Russian Empire, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and Russian Federation

Abstract

The history of Russia is a history of territorial expansion. Starting from the Principality of Moscow, Russia’s expansion first came from the East, gathering the lands of the ‘Golden Horde’. Then, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century Russia expanded to the West, step-by-step defeating Poland-Lithuania and Sweden. At the end of the eighteenth century Poland-Lithuania was dissolved in the three Polish divisions. During the nineteenth century expansion continued in Transcaucasia and Asia. At the end of the nineteenth century the Russian empire had attained the largest territory an empire had ever had. It reached from the Prussian border to the Pacific and from the North Atlantic to the Himalayas.