Russian Empire

At a glance

What was the Russian Empire?

The Russian Empire was the state ruled by the emperors of All Russia between 1721 and 1917. It continued the Tsardom of Russia under the same dynasty, the Romanovs, and the same Orthodox church, but with a new title, a new capital at St Petersburg and a new idea of itself as a European great power.

It was very large. An official table of the Central Statistical Committee for 1 January 1914 gives the empire's area as 19,155,587.7 square versts, without the significant inland waters, which is about 21.8 million km². Guinness World Records calls Russia the second-largest contiguous empire in history, "at its peak (c. 1895)" covering "some 22.8 million km²", behind the Mongol Empire. The often-repeated claim that it was the largest contiguous empire ever is therefore wrong. The peak area of 23.6 million km² given for this entry in the site's dataset has no source behind it and should be read as an estimate; the figures above are the ones that can be checked.

Dates in this entry are given in the Julian calendar (Old Style), which Russia used until 1918, with the Gregorian date in brackets where it matters. The gap was 11 days in the eighteenth century, 12 in the nineteenth and 13 from 1900.

When did Russia become an empire?

On 22 October 1721 (2 November in the Gregorian calendar). The occasion was the Treaty of Nystad, signed on 30 August 1721, which ended the Great Northern War with the Swedish Empire and gave Russia Ingria, part of Karelia, Estland and Livland on the Baltic.

The title was offered, not seized. According to the act printed in the Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire (PSZ vol. VI, no. 3840), the Senate and the Holy Synod resolved on 20 October to ask Peter, "in the name of the whole Russian people", to accept the titles "Father of the Fatherland, Emperor of All Russia, Peter the Great", and sent Prince Menshikov to him with a written petition. The Presidential Library's account of the ceremony in the Trinity Cathedral in St Petersburg records a liturgy, the reading of the peace treaty and a sermon by Feofan Prokopovich. The chancellor, Count G. I. Golovkin, then asked Peter to accept the titles, in a formula modelled on the Roman Senate's practice of honouring emperors "for great deeds". Guns fired from the Admiralty, the Peter and Paul Fortress and 125 galleys on the Neva.

Two laws of the following months defined the new state. The Table of Ranks of 24 January 1722 divided all military, civil and court service into 14 classes, so that rank came from service rather than birth; in the Presidential Library's summary, anyone who reached civil class VIII became a hereditary noble. The law on the succession of 5 February 1722 let the emperor choose and revoke his own heir. Its preamble names the reason: the "Absalom-like malice" of Peter's son Alexei, who had died in custody in 1718. The law gave the empire its first and most unstable century.

Who ruled the Russian Empire?

Fourteen emperors and empresses reigned between 1721 and 1917. From Peter III onwards, the male line was that of the dukes of Holstein-Gottorp, descended from Peter I through his daughter Anna. Old Style dates are given, with New Style in brackets where sources commonly use both.

What was the era of palace coups?

The years between Peter's death in 1725 and Catherine II's accession in 1762 are known as the era of palace coups, because the Guards regiments in St Petersburg repeatedly decided who would rule.

Peter, in the words of the Orthodox Encyclopedia, "left no heirs and did not manage to make a will". Menshikov and Tolstoi put his widow on the throne as Catherine I, and she paid the Guards their overdue wages. When her successor, the boy emperor Peter II, died of smallpox in January 1730, the Supreme Privy Council offered the crown to Peter I's niece Anna under written "conditions": she was not to marry, name an heir, make war or peace, levy taxes or grant estates without the Council. On 25 February 1730 a petition of the nobility with 166 signatures asked her to restore autocracy, and Anna publicly tore up the conditions. Historians still debate whether the episode was an early experiment in constitutional government or an oligarchs' manoeuvre.

Anna left the throne to an infant, Ivan VI, under the regency of her favourite Biron, who was arrested within weeks. On the night of 24/25 November 1741 Peter I's daughter Elizabeth went to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Guards and, according to a sermon preached that December, asked them: "Do you know, lads, who I am? And whose daughter?" The grenadiers carried her into the Winter Palace. Ivan VI spent the rest of his life in prison and was killed by his guards in July 1764, when a young officer named Mirovich tried to free him. Contemporaries suspected a government provocation; the Orthodox Encyclopedia finds no evidence for it.

Elizabeth's heir, Peter III, a grandson of Peter I raised as Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, reigned only 186 days. His manifesto of 18 February 1762 freed the nobility from compulsory state service; about 7,500 nobles retired in the following ten years. On 28 June 1762 his wife Catherine, with the Guards and the brothers Grigory and Alexei Orlov, overthrew him. He abdicated the next day and was taken under Alexei Orlov's guard to Ropsha, where he died on 6 July. Catherine's manifesto of 7 July said that he had fallen into "a most violent colic" from a haemorrhoidal attack. Most historians have held that he was killed by the conspirators; the historian O. A. Ivanov has argued for the official version, and the Orthodox Encyclopedia describes the circumstances as unresolved.

What did Catherine the Great change?

Catherine II, born a princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, reigned for 34 years and gave the empire much of its later shape. She secularised church lands in 1764, reorganised the provinces by the statute of 7 November 1775 (there were 50 gubernii by the end of her reign) and issued the Charters to the Nobility and to the Towns on 21 April 1785.

Her best-known text is the Nakaz (Instruction) of 30 July 1767, written for a commission that was to draft a new law code. It justifies autocracy by the size of the realm: "The Sovereign is absolute; for there is no other Authority but that which centers in his single Person, that can act with a Vigour proportionate to the Extent of such a vast Dominion." Its first chapter declares that "Russia is an European State", in the words of the English translation of 1768.

The largest challenge to her rule came from below. In 1773 Emelian Pugachev, one of several dozen pretenders who claimed to be the dead Peter III, raised a rebellion that drew in Cossacks, factory serfs, Bashkirs, Tatars, Kalmyks and other peoples. His army reached Kazan on 11 July 1774. He was captured and executed in Moscow on 10 January 1775. No reliable death toll was found for this entry.

Abroad, Catherine's wars moved the frontier south and west. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca with the Ottoman Empire (10 July 1774) declared the Crimean Khanate "free and completely independent" and gave Russia Azov, Kerch, Yenikale and Kinburn. By a manifesto of 8 April 1783 Catherine annexed the Crimea, Taman and the Kuban, promising to treat their inhabitants "on a par with Our natural subjects". In July 1783 the Treaty of Georgievsk took the east Georgian kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti under Russian protection, a step that, in the words of one Russian study, spared the Kingdom of Georgia from Turkish and Persian raids but cost it its independence. With Prussia and Austria, Russia partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, 1793 and 1795 until it ceased to exist.

How did Russia defeat Napoleon?

Catherine's son Paul I reigned only four years. He restricted the succession to the male line in 1797, limited the labour that landlords could demand from serfs to three days a week, and handed about 600,000 state peasants to private owners. On the night of 11/12 March 1801 a group of officers broke into his bedroom in the new Mikhailovsky Castle and killed him. His son Alexander had, in the Orthodox Encyclopedia's words, "in fact given his consent" to a plan to depose him. The official manifesto announced that Paul had died of apoplexy.

Alexander I began as a reformer, with the priest's son Mikhail Speransky as his chief adviser, whom the historian Alexander Kornilov called "undoubtedly the greatest man of Alexander's epoch". The wars with Napoleon dominated his reign. After the defeat at Friedland he met Napoleon on a raft in the river Niemen on 25 June 1807, and the Treaty of Tilsit made Russia a partner in the Continental System against Britain. In 1809 Sweden ceded Finland, which Alexander kept as an autonomous grand duchy with its own laws, and in May 1812 the Treaty of Bucharest gave Russia Bessarabia up to the river Prut.

On 12 (24) June 1812 Napoleon crossed the Niemen without a declaration of war. Figures for the invasion are disputed. The Brockhaus–Efron encyclopaedia gave the Grande Armée "more than 600,000" men against about 210,000 Russians on the frontier; a 2014 study by Gadzhimuradov, citing Clausewitz, gives 610,000 invaders, of whom only about 23,000 French and 60,000 allied soldiers got home. Much of the loss came before the frost: according to Brockhaus–Efron, the central army fell from 400,000 to 150,000 men in the summer advance "in a poor country almost without good roads". At Borodino on 26 August (7 September) 1812, the bloodiest of all Napoleonic battles in Kornilov's view, Britannica estimates about 45,000 Russian and 30,000 French casualties. After a council of war at Fili, Kutuzov abandoned Moscow without a fight. The city burned the day after the French entered; Brockhaus–Efron noted that the causes "have not been precisely established".

Russian armies followed the retreating French into Europe and reached Paris in 1814. The Congress of Vienna gave Alexander the Kingdom of Poland, which received a constitution on 15 (27) November 1815, and in September 1815 he founded the Holy Alliance with Austria and Prussia.

Who were the Decembrists?

The Decembrists were officers who organised secret societies to end serfdom and autocracy. The Northern Society favoured Nikita Muravyov's draft of a federal constitutional monarchy; the Southern Society followed Pavel Pestel's republican Russkaia pravda, which declared that "slavery must be decisively abolished, and the nobility must renounce forever the vile privilege of owning other people". They were secret societies of officers, not a mass movement.

Their chance came when Alexander I died at Taganrog on 19 November 1825. His brother Constantine had secretly renounced the succession, and in the confusion over who was emperor, rebel regiments assembled on the Senate Square in St Petersburg on 14 (26) December 1825. Nicholas ordered his guns to fire grapeshot, and the crowd fled across the Isaac Bridge. The leaders were tried, and the ringleaders executed.

The revolt shaped the reign of Nicholas I. In his first year he created the Third Section of his own chancery, a political police with the Corps of Gendarmes as its arm. His education minister, Sergei Uvarov, proclaimed the doctrine of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality". In 1833 the laws were codified for the first time in the 15 volumes of the Svod zakonov. Nicholas crushed the Polish rising that began in Warsaw on 17 (29) November 1830, after the Sejm had declared the Romanovs deposed, and in 1849 he sent troops to suppress the Hungarian revolution against Austria.

Why did Russia lose the Crimean War?

Russia went to war with the Ottoman Empire in October 1853. Admiral Nakhimov destroyed an Ottoman squadron at Sinope on 18 November 1853, but Britain and France entered the war in 1854 and landed in the Crimea, where the siege of Sevastopol became its central campaign.

Nicholas I died on 18 February 1855, before the war ended. After an eleven-month siege the allies stormed the Malakhov Kurgan on 27 August 1855, and the Russians abandoned Sevastopol. Brockhaus–Efron put the losses of the siege at about 83,500 Russians and at least 70,000 allied soldiers, not counting deaths from disease. The Treaty of Paris, signed on 18 (30) March 1856, cost Russia southern Bessarabia and declared the Black Sea "neutral", closing it to all warships (Article XI). Britannica puts the war's total casualties at about 500,000, about half on each side, with disease killing more than battle.

The defeat was followed by the Great Reforms of the new emperor, Alexander II.

How did Alexander II free the serfs?

By the manifesto of 19 February (3 March) 1861, in the final wording of Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow, and published on 5 March 1861. Brockhaus–Efron, writing in the 1890s, called it the emancipation of the "22-million-strong peasant population" from serfdom; state peasants were reformed by separate laws.

The terms were less generous than the word "liberation" suggests. The manifesto states that the landlords, "retaining the right of ownership of all the lands belonging to them", would give the peasants permanent use of their homesteads and allotments in return for set dues. Until they bought their land, the peasants were "temporarily obligated" to their former owners. Britannica summarises the outcome: the state advanced loans for the purchase, and peasants repaid them over 49 years; by 1881 about 85 per cent had received their land, and redemption was then made compulsory.

Other reforms followed. The zemstvo statute of 1 January 1864 created elected district and provincial councils, introduced first in 33 provinces. The judicial statutes of 1864 reformed the courts, and in 1874 universal personal military service replaced a system in which the obligation fell on townspeople and peasants and could be bought off. The reforms did not extend to political representation, and the Polish January Rising of 1863–1864 was suppressed by force.

Revolutionaries turned to terror. On 1 March 1881 members of Narodnaia volia ("People's Will") killed Alexander II with a bomb in St Petersburg. Ten days later their Executive Committee wrote to his son demanding an amnesty and a freely elected assembly of the whole people: "Your Majesty, decide. Before you are two paths."

How far did the empire expand?

In the nineteenth century the empire reached its greatest extent, on three fronts.

The Caucasus. After decades of war against the mountain peoples, Russian troops stormed Shamil's stronghold of Vedeno on 1 April 1859. Shamil, the imam of Dagestan and Chechnya, held out on Mount Gunib with about 400 people, including villagers, until 25 August 1859, when he surrendered to Prince Bariatinsky. In the west the war went on until 1864, so the end of the Caucasus War is dated either 1859 or 1864. Its last phase brought the mass removal of the Circassians and other western highlanders to the Ottoman Empire. According to the historian Tlyachev, official Russian data count 440,053 Western Circassians shipped from Black Sea ports between 1858 and 1865; other Russian and foreign researchers estimate between 500,000 and 1.5 million emigrants in all. Many died in transit camps on the Ottoman coast. Several Circassian historians and a scholarly conference in Nalchik have called these events a genocide, while imperial and Soviet historians long played down both the numbers and the state's role.

Central Asia. General Cherniaev took Tashkent in 1865. In 1868 the Emirate of Bukhara lost Samarkand and accepted a treaty that made it a protectorate. In 1873 three columns marched on Khiva and forced the Khanate of Khiva into dependence. The Khanate of Kokand was occupied in 1875 and became the Fergana province. General Skobelev's storming of the Turkmen fortress of Geok Tepe in the winter of 1880–1881 was followed by the capture of Ashgabat on 30 January 1881 and brought the Akhal-Teke oasis under Russian rule.

The Far East and Alaska. By the Treaty of Aigun of 16 (28) May 1858, the Qing court recognised the left bank of the Amur as Russian and left the land between the Ussuri and the sea in joint possession; an additional treaty was signed at Peking on 2 (14) November 1860. Across the Pacific, Russian traders had settled in Alaska since Grigory Shelikhov founded a permanent post at Three Saints Bay on Kodiak in 1784, after suppressing the islanders' resistance "rather cruelly", in the words of one Russian historian. The US Office of the Historian notes that permanent Russian settlers there "never numbered more than four hundred". Russia offered Alaska to the United States in 1859, and on 30 March 1867 the envoy Eduard de Stoeckl agreed with Secretary of State William Seward to sell it for $7.2 million. The US Treasury's cheque for the sum was issued on 1 August 1868.

What changed under Alexander III?

Alexander III ruled as an unbending autocrat. His manifesto of 29 April 1881 announced a programme of maintaining "order and authority", and constitutional plans were set aside.

In 1881 and 1882 more than 200 anti-Jewish riots, or pogroms, broke out, beginning at Elisavetgrad in April 1881. For a long time it was believed that the government had organised them. The historian John Klier, working from archival publications since the 1920s, called this "one of the most enduring myths" of the period and concluded that "the strength of belief in this myth does not make it true"; local officials were often slow or ineffective, which is a separate charge. The government's response made matters worse for the victims: the "Temporary Rules" of 3 May 1882, known as the May Laws, forbade Jews to settle anew outside the towns and shtetls of the Pale of Settlement.

The customs tariff of 11 June 1891 protected Russian industry, and in 1891 work began on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Two articles in Brockhaus–Efron date the imperial rescript that ordered it to 17 March and 17 April 1891 respectively; on 19 (31) May 1891 the heir, Nicholas, laid the first stone at Vladivostok. The same year a summer drought in the black-earth belt brought famine; private relief efforts, including Leo Tolstoy's, were remembered as a high point of public initiative. Sergei Witte became minister of finance in 1892, and the Franco-Russian military convention of 1892 tied autocratic Russia to republican France against Germany. Alexander III died at the Livadia Palace in the Crimea on 20 October (1 November) 1894.

Who lived in the Russian Empire?

The first general census, taken on 28 January 1897, counted 125,640,021 people, not including Finland. It asked for each person's native language, not their nationality. By that measure 55.7 million people, 44.3 per cent, spoke Great Russian. With 22.4 million speakers of "Little Russian" (Ukrainian) and 5.9 million of Belarusian, whom the census grouped together as Russian, the share rose to about two-thirds.

The rest of the population spoke many other languages. The largest groups recorded were:

• Polish, 7.9 million;
• Yiddish, 5.1 million;
• Kazakh (then called Kirgiz-Kaisak), 4.1 million;
• Tatar, 3.7 million;
• German, 1.8 million;
• Latvian, Bashkir, Lithuanian, Armenian, Romanian, Mordvin and Estonian, each about 1 to 1.4 million.

The status of these peoples differed widely. The Fundamental Laws of 1906 declared the Russian state "one and indivisible" and Russian its state language, but Finland was governed by its own institutions, and Congress Poland had its own constitution from 1815 until the rising of 1830–1831. Bukhara and Khiva remained protectorates under their own rulers. Jews were largely confined to the Pale of Settlement. The peoples of Central Asia were not conscripted into the army, which is why their call-up for labour in 1916 caused such upheaval.

What happened in the Revolution of 1905?

Nicholas II began his reign with a warning. On 17 January 1895 he told deputations of the nobility, zemstvos and towns that hopes for elected representatives in government were "senseless dreams". A year later, on 18 (30) May 1896, a crush at the coronation festivities on the Khodynka field in Moscow killed 1,389 people, according to the memorandum of the justice minister.

Defeat by the Empire of Japan in 1904–1905 turned discontent into revolution. On Sunday 9 (22) January 1905 troops in St Petersburg fired on a peaceful procession of workers led by the priest Georgii Gapon, who were carrying a petition to the tsar. The official count was 130 killed and 299 wounded; Gapon spoke of 600 to 900 dead, and Lenin's figure of 4,600 victims later became the Soviet standard. At sea, the Russian fleet suffered one of its heaviest defeats at Tsushima on 14–15 (27–28) May 1905, and by the Treaty of Portsmouth of 23 August (5 September) Russia ceded southern Sakhalin, the lease of Port Arthur and the southern Manchurian railway to Japan.

Nicholas signed the October Manifesto of 17 (30) October 1905. It promised civil liberties and established "as an unshakeable rule that no law may take effect without the approval of the State Duma". The Fundamental Laws of 23 April 1906 still gave the emperor "supreme autocratic power", but he now legislated "in unity with the State Council and the State Duma". The First Duma opened in the Winter Palace on 27 April (10 May) 1906 and was dissolved that summer.

Under the prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, a decree of 9 (22) November 1906 allowed peasants to leave the commune and own their allotments as private property. Stolypin was shot in the Kiev opera house on 1 (14) September 1911 and died four days later. On 4 (17) April 1912 troops fired on striking workers at the Lena goldfields in Siberia; there are no official figures, and sources give between 83 and 270 dead. The Romanov tercentenary in February 1913 was the dynasty's last great celebration.

How did the Russian Empire end?

In the First World War. Russia mobilised about 16 million men. At Tannenberg in August 1914 Samsonov's Second Army was destroyed, with about 120,000 men lost, 95,000 of them as prisoners. In 1915 the Great Retreat cost Poland and Lithuania and drove nearly 6 million refugees east. On 23 August 1915 Nicholas took personal command of the army, with his headquarters at Mogilev. The Brusilov offensive, which began on 22 May (4 June) 1916, advanced 70 to 120 km along a 350 km front and took more than 200,000 prisoners in its first days, but losses mounted. Estimates of Russia's military dead range from 908,000 (the demographer Boris Urlanis) to a post-Soviet calculation of 1.89 million battle deaths.

The strain reached the borderlands. A decree of 25 June 1916 conscripted Central Asian men for labour behind the front and provoked a revolt in Turkestan. Estimates of Kyrgyz losses in its suppression range from 42,000 (the historian Batyrbaeva) to 150,000 (a 1933 Soviet figure), and a governor's count of about 38,000 households suggests some 270,000 people fled to China. In Petrograd, the peasant healer Grigory Rasputin was killed in Prince Yusupov's palace on the night of 16/17 December 1916.

On 23 February (8 March) 1917 women workers in Petrograd demonstrated for bread. Within days the strikes became a general political strike and then an armed rising. Nicholas, unable to get through to Tsarskoe Selo, arrived at the Northern Front headquarters in Pskov on 1 March. On 2 March all front commanders except Admiral Kolchak advised him to abdicate. At about 3 p.m. he decided to abdicate in favour of his son, then changed his mind after his son's doctor confirmed that Alexei's illness was incurable. Late that evening he signed an act abdicating for himself and Alexei in favour of his brother, Grand Duke Michael. The act is dated "Pskov, 2 March, 15:00, 1917", the time of the first decision, not of the signature.

Michael never reigned. On 3 March he declared that he would accept supreme power only "if such be the will of our great people", expressed through a Constituent Assembly, and asked all citizens to obey the Provisional Government until then. The monarchy was thus suspended rather than abolished. On 1 (14) September 1917 the Provisional Government declared that Russia's form of state "is the republican order" and proclaimed the Russian Republic. There are therefore three candidate end dates for the empire: 2 March, 3 March and 1 September 1917.

What happened to the Romanovs?

After the abdication the family was held under arrest, in the end by the Ural Soviet in the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg. In the early hours of 17 July 1918, on the orders of the Ural Soviet, Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children and four members of their household were shot in the cellar.

The remains of five family members and the four retainers were identified after the fall of the Soviet Union and buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg on 17 July 1998, the 80th anniversary. President Boris Yeltsin called the murder "one of the most shameful pages in Russian history"; the Orthodox Church did not accept the identification and its patriarch stayed away. In 2007 a second grave about 70 metres away yielded the remains of Alexei and one of his sisters. DNA tests published in 2009 by Coble and colleagues gave "virtually irrefutable evidence" that the bones belonged to the two missing children, so that all seven family members are accounted for. The tests could not settle which sister lay in the second grave: Russian experts had held that Maria was missing from the first grave, American experts that it was Anastasia.

The Russian Orthodox Church's Council of Bishops canonised Nicholas, Alexandra and their children as passion-bearers on 14 August 2000. On 1 October 2008 the Presidium of Russia's Supreme Court declared their repression "groundless" and rehabilitated them.

Common myths about the Russian Empire

Timeline of the Russian Empire

What the map shows next

The border data draws the Russian Empire from 1721 to 1916; at 1819 on the map it stretches from Finland and Congress Poland to the Pacific. Its predecessor appears at Tsardom of Russia, and the rival it partitioned at Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the abdication the map shows the Russian Republic, and from 1922 the Soviet Union, while former provinces such as the Republic of Finland became independent states.