IllRussian Expansion
under Catherine the Great
Russia in the era of Catherine the Great expanded at a prodigious
rate. In some ways, this was a unique achievement. No other European
state of the late eighteenth century added 200,000 square miles to its
territory. Russia was the newest of the major powers, still regarded as
a barbaric parvenu by some western Europeans. However, the sheer
magnitude of the territorial gains ought not to obscure the fact that
Russian expansion was also a very normal process in terms both of
the empire's own historical development and of the diplomatic atti-
tudes of the time. Long before this period, expansion had become a
habit of Muscovite statecraft. As Marc Raeff has observed, there was
a very thin line between Moscow's gathering the Russian lands, the
principalities that had once been part of the Kievan Federation, and
the subjugation of alien people, especially since some of the other
Russian lands had already established control over non-Russians.
Techniques used in the gathering of Russian lands were later extend-
ed to non-Russian principalities.
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The fundamental motives for Rus-
sian expansion from the gathering period on closely resembled those
found elsewhere: the quest for protection against hostile neighbors;
the need for more agricultural land; and the search for other natural
resources, such as fur-bearing animals and minerals. Moreover, an
eighteenth-century European statesman would not have felt that ex-
pansion needed any explanation. Expansion was good because it
made states stronger. The Anglo-French rivalry in India; Prussia's
drive to take Saxony and Bohemia in the Seven Years' War; and the
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