Why Russia is so big

Down the Volga

The road east opened when Ivan IV took the Tatar khanate of Kazan by assault in 1552 and annexed the khanate of Astrakhan, at the mouth of the Volga, without a fight in 1556.^[4]

Chasing furs to the Pacific

In 1581 a Cossack expedition overthrew the small khanate of Sibir, which gave its name to all of Siberia. Through the late 16th and 17th centuries Russian trappers, fur traders and Cossacks spread across it to the Bering Sea, building forts at Tyumen (1586), Tomsk (1604), Krasnoyarsk (1628) and Irkutsk (1652). Most of Siberia came under Russian rule between the early 17th and the mid-18th century.^[2]

The prize was fur, which Indigenous peoples paid as tribute, as they once had to the Mongols. Smaller communities were devastated by exploitation and imported disease; larger ones, like the Sakha and Buryat, adapted better.^[2] Siberia is vast, about 13.5 million km² in its wider sense, yet Russian settlement stayed thin until the Trans-Siberian Railroad was built between 1891 and 1905.^[2]

Stopped, then pushing on

In 1689 the Treaty of Nerchinsk with China halted the Russian advance into the Amur basin.^[2] It resumed in the 19th century: the Treaty of Aigun of 1858 gave Russia the land north of the Amur, and the Beijing Convention of 1860 confirmed it. It was one of the “unequal treaties” China was compelled to sign with foreign powers.^[5]

Russia even crossed to America: the Russian-American Company, founded in 1799, controlled part of Alaska’s coast and islands.^[6] But Alaska was costly to supply, Russia was in debt after the Crimean War and looking to Asia instead, and in 1867 it sold the territory to the United States for $7.2 million.^[3]

What was kept

The empire also expanded into the Caucasus and Central Asia. Those lands became separate countries when the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, but Siberia and the Far East had long been Russian, and they stayed.^[6][7][1] Today Russia stretches from Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Pacific, and borders 14 countries from Norway to North Korea.^[1]