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The Russian Empire
The tsarist state that stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific and, for a time, into North America
Only the Mongol Empire ever ruled more contiguous land than the Russian Empire. By the late nineteenth century the emperor in St. Petersburg governed about a sixth of the planet's land surface, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific and from the Arctic Ocean to the borders of Persia and Afghanistan, and until 1867 Alaska as well. Its 1897 census counted 125.6 million subjects, fewer than half of them native Russian speakers. The empire built the Trans-Siberian Railway, produced a literature and music that the world still reads and hears, and its collapse in 1917 opened the way to the Soviet Union. Many of Russia's borders with its neighbors today follow lines the empire drew.
The empire was built on plains. Its European heartland ran from the forests around Moscow and St. Petersburg south across the black-earth steppe to the Black Sea, west into Finland, the Baltic provinces and Russian Poland, and southwest into Bessarabia. East of the Ural Mountains lay Siberia, a vast belt of taiga, tundra and permafrost crossed by the Ob, Yenisei and Lena rivers and reaching the Pacific at Vladivostok. In the south it took in the Caucasus and the deserts and oases of Central Asia. At its peak in 1895 it covered about 22.8 million square kilometers. Its lands now make up Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, much of Poland and part of northeastern Turkey, while Alaska is now a US state.
Muscovite princes threw off Mongol overlordship in the fifteenth century, and Ivan IV took the title of tsar in 1547 before conquering the Volga khanates and opening Siberia to Cossack expansion. Peter I, builder of St. Petersburg, proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721 after his victory over Sweden. Expansion continued under Catherine II, who annexed Crimea and took part in the partitions of Poland, and through the nineteenth century into the Caucasus and Central Asia, often against armed resistance from local peoples. Serfdom, which bound most peasants to the land, was abolished in 1861. Defeat by Japan and the revolution of 1905 forced a constitution and an elected Duma. Amid the strains of World War I, Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, and the Bolsheviks seized power that November, founding the state that became the Soviet Union in 1922.