The Rise of Russia: From Muscovy to Empire

Core Idea

Between the late 1400s and 1800, the principality of Moscow grew from a tributary of the Mongol Golden Horde into a vast empire stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific. Ivan III threw off Mongol overlordship, Ivan IV took the title of tsar and conquered the Volga khanates, and Russian traders and soldiers pushed across Siberia. Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) forced Western-style reforms on the state and army, defeated Sweden, and built St Petersburg as a new capital. Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796) expanded the empire further while serfdom bound most peasants ever more tightly to their lords.

How It's Best Learned

Use a sequence of maps from 1462 to 1796 to see how fast Russian territory grew and in which directions. Compare Peter's reforms with Louis XIV's absolutism and with Ottoman or Qing state-building. Discuss the tension between Westernizing the elite and deepening serfdom for the majority, which shaped Russia into the nineteenth century.

Common Misconceptions

• Peter the Great's reforms made Russia a Western European society. (Peter changed the army, navy, bureaucracy and elite dress and education, but most Russians remained serfs whose lives his reforms hardly touched, except through heavier taxes and conscription.)
• Catherine the Great's Enlightenment ideas led her to free the serfs. (Catherine corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, but after the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773–1775 she strengthened the nobility's control over serfs; serfdom ended only in 1861.)
• Russia expanded only westward into Europe. (Much of Russia's growth was eastward across Siberia to the Pacific and southward toward the Black Sea and the Caucasus.)

Explainer

When you studied the Mongol conquests, you saw that Russian principalities paid tribute to the Golden Horde for more than two centuries. One of them, Moscow, grew by serving as the Mongols' tax collector and by absorbing its neighbors.

Ivan III, who ruled from 1462 to 1505, annexed the rich city of Novgorod and stopped paying tribute to the Horde; after a standoff on the Ugra River in 1480, Mongol overlordship was over. He married a niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and Russian churchmen began to describe Moscow as the heir of Constantinople, a "Third Rome" defending Orthodox Christianity. His grandson Ivan IV was crowned tsar, from the Latin "caesar," in 1547. Ivan IV conquered the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, giving Moscow the whole Volga River, and Cossack fighters began the conquest of Siberia. Ivan is also remembered for terror against his own nobles. After his death came the Time of Troubles, a period of famine, civil war and foreign invasion, which ended when an assembly chose Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613.

Under the Romanovs, Russian traders seeking furs reached the Pacific coast by 1639. At home, a law code of 1649 bound peasants to the land as serfs.

Peter I, called the Great, believed Russia had to learn from Western Europe to survive. He toured Europe and studied shipbuilding. He created a large standing army and a navy, set up a Table of Ranks linking noble status to service, and ordered nobles to shave their beards and wear Western clothes. In a long war with Sweden he won the Battle of Poltava in 1709 and gained the Baltic coast, where he had founded St Petersburg in 1703.

Catherine II, a German princess who took the throne in 1762, read and wrote to Enlightenment thinkers. She also annexed Crimea in 1783 after wars with the Ottomans and joined Prussia and Austria in dividing Poland. After a huge peasant revolt led by Emelian Pugachev, she tightened the nobles' control over serfs. Russia entered the 1800s as a great power built on serf labor.