From 1721 to 1917 a Eurasian empire touched three oceans
The Russian Empire stretched across northern Eurasia from 1721 until the 1917 republic proclamation, closing tsarist monarchy's final chapter. By the early 1800s it ran from Arctic seas to the Black Sea and from the Baltic to Alaskan holdings.
At its late-19th-century peak the empire spanned about 22.8 million square kilometres, roughly a sixth of the world's land, making it the third-largest empire ever after the British and Mongol. The 1897 census counted 126 million subjects of remarkable ethnic, linguistic and religious variety. Its foundations were older: Ivan III, who reigned from 1462 to 1505, centralised the state and broke free of the Great Horde, and his grandson Ivan IV became the first ruler crowned tsar, in 1547. Ivan IV's conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan began the shift to a multi-ethnic realm, and between 1550 and 1700 the state grew by some 35,000 square kilometres a year, pulled into Siberia by the fur trade.
Peter the Great made the empire. Blocked from the Baltic by Sweden and served only by Arkhangelsk, a White Sea port frozen nine months a year, he allied in 1699 with Saxony, Poland–Lithuania and Denmark-Norway in the Great Northern War, which Sweden ended exhausted in 1721. He gained four provinces on the Gulf of Finland and in 1703 founded Saint Petersburg on the Neva delta, laid out on a European grid by architects such as Domenico Trezzini.
Catherine the Great extended the frontiers, and Alexander I helped defeat Napoleon and formed the Holy Alliance. Around 1800 its reach ran north to the Arctic, south to the Black Sea, west to the Baltic and east into Alaska, a colony kept from 1799 until 1867. Defeat in the Crimean War of 1853–1856 redirected energy into reform and Central Asian conquest. Railways and industry grew, yet the country stayed mostly agrarian, and the famine of 1891–1892 fed revolutionary movements; after 1905 Nicholas II allowed a State Duma while keeping ultimate power.
The First World War broke it. Heavy losses and urban food and fuel shortages led to the February Revolution of 1917, Nicholas's abdication and a republic, which the Bolsheviks overthrew that October. Russia was one of four continental empires the war destroyed, alongside Germany, Austria–Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.
Source: Russian Empire
