The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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Eighteenth-Century Expansion


Siberia and Steppe


Russia’s great century of empire was transformative in size and diversity. From about
16 million square kilometers around 1700, in the eighteenth century the empire
added another million square kilometers in European Russia and over a million
square kilometers in northern Kazakhstan; it grew to encompass over twenty-five
different ethnicities. A brief summary suggests the dramatic scale of this century’s
explorations. In Siberia, Russia pushed into the peninsulas of the Far East and across
the Bering Strait to Alaska (where only a few hundred Russian and émigré Siberians
lived as late as 1818). Russia’s long-time Baltic aspirations came to fruition with
Peter I’s founding of St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland in 1703; in the Great
Northern War (1700–21) he won Livonia with trade centers at Riga and Reval. The
partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) brought into the empire the rest of modern
day Belarus’and Ukraine, the Duchy of Courland, and some ethnic Lithuanian
territory. In the Black Sea zone, Peter I won but Russia failed to hold ports and
territory on the Azov and Caspian Seas (relinquishing Derbent and Baku in 1735),
but Catherine II enjoyed tremendous success. In three Turkish wars (1735–9,
1768 – 74, 1787–91) Russia secured Crimea and the Black Sea coast from the
Dniester (where the port of Odessa was promptly founded in 1794) to the northern
Caucasus. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century Russia continued to push
against Ottoman and Persian Transcaucasus and Caucasus, but this highly complex
territory, with dozens of separate ethnic and political subdivisions, resisted takeover.
Russia succeeded only in winning the voluntary annexation of the kingdom of
Georgia in 1801; it took through the mid-nineteenth century for Russia to complete
expansion into the Caucasus and to Central Asia; it also acquired much of the
former Poland (1815) and Finland (1810). All these territories were strategic and
productive. Russia’s eighteenth-century acquisitions (Baltics, Right and Left Bank
Ukraine, Black Sea steppe) by 1826 were providing almost 29 percent of total
government revenues for the empire. In this chapter we survey policies of conquest
and control towards the east, the Caspian steppe, and northern Caucasus.


SIBERIA


At the start of the eighteenth century Russia claimed lands to the Pacific and had
established its Amur River border with China. Cossacks in the name of Russia kept

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