From Poland to Alaska: the largest contiguous empire in human history. In two centuries Russia swallowed a sixth of the earth's land surface — Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Finland, Poland — and ruled it all from a marshy new capital built on the Baltic. No empire ever held so much land in one piece, before or since.
The empire in images
The rise
The empire was proclaimed in 1721, when Peter the Great — fresh from defeating Sweden in the Great Northern War — took the title of emperor. Peter had spent his reign dragging Russia westward by force: building St. Petersburg on a Baltic swamp as a “window to Europe,” shaving the boyars' beards, building a navy from nothing, and beating the finest army in Europe at Poltava. The empire was his personal project, built at a terrible human cost.
His successors kept expanding, none more than Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796), the German princess who became the most Russian of autocrats. She partitioned Poland with Prussia and Austria, annexed Crimea in 1783, pushed the frontier to the Black Sea, and made Russia the arbiter of Eastern Europe. By 1800 the empire stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific, and the question was no longer whether Russia was European, but whether Europe could contain Russia.
The zenith
The zenith came in 1815. After defeating Napoleon — the Grande Armée frozen and shattered in the Russian winter — the tsar stood as the arbiter of Europe at the Congress of Vienna, and the Holy Alliance made Russia the continent's conservative policeman. The empire kept growing: the Caucasus, Central Asia's khanates, and in 1867 it still held Alaska — sold that year to the United States for $7.2 million, two cents an acre.
At its peak the empire covered some 22.8 million square kilometers and a hundred peoples — Finns and Poles, Tatars and Georgians, Yakuts and Aleuts — ruled by a bureaucracy, an army, and an autocrat in St. Petersburg. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky wrote while the empire expanded; the Trans-Siberian Railway, begun in 1891, stitched the continent together with steel, the longest railway on earth.
The fall
The fall was written into the structure. Defeat by Japan in 1905 exposed the rot; the revolution of that year forced a parliament the tsar never accepted. Then came the Great War: millions of Russian soldiers died for an empire that could not feed, arm, or transport them, while the court rotted from within and the railways seized up.
In February 1917 the army mutinied and Nicholas II abdicated; in October the Bolsheviks seized power and the empire became the Soviet Union's inheritance. Three centuries of Romanov rule ended in a railway carriage and a Petrograd street — and the largest land empire in history dissolved into revolution and civil war.
The legacy
The empire's borders are today's headlines. Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia — the states that emerged from the Soviet collapse all sit within the frontiers the tsars drew, and the “Russian question” in Europe is the imperial question in modern dress. Geography, as the tsars understood, is destiny that outlives dynasties.
Russia also left a cultural empire that survived the political one: the Russian language, spoken across Eurasia; the literature of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, read on every continent; and Alaska — the two-cents-an-acre reminder that even the largest empire in history could misprice real estate.
From Poland to Alaska, one-sixth of the earth's land, ruled from a city built on a swamp. The empire that swallowed a continent proved that size is power — and that power, at that size, eventually eats itself.