Land to stomp on any shred of Polish nationalism. Finland, which was acquired from Sweden in 1809, would be integrated in a similar manner, albeit under more genuine autonomy; the Grand Duchy of Finland would be ruled in personal union for over a century. Also during the Napoleonic Wars, the Russians seized the region of Bessarabia, a region of the Ottoman tributary of Moldavia.

The Russians continued foraying in the east and south in the 19th century. Already starting in 1732, the Russians had begun colonizing North America, mostly holding territory in Alaska, but also having a brief but notable presence in contemporary San Francisco. With the Siberian conquest largely complete by 1778 with the integration of Kamchatka and the Chukchi Peninsula, Russia's efforts outside the European plain largely focused on the Caucasus and Central Asia. Via war with the local peoples, the Ottomans, and Persia, the North and South Caucasus would be brought under Russian rule by 1864. Russian operations in Central Asia started with campaigns against the Khanates of Khiva and Kazakhstan; campaigns intensified in the 19th century, culminating in the subjugation of the Emirate of Bukhara in the 1860s, with the conquest of Central Asia largely wrapped up by 1895. Much of the Russian efforts in this region was done to compete with the UK, based out of India, in influence.

1909 map of the Russian Empire

Tsarist Russia reached its peak in 1866; the 19th century did see the country lose several territories. The Russian loss in the Crimean War saw Bessarabia and the Danube Delta returned to Romania. However, the southern part of the former would later be retrieved during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, in which the country decisively mauled the Ottoman Empire and also took the Armenian territories of Kars and Batum from it. Alaska, which was a difficult to defend area that was not profitable enough to justify continued Russian presence, was sold to the United States in 1867. In the Far East, Russia took advantage of a weakened China to annex large parts of Chinese Manchuria while it was embroiled in the deadliest civil war in history; it also acquired a number of exclaves in the country.

Despite the Russian colonization of Siberia, the northern fringes of the country were extremely remote, and these Arctic regions would only be seriously chartered and explored the last century of Tsarist Russia's existence. The New Siberian Islands were discovered by Cossacks in 1712, and subject to a multitude of expeditions afterwards. The Severnaya Zemlya had been discovered by the 19th century, though no landing took place until 1913; a year later, it was named Emperor Nicholas II Land, in honor of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II. Both territories were formally incorporated into Russia in the mid-1910s. The Russians also discovered Antarctica in 1820, though never claimed or landed on the continent. The last major territorial change of Tsarist Russia was when the southern part of Sakhalin was ceded to Japan following the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. On October 17, 1867, the eve of the cession of Alaska to America, the empire bordered Sweden–Norway, the North German Confederation, Austria-Hungary, Romania, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, the Turkmens, the Khanate of Kokand, China, Korea, and British North America, specifically the North-Western Territory and British Columbia.

Structure

Tsarist Russia was legally one indivisible state; i.e., a unitary state. The Grand Duchy of Finland, as well as the Kingdom of Poland were considered part of this indivisible realm. Early on in the history of the Muscovite Princedom, appanages were common, though already by the time of Ivan the Great, this system was on the way out as Muscovy consolidated together to form Russia, being dismantled formally by the first Tsar, Ivan the Terrible.

The empire was largely contiguous, save for their holdings in Alaska. This made it unique amongst the contemporary European powers; while most such as Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, had large colonial possessions that often constituted the bulk of their territory, Russia's possessions were an integral part of its territory; as such, while the other empires were subject to decolonization, the territory of Tsarist Russia would form the basis of the territory of the USSR and even after its collapse the territory of the contemporary Russian Federation.

In addition to the exclave Chinese concessions, the Russians also controlled the Chinese Eastern Railway, which linked Port Arthur with Vladivostok and Chita. In the 1810s, Georg Anton Schäffer, a German entrepreneur, attempted to get the nascent Kingdom of Hawaii annexed by the Russian Empire, going so far as to successfully negotiate protectorate status for the island realm, though Tsar Alexander I refused the offer. In 1888, a Cossack adventurer named Nikolay Ivanovitch Achinov attempted to conquer Sagallo in contemporary Djibouti as Russia's contribution to the ongoing Scramble for Africa, but his efforts were thwarted by the French, who considered Djibouti to be their area of control under the Berlin Conference.

Religion and demography

The Great Taking of the Veil, by Mikhail Nesterov (c. 1897)

From its inception, Tsarist Russia was an extremely diverse country, containing a multitude of religious and ethnic groups. Through interaction, migration, and conquest, Tsarist Russia grew to encompass a myriad of different peoples over its centuries-long history, w hich shaped its history. The relation between these groups and the Russian government varied. The Tsarist regime generally represented the Russians and the Orthodox Church, and sought throughout its history to assimilate the various groups of the empire into a coherent, Orthodox Russian populous. Especially during the Imperial era as the empire conquered more exterior territory and gained influence from the rising nationalist movement in Europe, religious and ethnic communities were increasingly marginalized as an Orthodox, Slavic nationalistic ideology gripped the country. Policies of forceful hard assimilation were promoted by successive Tsars, with varying degrees of effect. In some areas, such as Poland, this would prompt various rebellions against Russian rule, and in many areas would help promulgate various other nationalist movements.

Religion

Tsarist Russia was officially an Eastern Orthodox state. As the state religion, it held precedence over all other faiths. Eastern Orthodoxy served not only as the official religious doctrine, but the foundational cultural nexus for the entirety of the Tsarist society and state. The Tsarist state and Church held a symbiotic relationship, in which the Church legitimized the Tsar's right to rule by divine right while the state provided the Church with resources, protection, and doctrinal enforcement.

Third Rome

Main article: Moscow, Third Rome

The sobor of 1490, from the Illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible, late 16th century

Christianity had arrived in Russia via the Byzantines, who began converting the Rus in the 10th century. Under Vladimir the Great in 988, the Baptism of the Kievan Rus took place as he and many others converted to Christianity, and the religion would become the dominaint faith by the time of its demise during the High Middle Ages. Being culturally influenced by the Byzantines, it joined the Eastern Orthodox Church amidst the Great Schism of the mid-11th century. In the aftermath of the Mongol conquest, monasticism began gripping Russia, becoming a staple of late medieval Russian Orthodoxy. Propagated by men such as the 14th century saint Sergius of Radonezh, the monastic revival helped prompt a new wave of conversion efforts by the Church, such as Stephen of Perm, who evangelized the Permians at the end of the 14th century.

The Byzantine Empire went into decline in the late Middle Ages, suffering increasingly from poor leadership, internal divisions, and external excursions. In the late 14th century, they began to be increasingly threatened by the rising Ottoman Empire, who also began threatening Christian Europe and especially the Balkans. As the Ottoman Empire continued to grow in prominence and the Byzantines grew more weak, the idea of Byzantium's Roman legacy being inherited became a more front of mind topic. Part of the reason behind the Great Schism was that the Western Catholic Church had claimed that the Holy Roman Emperor was the true holder of the Roman imperial title, while the Eastern Orthodoxs claimed the Byzantine emperor was. As the Ottomans continued to absorb not just Byzantine territory, but most independent Orthodox polities, Muscovy gradually began to emerge as the only seriously powerful Orthodox state. After the Bulgarian city of Tarnovo was captured by the Ottomans in 1393, a number of exiled Bulgarian clergy took refuge in Russia and began exporting the idea of a "Third Rome" there. This idea gained further prominence, especially when the Byzantines attempted to rejoin the Catholic Church in 1439 in a desperate bid to garner Western support against the Ottomans. This move, unpopular throughout the Eastern Orthodox world, prompted the Russian Church to declare autocephaly in 1448.

The independence of the Russian Church, which would eventually be recognized by Constantinople in 1589, marked the establishment of what would become the Moscow Patriarchate, elevating the leader of the Russian Church to the rank of Patriarch. In what became known as the conciliar period of the Russian Church, the institution began to assert itself as a major, and eventually preeminent force in the Eastern Orthodox world. A landmark event of this was the Stoglav of 1551. The result of a synod, it regulated canon law and ecclesiastical life in Russia for the next century. Though this helped standardize religious practice in Russia, it had the effect of furthering the separation of the practices of the Russian Church and the other Orthodox churches.

Also as part of this process, the church began to more firmly integrate with the Russian state apparatus. The Idea of a "Third Rome" continued to gain prominence across the Eastern Orthodox world as the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople in 1453 and subsequentially spent the remainder of the 15th century absorbing most of the remaining Eastern Orthodox polities. Tales told by men such as Nestor Iskander stated that the Rus would eventually defeat the Muslims and retake Tsargrad, the Slavic name for Constantinople; such narratives garnered widespread popularity as Russia emerged as the last free bastion of the Orthodox faith. By the end of the 15th century, this idea of Moscow being the successor to Byzantium had become part of Russian policy, with Ivan the Great taking on the title of tsar in 1484, marrying Sophia Palaiologina, the cousin of the last Byzantine emperor, and using Byzantine imperial imagery such as the double-headed eagle to assert a political and religious connection with the Byzantines and thus Roman civilization. This would later be formalized by Ivan the Terrible in 1547, when he would declare himself Tsar of all Russia, establishing the Russian Tsardom.

The growing power of Tsarist autocracy meant that the Tsar garnered extraordinary influence over religious affairs, and gradually the Russian Church emerged as a stooge of the state. The Tsarist era saw its share of schisms and heretics. The Judaizers, an group of heretic Christians who were accused of adhering to Judaism, were persecuted after the sobor (synod) of 1490, with many being burned. Under Ivan the Terrible, a myriad of clergy who went against him were oppressed and killed, including Philip II, Metropolitan of Moscow. Nevertheless, the preeminence of Eastern Orthodoxy was twice threatened in the early 17th century during the Time of Troubles. False Dmitry I, one of many usurpers during that time period, took power in 1605, off the back of support from Russia's principal enemy at the time, Poland–Lithuania; in exchange for his support, he publicly converted to Roman Catholicism, since the PLC was Catholic. This created unease in Russia, and this was worsened as rumors circulated that he had secretly promise to join the Russian Church with the Holy See. It was custom for a Russian Tsar upon marrying their wife to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy if they already were not. Russia's only Catholic Tsar did not make his wife, the Polish noblewoman Marina Mniszech, convert; prompting enough backlash to contribute to his toppling the next year. Later, the primacy of Orthodoxy in Russia would be under threat when the Commonwealth launched an invasion of Russia that resulted in Moscow being occupied for several years. The events, as well as the broader period of instability engendered a new sense of religiosity in Russian society as the ill times that had fallen upon the Tsardom were blamed on a lack of devotion.

The raskol and Petrine settlement

Main articles: Schism of the Russian Church and Church reform of Peter the Great

1887 painting by Vasily Surikov, showcasing the arrest of Muscovite Old Believer Feodosia Morozova. In protest, she holds two fingers, rather than three, raised in the old way of making the sign of the cross.

Beginning in the 1630s, this manifested as in the Zealots of Piety, a group of high-profile clergymen who wanted to implement various liturgical reforms to the Russian Church. They disliked the Stoglav for its enabling of pre-Christian festivals and what they saw as a disordered liturgy. In 1652, after the death of Patriarch Joseph, whose tenure had marked a low point in the influence and power of the position, one of them, Nikon, was elected as his successor. The most significant schism in Russian history unfolded in the mid-17th century, when a series of reforms by the Patriarch Nikon to mend the divisions between the Russian Church and other branches of Eastern Orthodoxy prompted such controversy it led to decades of sectarian conflict known as the raskol. Controversy within the clergy boiled over into the Great Moscow Synod of 1666 to 1667, where the reforms were declared valid and the prior practice anathema, with the Stogalav being declared heretical for its role in further separating Russian Orthodox practice from other Eastern Orthodox branches. Despite this, Nikon was removed from patriarchal power; he had become wildly unpopular, even amongst those who backed his efforts, mostly owing to his abuse of power and internal politics. He was involved in power struggles with Tsar Alexis that culminated in him taking to a monastery in a tantrum in hopes to have the Tsar beg for his return in 1658; when Alexis did not fall for the bait, the Russian Church was leaderless for a decade, and Nikon was immediately scrutinized when he attempted to reestablish himself as if nothing had occurred a decade later.

Nevertheless, his reforms were endorsed by the men who had just stripped him of his power, and the dissidents, known as Old Believers, were condemned. The Old Believers did not take their loss lying down, and the Tsarist regime used the split to grow its control over ordinary Russians' lives to an unprecedented degree, prompting backlash from dissidents. Banditry, revolts, and mass self-immolations became common, with thousands committing suicide by fire while major uprisings occurred at the Solovetsky Monastery and Moscow. The Old Believers, many of whom came from the peasantry and monastic classes, viewed the Tsarist attempt to enforce the Nikonian reforms as an abuse of secular power, represented in the latter by the increasingly centralizing power of the state and by the former by the feudal system that backed the reforms. In its most radical form, many Old Believers associated the Nikonian reforms and the increasingly autocratic state with the Antichrist and saw them as signs of the coming apocalypse, with the year 1666 drawing comparisons to the number of the beast, while the Greek three fingered manner of making the cross that Nikon replaced the old Russian two fingered practice drawing comparisons to the mark of the beast. The Tsarist state did its best to crack down on the Old Believers, with many dissenters being executed and imprisoned.

Participants of the July 26, 1911 extraordinary meeting of the Most Holy Synod

By the 1690s, the raskol began to subside as Peter the Great began concentrating his power. He did not care much for the religious divides and scaled back the persecution of the Old Believers, with them only being subjected to his formally unrelated Beard tax. The Old Believers would remain surprisingly durable, possibly accounting for up to 20% of Russia's population in the 19th century and having diaspora communities in areas like the United States and Canada. In Tsarist Russia, they began common amongst the merchantry and artisanry as their exclusion from the Orthodox establishment pushed them to commercial activity; additionally, their close-knit communities converted easily into business connections. Throughout the last years of the Russian Empire, restrictions on them were gradually whittled away.

Under Peter however, the Russian Church still went through a massive transformation, as Peter sought to consolidate even more control over it. After the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700, the Tsar refused to appoint a new Patriarch, and in 1721, he formally abolished the office, replacing it with the Most Holy Synod, a governing body composed of laymen appointed by the Tsar and clergymen such as the Metropolitans of Saint Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev, and the Exarch of Kartvelia. The Chief Procurator of the Synod, a layman, effectively ran the Synod as a government ministry on behalf of the Tsar. As part of this, the Church lost what remained of its institutional independence and its check on the Tsarist state. As such, it increasingly became identified with the Russian state and oppressive strata system, a fact that helped contribute to the rapid secularization of Russian society in the Russian Empire's final years as the Tsarist model grew more and more unpopular, culminating in much of the outright anti-religious sentiment of the Revolutionary period. Although the Patriarchate was reestablished in the wake of the February Revolution in 1917, the Russian Orthodox Church by that point was a spiritually and intellectually depleted organization, compromised by its association with the Tsarist autocracy and unable to match the ferment and rigor of contemporary secular Russian thought.

Non-Orthodox Christianity

Two versions of the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Belarusian city of Grodno. Originally a Catholic church (old building pictured left), the Russian Orthodox Church seized it in 1804 and converted it. In the late 19th century, it was rebuilt in a pseudo-Russian style (pictured right).

Despite Tsarist Russia originating in the northern heartland of Eastern Orthodoxy, the expansion and circumstances of the state brought it into contact with other Christian denominations. Catholics were the largest non-Orthodox Christian group in the empire, almost wholly from the territories acquired from the collapse of the Commonwealth around the turn of the 19th century; Ruthenia (contemporary Ukraine and Belarus), Poland, and the southern Baltics. Russian policy towards Catholics oscillated depending on the political situation, largely being dependent on the relationship with subjugated Poland. Anti-Catholic oppression and sentiment ramped up following the failed Polish insurrections of 1830 and 1863, with Catholic education restricted, Catholic monasteries closed, and forced conversion efforts being implemented.

The Ruthenian Uniate Church established by the Union of Brest in 1596 was abolished under the Russian Empire. The Church had been created as a compromise by parts of the Ruthenian Orthodox populations of the PLC to transfer authority to the Pope while maintaining Eastern Orthodox liturgy. The Russians forcefully reintegrated them into the Orthodox mold in 1839, though they persisted afterwards, forming a major part of the Eastern Catholic Churches.

Protestantism was present in the Russian Empire through its northern Baltic and Finnish possessions, as a result of conversion efforts by the Swedes and local Baltic German population who had joined the Protestant Reformation. Alongside the Finns and Baltic Germans, the Latvians and Estonians were largely Lutheran. Oppression towards them was minimal, with the Baltic Germans enjoying a special status in the Russian Empire following the integration of the region in the 18th century. Despite surface-level similarities regarding qualms with the Catholics, the Russians never truly sought to ally with the Protestants, largely writing off the whole of Western Christianity as being fallen. In 1570 Ivan the Terrible invited an exiled Hussite, Jan Rokita, to make his case to him; Ivan strongly disagreed with his case and afterwards refused to even acknowledge the Protestants as Christians.

The last major non-Orthodox Christian group were the Armenians, whose national Apostolic Church would be present as a consequence of the Russian campaigns in the Caucasus during the 19th century. The Armenian Church maintained its autocephalous status, with the Catholicos of All Armenians residing at Etchmiadzin within Russian territory after 1828. More Armenian territory was ceded to Russia in the late 19th century as a consequence of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Russia stylized itself as the protector of Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire, with this being a big part of the decline of the Ottoman Empire; this extended to the non-Orthodox Christians largely living outside of the Ottomans' European possessions. The large Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire were included in this, especially as they began facing increased oppression as Turkish nationalism was picking up in the late 19th century; they subsequentially endorsed the idea of Russia being their protector. As part of a series of genocides against Christians in the Ottoman Empire's final years, tensions between the Turks and Armenians would blow over during World War I, where accusations of Armenian support of collaboration with the enemy Russians in the Caucasian front would be used as justification for the Armenian Genocide.

Non-Christian faiths

The Mukhtarov Mosque in Baku c. 1910, as photographed by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

Islam emerged as the largest non-Christian faith in Tsarist Russia by the end of its existence, owing to the large Muslim populations on the Steppe and in Central Asia. They were present largely amongst the Turkic and Caucasian populations of the empire. Russian policy towards Islam varied throughout the Tsarist era; when Ivan the Terrible absorbed the Khanate of Kazan in 1552, they inherited the polity's large native Muslim populous; a similar scenario occurred in 1556 with his conquest of the Khanate of Astrakhan. attempts were made to incentivize and force conversion, such as the destruction of mosques and legal incentives towards baptism. Over time, especially during the imperial era, toleration increased. Under Catherine the Great, the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly was established in 1788; it served effectively as the Muslim version of the Holy Synod, used to organize and control the Islamic clergy. This practice was adopted in the Volga-Ural regions and was also largely imported to Central Asia following its conquest. The exception was the Caucasus. The Russian conquest of the Caucasus was fiercely opposed by the Muslim populations of the region and involved jihadi resistance through things such as the Caucasian Imamate; ultimately the Caucasian War would result in the brutal subjugation and Russification of the region, with the Circassians in particular undergoing exile and genocide after a century of war.

Jews, who grew to make up a large part of the empire, were subject to series of discriminatory regulations. Buddhism was also present in Tsarist Russia via the Mongols, specifically the Buryats and Kalmyks north of contemporary Mongolia and off the European coast of the Caspian Sea respectively. The Kalmyks migrated to the lower Volga steppe in the 17th century, settling in an area known today as Kalmykia; they subsequentially accepted Russian suzerainty. After conflicts with Russian settlers, many migrated back to Central Asia in the 18th century in a process that resulted in tens of thousands of them dying. Buryatia was incorporated by the Siberian conquest in the 17th century. Both maintained their variants of Tibetan Buddhism under state supervision. Many of the absorbed populations in Tsarist Russia, from the Turks, to Uralic peoples, to peoples of the Siberian far east and Alaska maintained pre-existing Tengrist and animist belief systems, often incorporating them into Christianity or Islam via syncretism; in more remote areas, they were able to continue practicing them well into the 20th century. Many were subject to conversion efforts by individual Russians or the state, such as the peoples of Russian Alaska.

Ethnocultural divisions

The All-Russian nation: Mother Russia, representing (Great) Russians, flanked by personifications of Belarusians (White Russians) and Ukrainians (Little Russians), respectively, who look towards her as she leads them under the Russian flag and eagle

Tsarist Russia was a diverse place, with a multitude of different ethnic groups. In the 1897 census, ethnic Russians made up 44% of the empire, a plurality, but not a majority. Compounded with the Ruthenians (Ukrainians and Belarusians, who made up 18% and 4% respectively), East Slavs made up around 68% of the empire's population. The Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Belarusians, were the largest ethnic groups at that point.

Attitudes to fellow Slavs varied wildly amongst the Tsarist state. Internationally, it propped itself as the defender of the wider Slavic community, being for large parts of its history the preeminent and even sometimes only independent Slavic state. This big brother narrative gained popularity amongst the South and non-Polish West Slavs, who in the 19th century began to undergo their national awakenings and campaign for independence against the Habsburgs and the Ottomans; the Russians invested and backed these efforts under a Panslavic ideological framework. The Panslavic colors became based on the colors of the Russian flag in homage to this, being featured on most Slavic states' flags.

However, when it came to the fellow Slavs living in Tsarist Russia, they were subject to institutionalized oppression and Russification. As the primary enemy of Russia during the Tsardom, with their occupation of Moscow in the early 17th century still remembered, many Russians believed that they and the Poles were locked into an external struggle, with a proud and independent Polish nation signaling the end of Russia. The Russians also viewed the Poles as corrupted by their longstanding integration with the west and doubted that they, as Catholics, would ever truly submit to an Orthodox monarchy.

Poles were also blamed for severing Ukrainians and Belarusians apart from Russia and making them believe they were separate peoples. The East Slavs, or Rus, formerly united even during the days of the Tatar Yoke, were separated by the Lithuanian campaigns in Ruthenia in the Late Middle Ages, which the Poles aided; the areas that they conquered would undergo linguistic and cultural divergences that resulted in the ethnogenesis of Ukrainians and Belarusians. The Russians maintained, under the idea of a triune of Russians, that the Ukrainians (Little Russians) and Belarusians (White Russians) were subgroups of a greater Russian ethnic group, of which the (Great) Russians were also a part of. This idea began to be formulated by the remaining Orthodox clergy of Ukraine after the Ukrainian Cossacks submitted to the Russian Tsar in 1654, an event that would later be commemorated in Russia as the reunification of it and Ukraine, with the 1674 Kievan Synopsis serving to justify it under this lense. The narrative would become more used as the Russians seized the lion's share of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late 18th century, absorbing most of the Ruthenians.

Under Russian rule, Ukraine and Belarus underwent extensive Russification campaigns, however, they failed to extinguish their local identities; in fact, both Ukraine and Belarus underwent a national reawakening under the Russian Empire, and Ukrainians and Belarusians (recorded as Little and White Russians respectively) still made up nearly a quarter of Tsarist Russia's population according to the 1897 census. Despite this, the degree of cultural similarity and historical ties of the Rus people did make the issue a contentious one in Ruthenia, with many Ruthenians arguing that they were indeed core, but distinct parts of the Russian ethnicity, arguing against full-fledged independence and instead for negotiated autonomy. As Russification efforts intensified, popular opinion in Ruthenia turned against the Tsars, with many Belarusians aiding the Poles in their 1863 uprising. In the aftermath of the revolt, a fresh wave of Russificatory policies emerged, most famously the Ems decree by Alexander II, which largely banned the publication of Ukrainian; similar effective bans were placed on Belarusian for most of the 19th century, which furthered the rise of Ruthenian nationalism. Russia's failure in World War I prompted a major turning point in Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism, as the ineffectiveness of the Tsarist and later successive revolutionary governments helped shift the narrative firmly towards independence, with both peoples establishing brief periods of statehood, however, they were eventually reabsorbed by the forces of the Russian-based Bolsheviks into the Soviet Union; although constituted as a separate republic from Russia, they would only gain independence in 1991.

The non-Slavs of Tsarist Russia, often called inorodtsy, were administered under various local agreements. These included the Finns, Balts, Estonians, Jews, Tatars, Caucasian peoples, Central Asians, and Siberians, among others. These agreements arranged from being granted decent autonomy such as Finland to being under direct Tsarist control. The contrast between the Russian Tsarist centralization and the multiethnic character of the state was a key tension in Tsarist Russia, one the culminated in the various ethnic wars that engulfed it after its death during the Russian Civil War.

Jews

See also: History of the Jews in Russia

Jewish Children with their Teacher in Samarkand, c. 1910, by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

The history of Jews in Russia goes back to the Kievan Rus, where a small Jewish population was recorded, largely in Kiev's Jewish quarter. They also existed in places such as Chernigov, but were generally miniscule. This continued into the era of the Tatar Yoke and the rise of the Tsardom. Documents indicate the existence of Jews in Muscovite Russia in 1471. They were subject to discrimination; officially, a ban on Jewish residence in Russia was in effect from 1479. This ban was meant to enforce Eastern Orthodox religious purity and protect Russian merchantry. This ban was in practice not always in force, with Jews having a small presence in Russia prior to the late-18th century; nevertheless, it was upheld by multiple Tsars. Ivan the Terrible banned all Jews from entering or residing in Russia and forcibly drowned all the Jews of Polotsk who refused to convert after he captured the city in 1563. Tsarina Catherine I in 1727 issued a decree that expelled all Jews from Russia, citing alleged illicit economic activity on their behalf; an even stronger measure by Tsarina Elizabeth in 1742, meant to combat evasion of the prior decree, ordered the immediate expulsion of all Jews of Russian unless the converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. When the mercantile city of Riga appealed to her, citing the losses her decree would have on the local merchantry, she replied "I do not wish to obtain any benefit or profit from the enemies of Jesus Christ." Even her father, the western-oriented Peter the Great, when asked by western advisors to consider allowing Jewish merchantry, replied

"I prefer to see in our midst nations professing Mohammedanism and paganism rather than Jews. They are rogues and cheats. It is my endeavor to eradicate evil, not to multiply it."

Map showing the percentage of Jews in the Pale of Settlement and Congress Poland, The Jewish Encyclopedia (1905)

Rigid anti-Judaic and antisemitic sentiment in Russia was common, limiting its Jewish population for most of its history. However, in the neighboring Commonwealth, the Jewish population swelled during the Early Modern Era, with them being allowed in by successive Polish-Lithuanian monarchs as refugees following expulsions elsewhere in Europe, staring with Casimir the Great in the 14th century. This population spread throughout Poland-Lithuania, with many also going into Ruthenia. In the shtetls, or towns with a large Jewry, they traditionally ruled themselves according to the halakha, and communicated with the central government via a shtadlan. By the dawn of the 1770s, it is estimated that there were roughly 800 thousand Jews living in the PLC. As a direct consequence of this, when Russia initiated its Partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795, this state that had been under an official Jew ban since the 15th century now had absorbed a huge chunk of this Eastern European Jewry. To adapt to this new situation, Catherine the Great established the Pale of Settlement in 1791, to further settlement along the territories along the coast of the Black Sea that had been recently acquired from the Ottoman Empire. The Pale of Settlement was an area, of varying borders over time, where the Russian Jewry were permitted to love. The area generally consisted of Ruthenia, Russian Poland, Lithuania, and Bessarabia.

Despite being a safe haven for European Jewry, the Jews under the PLC still faced institutionalized discrimination and restrictions known as disabilities, and this continued under Russian control. Jews of the Pale were not permitted to leave it without special permission. They were allowed to vote in local elections, but even in areas where they constituted a majority, their vote amounted to a third of the other residents. A Russian-speaking member of a Jewish community was to serve as the intermediary between said community and the government; they were known as the crown rabbi. An 1827 decree made Jews liable for military service and mandated that each Jewish community supply four soldiers per thousand people, legally between twelve and twenty five, to the military. The qahals, which governed Jewish communities, would often resort to kidnapping and informers, with many Jews preferring to runway.

While Jews were generally excluded from living outside the Pale, certain communities were allowed to live in certain areas. Jews who had been conscripted, certain artisans, and members of the wealthy First Guild, were permitted to reside outside; this is the origin of the Jews of Udmurtia and Tatarstan. Additionally, local Jewish populations in areas like Central Asia that were conjured after the Pale was established were permitted to remain.

Antisemitism in the Russian Empire began to seriously pick up in the 19th century, as the result of the rise of Slavophilic, Eastern Orthodox Russian nationalism and the mass addition of the area of the world with the most Jews into an already very antisemitic society. This antisemitic push was both popularly and governmentally pushed. Like many of the other ethnic groups of the empire, assimilation campaigns were initiated, starting with Tsar Nicholas I, who aimed to eradicate Jewish life. In the 1840s, a special tax was imposed upon the Jewry, used to fund "Jewish schools" that aimed at assimilating them, with the teachers mandated to be Christian. Growing payots was forbidden, and Jews were classified into two categories: useful (merchants), and non-useful (everyone else). These measures were partially rolled back by Alexander II. Popular sentiment remained against Jews broadly, with Alexander II's permission of Jews who graduated secondary school to settle outside the Pale bringing widespread resentment. Pogroms in the Russian Empire had already been occurring by this point, with Odessa in Ukraine being wracked by multiple over the course of the Russian Empire's final century. Tensions boiled over after Alexander II was assassinated by the nihilist organization Narodnaya Volya in 1881. The involvement of Hesya Helfman, a Belarusian Jew, as well as Ignacy Hryniewiecki, a Pole who was falsely rumored to carry Jewish ancestry, was used as the basis for an antisemitic backlash, with a wave of pogroms gripping Russia in the succeeding three years. These attacks, fueled by economic conditions and various rumors (such as the Jews ritually killing children), compounded with the poor economic conditions in the Pale, helped promulgate a mass exodus of Jewry from Imperial Russia, with many emigrating to other parts of Europe, the United States, and even to Ottoman Palestine under the influence of the burgeoning Zionist movement.

Victims of a pogrom in Odessa, 1905

Tsar Alexander III rolled back his father's lax policy towards the Jews, codified together in the 1882 May Laws, which officially blamed the Jews for Alexander II's death. The laws banned Jews from living in rural areas, even in the Pale, and restricted their occupations. They were forced into the overcrowding shetels, or communities with a large Jewish population. Konstantin Pobedonostsev stated the aim of the government with regard to the Jews was that "One third will die out, one third will leave the country and one third will be completely dissolved in the surrounding population". In 1891, Jews were officially expelled from Moscow. The Russian government actively encouraged pogroms, and another, bloodier wave of them occurred in the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, with a major pogrom in Kishinev in 1903 initiating it. The scapegoating of the Jews in Russia culminated in the Beilis affair, where Menahem Mendel Beilis was falsely accused, tried, but ultimately acquitted of ritually murdering a thirteen-year-old boy. The institutionalized and omnipresent antisemitism in Russian society drew mass international condemnation, with international Jewry organizing immigration efforts. Nonetheless, this behavior continued into World War I, with Jews being accused of spying for Germany. It was only with the February Revolution that brief relief was brought, with the Provisional Government abolishing all religious and ethnic discriminatory laws, though antisemitic violence resurged after the October Revolution and during the ensuing Civil War.

Demographics

See also: 1897 Russian census

Censi in Tsarist Russia were conducted on a large sporadic and local basis. However, these were rarely at a national level; Tsarist Russia had only one empire-wide census, that of 1897. First proposed in the 1870s, it was approved by Tsar Nicholas II in 1895 and its findings were published from 1898 to 1905 via Hollerith card machines. The total population of the Russian Empire was recorded at 125,640,021. The census analyzed the religious demographics of the empire, which were as follows:

Faith	Number	%
Eastern Orthodox	87,123,604	69.34
Muslim	13,906,972	11.07
Roman Catholic	11,467,994	9.13
Rabbinic Jewish	5,215,805	4.15
Lutherans	3,572,653	2.84
Old Believers	2,204,596	1.75
Armenian Apostolic	1,179,241	0.94
Buddhists	433,863	0.34
Reformed	85,400	0.07
Mennonite	66,564	0.05
Armenian Catholic	38,840	0.03
Baptist	38,139	0.03
Karaite Jewish	12,894	0.01
Anglican	4,183	0.00
Other Christian denominations	3,952	0.00
Other non-Christian denominations	285,321	0.23
TOTAL	125,640,021	100.00

The census did not officially analyze ethnicity, instead only analyzing languages spoken. Nevertheless, these offer insights into the ethnography of the Russian Empire and function as the closest government record of it. Under the ideology of the Triune Russia, Russian is labeled as Great Russian, Ukrainian as Little Russian, and Belarusian as White Russian. The following are the records for the twenty five most spoken languages in Tsarist Russia at the time.

Language	Native speakers	%
Great Russian	55,667,469	44.31
Little Russian	22,380,551	17.81
Polish	7,931,307	6.31
White Russian	5,885,547	4.68
Jewish	5,063,156	4.03
Kyrgyz-Kaisak	4,084,139	3.25
Tatar	3,737,627	2.97
German	1,790,489	1.43
Latvian	1,435,937	1.14
Bashkir	1,321,363	1.05
Lithuanian	1,210,510	0.96
Armenian	1,173,096	0.93
Moldovan	1,121,669	0.89
Mordovian	1,023,841	0.81
Estonian	1,002,738	0.80
Sartic	968,655	0.77
Chuvash	843,755	0.67
Georgian	823,968	0.66
Uzbek	726,534	0.58
Samogitian	448,022	0.36
Other Turkic dialects	440,412	0.35
Votyak	420,970	0.34
Mari	375,439	0.30
Tajik	350,397	0.28
Buryat	288,663	0.23

There is evidence of governmental tampering with the official numbers; the number of Russian speakers was possibly overstated, while the number of Polish speakers downplayed. Plans for another census existed as far back as 1908, but the imperial treasury struggled to fund the endeavor. A second general census was finally scheduled for December 1915, but World War I led to its indefinite postponement, and the collapse of the empire in 1917 meant that no nationwide general census would be carried out until the 1926 Soviet census.

Economy

See also: Economy of the Russian Empire

The degree of state intervention in Tsarist Russia is often seen as a predecessor for the Soviet Union and its style of economic micromanagement.

Throughout the Tsarist era; from the Muscovite period to the Tsardom era, to the Empire, the Russian economy was unique amongst European polities for how much the state was involved in the economy. Under the Grand Princes, there was little distinction between princely and state property, and the Grand Prince, particularly as the Tsarist model of governance was developed under Ivan III and his successors, began amassing extensive control of the Muscovite economy. Through state monopolies, state-sponsored manufacturing and trading initiatives, the frequent direction of modernization efforts by the Tsars or their high-ranking ministers, or serf-funded military estates, there was rarely an aspect of Russian economic life where the state acted as a passive player. Likely inherited in part from the Mongols, whose economic micromanagement contrasted with that of the East Slavs under the Kyivan Rus, the degree to which state intervention in the economy was so normalized in Russian society is often held up as enabling the popularity of Marxist ideologies around the turn of the century, enabling the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917 and culminating in the Soviet Union. The large degree of state control in the economy prevented the development of free-market capitalism or any seriously independent economic force, which, compounded with the longstanding communal history of Russia via the mir system, made the Marxist ideas of state-run enterprises and collective ownership more palatable to many in Russia.

Grand Principality and Tsardom economies (15th to 18th centuries)

See also: Economy of Kievan Rus'

The Genoese city of Kaffa (now known as Feodosia) became a center of Muscovite trade output in the 15th century.

The economy of the Kyivan Rus was one of the strongest in High Medieval Europe at a point, but following the severing of trade ties between the Kyivan Rus and Byzantium, the collapse of the state, and the Mongol Conquest, the economy floundered as cities were despoiled and the East Slavs were forced to pay tribute to their new Tatar overlords. In the 15th century, as the Mongol successor state of the Golden Horde began to collapse following the Timurid invasions, the Muscovites began expanding their trade network, with merchants going to Crimea and trading with the Crimean Goths and the Genoese in Kaffa. Crimea also served as the vantage points for Armenian and Genoese merchants to enter into Russia. Trade along the Volga also increased during this era, with Kazan replacing Bolgar as the principal trading center along the river. Kazan and the neighboring Nogai Horde provided Russia with many traded goods, most notably horses.

Since the days of the Kyivan Rus, Novgorod had served as the central trading city of the Russian people, and their outlet to Western Europe. As the gathering of the Russian lands occurred, the Novgorodian Republic was annexed into Muscovy, and Novgorod's trade importance was as such inherited by the Grand Prince. Muscovy, and later Russia's importance in the Baltic trade increased at the turn of the 16th century, as the Hanseatic League went into decline; Peterhof, the Hanseatic kontor in Novgorod, was closed by Ivan III in 1494. Despite this, Ivan sought to open up external trade as much as possible, setting up numerous trading outposts during his reign, most notably the fortress of Ivangorod on the Narva. This was continued by his successors, including Ivan the Terrible, who established contract with the English via the Muscovy Company, establishing a trade route via the White Sea through Archangel, bypassing the often hostile Swedes and Polish-Lithuanians in the Baltic. Especially following the loss of Ingria in the aftermath of the Livonian War at the end of the 16th century, the Archangel route became the principal conduit of Russo-Western trade. Anglo-Russian relations experienced a downturn in the mid-17th century during the English Civil War, as the Muscovy Company was accused of harboring Parliamentarian sympathies; this culminated in the expulsion of all English merchants from Russia outside of Archangel in 1649, as a reaction to the trial and execution of Charles I; Royalist refugees were also taken in and settled in Moscow during this period. Although tensions thawed following the Royalist Restoration in 1660, the English never managed to recover their position as the dominant western merchantry in Russia, a position that for the remainder of the 17th century was replaced by the Dutch.

The city of Novgorod, seized by Muscovy in 1478, was one of Russia's most important trading cities until its destruction by Ivan the Terrible in 1570.

During the appanage era, the Rus principalities were more often then not oriented around a town, often eponymously. As Muscovy absorbed these lands into its domain, they promptly became centers of Grand Princely and later Imperial administration. Typical Russian towns during the Muscovite and Tsardom eras consisted of artisans who produced a variety of goods, typically for the domestic Russian market. The countryside produced most long-distance trade items, such as fish or salt. The economy during this time largely remained agricultural, with most of the population being subsistence farmers. The pomestye system, whereby land grants given in exchange for military service, was the backbone of Tsarist military capacity, tying the fate of the agricultural economy closely with that of the state. As Russia increasingly centralized in the 16th century, more strain on the peasantry occurred. The reign of Ivan the Terrible unleashed great economic disruption via the Livonian War, Crimeo-Tatar raids, and the rapaciousness of the new oprichniki, who destroyed the great trading city of Novgorod, severely uprooted productive land, and abused the peasantry to the extent that many began fleeing their lands. The extensive disruption helped precipitate the Time of Troubles, in which many peasant leaders and wannabe-Tsars utilized peasant support to amass power.

Following the Time of Troubles, serfdom was formalized as the predominant institution of labor in Russian society. The broad social and economic upheaval inflicted upon Russia from the Time of Troubles prompted this as the Russian nobility needed to be kept solvent, and permanently tying the peasantry to their lords was seen as the way to accomplish this. The Sobornoye Ulozheniye of 1649, a revised legal code implemented by Tsar Alexis, effectively codified the institution of serfdom in Russia; serfdom in Russia closely resembled that of chattel slavery, especially as the 17th century marched onwards and the rights of the serfs further eroded.

Russia's main exports before the Petrine reforms was fur, as the age of fur intensified during the mini-ice age. Control of the fur trade informed the Muscovite conquest of Novgorod in 1478, as well as the expansion into Siberia starting in the 1580s and its related colonial efforts in the New World. Salt was also important; the House of Stroganov, which spearheaded the initial colonization of Siberia, initially built themselves off the salt trade. Domestic manufacturing was essentially absent and there was strong state interference in the economy, with monopolies being held by the Tsars over certain luxury goods.

The Petrine and Cathrinian economies (18th centuries to 1861)

Peter the Great at Deptford Dockyard, by Daniel Maclise (1857). Peter's observations of Western manufacturing were imported to Russia in order to boost its economic output.

Under Peter the Great, Russia's first major manufacturing enterprises were founded, largely pertaining to metallurgy and textiles, often in service of his wars. The Urals began to be developed as a center of iron production during his reign via state-sponsored foundries making armaments. He also encouraged the development of merchant companies and improving domestic infrastructure, such as the Vyshny Volochyok Waterway, a canal system linking the Baltic and Volga. After Ingria was recaptured from Sweden during the Great Northern War, Peter ordered the construction of the city of Saint Petersburg on the mouth of the Neva, finally replacing the long in-decline Novgorod as the country's principal Baltic trading outlet and Archangel as its main trading outlet. The new Baltic port city swiftly became Russia's principal commercial hub. The Russian economy evolved under Peter to have a surface-level modernizing, exporting economy over a layer of a serf-based agricultural economy. The next great Russian monarch, Catherine the Great, would see the acquisition of the Black Sea littoral and Crimea via the takeover of the Crimean Khanate. The expansion of Russia into these rich lands of the Pontic Steppe, known by the Polish-Lithuanians as the Wild Fields would provide access to some of the most fertile lands on Earth, prompting an influx of settlers to populate what was now called New Russia; these new agricultural resources, as well as other exports, were now also more easily able to be shipped with access to the Black Sea, which by proxy granted access to the Mediterranean. As a result of the Petrine and Catherinian developments, Russia's foreign trade expanded significantly throughout the 18th century, with grain becoming increasingly important. Great Britain was the country's most important trading partner during this era.

During the age of the Grand Princes, the taxation system constituted of levies on land ownership and personal property, industrial and commercial production, service obligations, and judicial fees. Landowners were required to pay a tribute, or dan, a "recension squirrel" (pischaya belka), and sometimes an additional "supplement" (primet). Marriage was also taxed and commerce as well via tolls introduced during the Kyivan and Mongol eras. Commoners were obliged to assist in the transit of goods as well as fund the yam, or the Mongol-era postal service that was preserved following independence. As the peasantry became less free with the arrival of serfdom, taxation became more onerous throughout the Tsardom era. The Petrine reforms and wars were often funded via aggressive taxes, most famously the beard tax, which forced the Russian nobility to shave their facial hair in an attempt to fit into contemporary western fashion trends. More significantly, the soul tax in 1722 implemented a per-capita tax on all male serfs and state peasants; payments that were the responsibility of their landlords, which further entrenched serfdom. The soul tax remained the principal source of Tsarist revenue for over a century. Under Peter III in 1762, the Russian nobility were granted tax-exempt status, which was reinforced by his wife, overthrower, and successor, Catharine the Great, who was under the influence of French Physiocratism. Catherine further granted the nobility preferential treatment in 1785, when she granted them full ownership of the serfs and their lands, further entrenching the Nobility's dominance, but also locking the Empire into a serfdom-oriented model right as the Industrial Revolution was kicking off.

Industrialization (1861 to 1917)

Reading of the Emancipation Manifesto to serfs. Painting by Boris Kustodiev, 1907.

As the 19th century trudged along, it became apparent that reform was needed. Serf labor was inefficient, immobile, and effectively rendered productivity growth non-existent. The Russian nobility was becoming increasingly indebted, with the majority of Russians serfs being mortgaged to state credit institutions by their lords by 1861. Russia itself was in great debt following the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Following the shocking Russian military performance in the Crimean War in the 1850s, reform became seen as inevitable by the new Tsar, Alexander II, who, with the nobility having lost their political leverage via their debt to the state, was able to emancipate the Russian serfs in 1861. With the Tsar's consent, 23 million people were freed from the institution of serfdom, but to compensate the embittered nobility, the new freedmen had to pay redemption payments to their former lords for the next 49 years in exchange for the new land that they received, which were typically less and of lower quality than what they had farmed while in bondage. Nevertheless, emancipation did release a substantial labor force that settled into cities, helping finally promulgate the Russian Industrial Revolution. The final decades of the 19th century saw rapid infrastructure developments, most notably railroad construction, with the Trans-Siberian Railway being built during this era. The expansion of the Russian railroad network, often funded by foreign capital (primarily of Belgio-French origin) helped facilitate greater internal and external exporting capabilities.

Much of this economic development was undertaken by Sergei Witte, Russia's Finance Minister who dominated economic policy in the 1890s. Witte utilized high protective tariffs to shield Russian manufacturing, secure foreign loans, subsidize core industries, and implement a gold standard in 1897. Russia's industrial output grew by an average of 8% throughout the 1890s, becoming the fastest in the world. Production of steel, coal, and textiles all swelled, while the Baku oilfields made the Empire briefly the largest oil producer around the turn of the century.

Haymaking farmworkers taking a break in 1909. Photo by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.

In spite of this, Russia remained predominantly agrarian by the turn of the century, with the peasantry still consisting of 80% of the population at the turn of the 20th century, and living standards remaining low; in some areas, the lack of adequate land to support the peasantry had actually caused the quality of life to decline. Famines remained common, with a particularly severe one from 1891 to 1892 killing close to half a million people. Continued industrialization was interrupted by the Russo-Japanese War and First Russian Revolution. In 1906, Pyotr Stolypin came to power as Prime Minister, under the Tsar Nicholas II. Stolypin implemented a variety of major economic reforms that helped modernize the Russian economy. In particular, he attempted to dissolve the mirs, or peasant communes that held collective decision and land authority in their respective villages, replacing it with individual peasant proprietorship so that a class of independent peasants could develop and be more productive; this process was halted after his assassination.

Despite these reforms in the decades since emancipation, the Russian Empire performed poorly in World War I, with the conflict demonstrating all the weaknesses and woes of the Russian economy. The mobilization of Russia pulled tens of millions out of agriculture, precipitating a massive collapse in food output. The strained railway system proved unable to support both the front and the cities. Inflation skyrocketed, while food and fuel shortages became increasingly omnipresent, and public discontent culminated in the Russian Revolution in 1917, as the public blamed Nicholas II for the economic, social, and battlefield woes the country was experiencing, forcing him to abdicate.

Military

Main articles: Army of the Tsardom of Russia, Army of Peter the Great, Imperial Russian Army, Imperial Russian Navy, and Imperial Russian Air Service

See also: Military history of the Russian Empire

A noble cavalryman

The military of Tsarist Russia evolved from the armies of the Rus' principalities that gradually emerged with the disintegration of the Kyivan Rus and the Mongol conquest. As the Rus principalities gained independence, the united armed forces of the Kyivan Rus gave way to personal forces of the various princes. Until the Mongol conquest, Rus princes carried with them a retinue of druzhina, or heavy cavalry that would typically fight dismounted. In the 14th century, the druzhina were gradually replaced by feudal, boyar or prince-headed heavy cavalry units that consisted of landed gentry and were accompanied by kholops. Under Ivan III in the late 15th century, an entirely aristocratic army, known as the Landed Army, was formed for the Grand Principality of Moscow in 1482. Typically equipped as mounted archers, it mostly consisted of nobility and service class people, who were accompanied by armed kholops. At the end of the 16th century, the Landed Army consisted of no more than 50 thousand men in the Tsardom of Russia.

The creation of the Landed Army was part of a broader process of centralization of the military that accompanied the wider centralization of Russia during this era. Prior to Ivan III, the Muscovite military primarily consisted of disorganized peasant levies, and the Grand Prince was unable to compel the subordinate princes to directly place their armies under him, only the ability to call them to arms. The shift began under Ivan III's predecessor, Vasily II, during the Muscovite War of Succession in the early 15th century, and was largely finalized by Ivan III by the end of the century. Vasily III continued this in 1522 when he turned the city of Kolomna, just outside Moscow, into his summer and autumn base of operations for campaigns along the Oka River. Under the Tsardom era, the army consisted of various polks, or regiments, commanded by a voivode.

Painting of the streltsy by Sergey Ivanov, 1908

The 16th century saw the Military Revolution sweep Europe, making gunpowder and portable firearms integral parts of European armies. These changes came to Russia, where under Ivan the Terrible, it would become one of the gunpowder empires. Gunpowder warfare had already been introduced to Russia in the form of cannons, which had seen used as far back as 1393, and had seen large scale use after the Italian engineer Aristotele Fioravanti created a large cannon foundry in Moscow. Ivan the Terrible established the streltsy, or units equipped with firearms, sometime by 1550. Initially equipped with arquebuses, they first saw combat at the 1552 siege of Kazan, and would go on to see frequent use as Russia was embroiled in a state of near permanent war for the rest of his reign. The streltsy were initially recruited from free tradesmen and the rural population. They were overseen primarily by the Streltsy Department and consisted of a Muscovite branch that defended Moscow and the Kremlin, as well as a "municipal" branch that defended everywhere else. Despite being an elite force, the streltsy were poorly paid and treated, and they would often engage in rebellions against the government.

At the end of the 16th century, the Russian army consisted of up to 110 thousand men. However, the coming 17th century would expose many weaknesses of the Tsarist army. The Time of Troubles did major damage to it, as the Landed Army proved to militarily ineffective at combating domestic revolts and foreign invasions from the Swedes, Crimeo-Tatars, and Polish–Lithuanians, while the poorly treated streltsy often joined and abated serf rebellions. Following the failed Smolensk War against Poland–Lithuania in the 1630s, a process of westernization began under Tsar Alexis, starting with the general replacement of the Landed Army with professional army units such as Reiters, Dragoons, Pikemen and Musketeers; these became known as the New Order Regiments. When Peter the Great came to power, the military began to be further reformed as part of the Petrine reforms. The last remnants of the Landed Army were disbanded by him, and he began to compose a new army from the New Order Regiments, Cossacks, streltsy, and zheldaks, incorporating the latest advancements in European militaries; knowledge partially attained from a private toy army he amassed as a child.

The Morning of the Streltsy Execution, by Vasily Surikov, 1881. Depicts Peter I's execution of streltsy troops following the 1698 uprising.

The streltsy, by now a hereditary position, had become a major political force in Tsarist Russia in the 17th century, frequently picking fights with the central government, such as supporting the Old Believers during the raskol. They increasingly became opposed any reforms to the military, and much like the Janissaries in the Ottoman Empire, were not afraid to violently resist such efforts and attempt to play kingmaker in regards to the Russian throne. When Peter came to power alongside his brother, Ivan V, in 1682, they launched a revolt to keep Ivan as the senior Tsar and him as the junior Tsar, with his sister, Sophia, acting as the autocratic regent; this was despite the fact that the Boyar Duma had selected Peter as sole Tsar under regency from his mother, Natalya, since Ivan had serious mental deficiencies. With this, and having seen some of his relatives be personally killed during the uprising, compounded with their opposition to modernization, made the streltsy and Peter natural enemies. In 1698, when they again rebelled to reinstate a since deposed Sophia, Peter infamously suppressed the revolt and savagely tortured the streltsy. Already in 1689, the streltsy had begun to be disbanded following Sophia's deposition, and this process would largely finish by the 1720s, though some cities retained theirs until the late 18th century.

Peter's military, largely influenced by imported western minds such as the Scottish general Patrick Gordon and the Genevan admiral François Le Fort, who helped establish the modern Russian navy, saw its first major test in the Great Northern War against Sweden, where Russia attempted to regain Ingria and, together with a coalition of Poland–Lithuania and Denmark–Norway, end Swedish hegemony in the Baltic. Despite the reforms, poor leadership, compounded with the vigor and brilliance of the Swedish King, Carolus Rex, led to massive defeats of the anti-Swedish coalition, with a Russian attempt to take the city of Narva failing spectacularly in 1700, despite outnumbering the Swedes four-to-one. Ultimately, the Swedish forces getting bogged down in a later invasion of Russia led to a decisive battle at Poltava in contemporary Ukraine, where the Russians defeated the Swedes in 1709 and effectively forced them on the defensive for the remaining decade of the war.

Russian Imperial Guard at Borodino. 1912 painting by Nikolai Samokish.

The military of the Russian Empire largely consisted of peasant conscripts, though starting in the 19th century, the navy preferred urban recruits for more technical roles. For most of the 18th century, service was for life; this was changed to 25 years in 1793 and gradually lessened in the years after the Napoleonic Wars, eventually coming down to twelve years of active service in 1855, plus three years in the reserve. The wars against Revolutionary and Imperial France around the turn of the 19th century compelled changes to the Russian military under the reformist new Tsar, Alexander I. He created the Ministries of War and the Navy in 1802, which aided in the management of the army and navy respectively. However, the Russian military still bore many of l'ancien régime like structures and tendencies that France's rejection of had contributed so much to its success on the field; Russia and its coalition saw decisive defeats in the Revolutionary and early Napoleonic Wars, most notably during the disastrous War of the Third Coalition, where Napoleon pummeled a joint Austro-Russian force at Austerlitz in 1805. Starting with the War of the Fourth Coalition, the Russians began to rebound, with them fighting a major and inconvlusive battle at Eylau in February 1807. Napoleon later invaded Russia in 1812, defeating the Russians at Borodino and capturing Moscow, but was forced to retreat as the Russians refused to engage in peace talks and the Russian Winter set in; this effectively marked the end of Napoleon's dominance on Europe.

Following the Napoleonic Wars, Tsar Nicholas I maintained the large imperial army to maintain Russia's position in Europe. From the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the Battle of Oltenița in 1853, the Imperial Russian Army numbered at around 1 million men, while the navy also was the third largest. The latter was the first engagement of the Crimean War, in which Russia was pitted against a coalition of the Ottomans, French, and British. The ensuing defeat of Russia promulgated new reforms under Tsar Alexander II, who delegated the effort to Count Dmitry Milyutin, the Minister of War. Both branches of the imperial military had a shortage of noncommissioned officers, with virtually no one aside from a few special units being composed of individuals who did not want to become an officer. Following the Crimean conflict, there were three main sources of officers in the Russian army; the Page Corps, the cadet corps, and the junker military schools, while for the navy, it was their cadet corps. He also finally gave the army permanent barracks, previously, they had used only dugouts and shacks. Milyutin's reforms molded the Tsarist military into what it would be for the rest of Tsarist Russia's existence.

Damage to the battleship Oryol following the Battle of Tsushima

As Russia began to focus more on catching up with Europe socially and developmentally in the late 19th century, military spending declined as funding was diverted to civilian spending, paying off foreign loans, and building infrastructure. Aside from major conflicts such as the Russo-Turkish War in the 1870s, as well as the Boxer Revolt in China at the turn of the century, the Russian army spent most of the two decades following the ascension of Alexander III quashing around 1,500 protests as antagonism towards the Tsarist model grew, crushing morale. When Russia went to war with Japan in 1904, it suffered a humiliating defeat, with Japan forcing Russia's Pacific Fleet to stay in anchor, prompting the Baltic Fleet to sail all around the Cape of Good Hope to the Pacific, only to be nearly wiped out at the Battle of Tsushima. As the First Russian Revolution gripped the country in response, many in the military began to mutiny, which helped prompt the October Manifesto. Even afterwards, between fall 1905 and summer 1906, there were around four hundred mutinies in the Russian army.

Grigorovich M-9s towing boats off the coast of Sevastopol

In 1914, Russia entered into World War I. Tsar Nicholas II appointed his cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas, as commander-in-chief. Russia entered the war with the largest army in Europe, and its military might even provoked Germany into war, who believed that they would have no chance to defeat them after 1916. In spite of this, Russia fared poorly in the war, and the Eastern Front saw massive losses for them and their allies. The army had severe tactical and operational issues when compared to the German Army (though it fared better against those of the other Central Powers), and the Russo-Japanese War had resulted in the Russian Navy slipping from being the third largest to sixth, with a rebuilding campaign being incomplete at the time of the July Crisis. In 1912, the same year the naval reconstitution started, the Imperial Russian Air Service was set up, and it saw limited action in the war. Eventually, the military defeats and poor conditions at the home front promulgated the Second Russian Revolution in 1917. Following the ousting of the Tsar in March in part to mutinies from troops who were tired of firing on protestors, the new Provisional Government began referring to the Imperial Russian Army as the Revolutionary Army of Free Russia, and this would continue shortly after the Russian Republic was declared. After the Bolshevik Revolution in November, the entire Russian military fell into disarray, as forces were split between White, Red, and neutral factions, and management became unwieldy. Foreign powers often seized their equipment or attacked them; the White commander Pyotr Wrangel and around 150 thousand of his men were forced to evacuate Crimea after the collapse of the White South Russia regime in 1920, taking the remnants of the Baltic Fleet to French control; they remained docked in French Tunisia until France recognized the USSR in 1924. In general, the Reds, as the eventual victors of the Russian Civil War, would take up most of the remnants of the Tsarist military, transforming them into the Soviet military.

Symbology

Tsarist Russia utilized a multitude of national and governmental symbols. These were generally implemented top down by the Tsarist government. Many of these symbols are still used today in the Russian Federation.

Flags and armorial

Coat of Arms

Main article: Coat of arms of Russia

See also: Coat of arms of the Russian Empire

Yaroslav the Wise of the Kievan Rus had Saint George be his patron saint; he was baptized as George. As such, he featured the saint on his seal. Many other Russian princes would go on to employ him in their symbols. Meanwhile, as early as 1390, a rider had appeared on the seal of Vasily I, the Grand Prince of Moscow. Under Ivan III, a dragon being pierced by a lance of this rider was added, which eventually evolved into the coat of arms of Moscow. The horseman was not identified with any particular figure, and remained so for centuries. Many artists depicted him as reigning Tsars. When Peter the Great came to power however around the turn of the 18th century, he began making a connection between the horseman and the story of Saint George slaying the dragon. This connection was made official by a decree in 1730 under Tsarina Anna.

As Muscovy continued expanding and consolidating under Ivan III, he sought to further his claim to being the successor of the fallen Byzantines and his title of tsar, and as such adopted the imperial double-headed eagle as early as 1472. Under Ivan the Terrible and founding of the Tsardom, the double-headed eagle and Saint George's slaying were combined to form a single coat of arms, with the latter serving as a escutcheon superimposed on the former. With the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1589, a patriarchal cross was added for a time between the heads of the eagle. Under the Romanovs in the early 17th century, three crowns, widely interpreted as representing the conquered kingdoms of Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberia, or the three All-Russian states of (Great) Russia, White Russia (Belarus) and Little Russia (Ukraine). Under Peter the Great, the collar of the Order of St. Andrew was added around the escutcheon and the crown was changed to mirror western crowns and eventually the new imperial crown. The eagle's color was also changed from golden to black. Under Nicholas I, a variant with the arms of Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberia on its left wing and those of Poland, Crimea, and Finland superimposed on the eagle's wings began to be used; later greater achievements would have more arms and have them surround the eagle instead.

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  1472–1502: Seal of Ivan III
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  1584–1667: Coat of arms of the Tsardom of Russia
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  1654: Variant under Tsar Alexis (from the Pereiaslav Agreement)
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  1667–1721: Coat of arms of the Tsardom of Russia
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  1721–1725: Imperial coat of arms under Peter the Great
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  1725–1727: Imperial coat of arms under Catherine I
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  1727–1730: Imperial coat of arms under Peter II
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  1730–1798, 1801–1825: Imperial coat of arms under Anna, Ivan VI, Elizabeth, Peter III, Catherine the Great, and Alexander I
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  1799–1801: Variant coat of arms under Paul I
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  1825–1828: Imperial coat of arms under Nicholas I
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  1828–1856: Imperial coat of arms under Nicholas I
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  1856–1882: Lesser coat of arms under Alexander II
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  1882–1917: Coat of arms under Alexander III and Nicholas II
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  1882–1917: Lesser achievement under Alexander III and Nicholas II
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  1882–1917: Middle achievement under Alexander III and Nicholas II
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  1882–1917: Greater achievement under Alexander III and Nicholas II
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  1917: Coat of arms under the Russian Provisional Government

Flags

Main article: Flag of Russia

See also: Black-yellow-white flag of the Russian Empire and List of Russian flags

In 1552, Russian forces under Ivan the Terrible entered into Kazan under the banner of the Most Gracious Savior, a flag that accompanied the Russian army for the next century and a half. At the end of that period, on August 6, 1693, while sailing in the White Sea, Peter the Great unveiled a new flag, the so-called "Flag of the Tsar of Muscovy", a horizontal tricolor of white, blue, and red. On January 31, 1705, Peter decreed that it would be the maritime flag for all Russian commercial vessels. On June 23, 1858, Tsar Alexander II decreed that a black-yellow-white tricolor should be the official state flag of the Russian Empire, with colors based on the imperial coat of arms and the arms of the House of Romanov. On April 28, 1883, Tsar Alexander III authorized the use of the prior white-blue-red flag as a civic flag. On April 29, 1896, Tsar Nicholas II reverted to the tricolor as the state flag, with it being deemed the historical flag of Russia; despite this, the black-yellow-flag remains an icon of Tsarist Russia to this day and is still extensively used by Russian monarchists. During World War I, a special variant featuring the coat of arms in a yellow canton on the top left was used. After the February Revolution, the canton was removed by the Provisional Government.

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  Banner of the Most Merciful Savior, used as the flag under which Ivan conquered Kazan in 1552
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  1668–1693: Civil ensign
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  1693–1703: Imperial standard of Peter the Great
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  1696–1896: Civil ensign
  1896–1917: State flag
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  1858–1896: State flag
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  1883–1917: Imperial standard of the Emperor of Russia.
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  1914–1917: Special state flag variant during World War I

Other

God Save the Tsar! was the official national anthem of the Russian Empire. Adopted in 1833, it was composed by Alexei Lvov, with lyrics written by the court poet Vasily Zhukovsky. It served as the official anthem until the Worker's Marseillaise was adopted following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. A myriad of regalia was used by the Russian Tsars. The Monomakh's Cap, a Central Asian-inspired crown, served as the crown of the Grand Princes and Tsars until Peter the Great and his brother Ivan V were crowned in 1682. After Peter, a new western-style crown was used for Catherine I, and a series of crowns were used until Catherine the Great commissioned the Imperial crown of Russia, used until the end of Tsarist Russia. The Russian Empire's motto was "God is with us!", derived from the Orthodox liturgical exclamation used in the Great Compline service, itself a quotation from Isaiah 8:10. Engraved upon the two greater coat of arms of Russia, it expressed the fundamental premise of Tsarist political theology: that Russia was a divinely favored state and the Tsar a divinely appointed ruler.