Russian Empire

Founding

The Russian Empire was proclaimed on 2 November 1721, when Peter I ("the Great") assumed the title of Emperor (Imperator) following Russia's victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700–1721), sealed by the Treaty of Nystad (10 September 1721), which gave Russia Estonia, Livonia, Ingria, and part of Karelia.

Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725). Peter (sole ruler from 1696) transformed Russia into a European great power. He modernized the army and built a navy; reorganized government (the Governing Senate, the "colleges," the Table of Ranks); subordinated the Church via the Holy Synod; and Westernized elite dress and custom. His signature act was founding St. Petersburg in 1703 on newly conquered Baltic marshland; it became the capital in 1712/1713. Key military milestones: the defeat at Narva (1700) and the decisive victory at Poltava (1709) over Charles XII of Sweden.

The eighteenth century

After Peter came a series of palace-coup successions (Catherine I, Peter II, Anna, Ivan VI, Elizabeth, Peter III). Catherine II "the Great" (r. 1762–1796), an enlightened absolutist, expanded the empire dramatically: she annexed Crimea (1783) after wars with the Ottomans and, with Prussia and Austria, carried out the three Partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795), which erased Poland-Lithuania and brought vast western territories under Russian rule. Her reign is regarded as a golden age of the nobility, arts, and sciences, though it entrenched serfdom and faced the massive Pugachev Rebellion (1773–1775).

The nineteenth century

Under Alexander I (r. 1801–1825) Russia withstood Napoleon's invasion of 1812: after the bloody Battle of Borodino and the burning of Moscow, the Grande Armée's catastrophic winter retreat destroyed it, and Russian armies marched to Paris (1814). Alexander's death triggered the failed liberal Decembrist revolt (1825). Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855) ruled as an arch-conservative autocrat and lost the Crimean War (1853–1856) to an Anglo-French-Ottoman coalition, exposing Russian backwardness. His son Alexander II (r. 1855–1881), the "Tsar-Liberator," carried out the Emancipation Reform of 1861: per the Emancipation Manifesto, "more than 23 million people received their liberty" — roughly one-third of the empire's population — alongside judicial, military, and local-government (zemstvo) reforms; he was assassinated by the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya in 1881. Alexander III (r. 1881–1894) reverted to reaction and Russification.

Revolution and fall

Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), the last emperor, faced defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the Revolution of 1905 (which forced the October Manifesto and the creation of the State Duma). Ruinous participation in World War I shattered the regime; the February Revolution of 1917 forced Nicholas's abdication in March 1917, ending the empire and the Romanov dynasty.