History of Russia

Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible annexed Kazan and Astrachan. Fedor acquired all of Siberia, south of the 50th degree of latitude to the Arctic circle. Michael Romanoff added the Ural district, and a vast slice of Northwestern Asia, from the Yenissei River to Behring's Strait and the Sea of Okhotsk. Alexis annexed Little Russia and the Cossacks of the Ukraine. Peter the Great conquered the Baltic provinces, and the peninsula of Khamschatka. Empress Anna stole from the Turks the district between the Dneiper and the Bug, and absorbed the Kirghiz Tartars on the Caspian. Elizabeth appropriated a strip of Finland. Catherine II. deprived Turkey of the Crimea and the shores of the Sea of Azof, a part of Poland, and a belt of the Baltic lands from Liban to the Black Sea. Paul I. coveted "his neighbor's vineyard" in the Province of Georgia—and took it. Alexander I. relieved Sweden of the custody of what remained of Finland, another slice of Poland, and appropriated Bessarabia in spite of Turkey's protest. In Asia he occupied the entire country extending from the Sea of Aral to Lake Balkhash. Nicholas cast an evil eye on Persia and promptly acquired two whole provinces in Trans-Caucasia. After his defeat, however, in the Crimea, he unwillingly ceded Bessarabia to Roumania. Alexander II., subsequently, under the Treaty of Berlin, re-acquired it by purchase, obtaining at the same time from Turkey, Kars, Batoum, a nearly limitless stretch of Black Sea littoral, and all of the Eastern coast of the Caspian. In Asia he absorbed Khokand, and extended Russian dominion to Khiva and Bokhara. He also annexed the region of the Amur on the Pacific; which included the whole coast line up to the Korean frontier, and a long line of coast on the Sea of Japan; but after the Crimean war he forfeited Russia's right to maintain a fleet upon the waters of the Black Sea.

While amnesty was extended to many prisoners after the coronation, Alexander excluded all Nihilists from the benefits of participation, and their acts continued to he regarded by a vast number of the middle and upper classes with malicious satisfaction. But the press was shackled as never before, information regarding any important event being wholly suppressed. In response to the demand of the mercantile class, whose interests were menaced by the imposition of a three percent income tax, the depreciation of the paper rouble and a commercial crisis, a new department, that of commerce and manufactures was established, with Ignatieff in control.

Though the fair held at Nijni-Novgorod was a failure as regards attendance, the great Industrial Exhibition at Moscow had demonstrated that while the United States and India would rob Russia of her importance as the granary of Europe, the industries of Central Russia were shown to be susceptible of unlimited expansion. Russian roads, however, are deplorably bad, and though the magnificent river system, with its extensive canals, offers extraordinary transportation facilities through tributary districts, vast tracts of arable lands lie fallow, awaiting the advent of the railway.

Seventy-six percent of the whole of the population of Russia is engaged in agricultural pursuits. The Cossack Dons on the Volga cultivate, in some individual instances, thirty thousand acres of wheat, own stud-farms comprising five hundred horses, besides herds numbering a million head of sheep. The taxes paid into the treasury by the Russian peasantry, have amounted annually to nearly one hundred and twenty million roubles, one third of which is applied to the repayment of the debt on the land, which was charged against the serfs at the time of their emancipation. This tax was substantially diminished by ukase of Alexander on his accession to the throne. On the rich "black lands" of Southern Russia, English farm machinery is now utilized, "where it is no unusual thing," says Morfill, "to see one proprietor with as much as fourteen thousand acres under crop with white Turkish wheat." Out of the one hundred and twenty-four million of Russia's population to-day not twenty millions live in the towns. "It is not among the palaces of St. Petersburg," writes Stead, "nor amid the glories of the Kremlin that you find the real Russian, but in the villages." Of these villages there are more than half a million, and from these, which "nestle like so many flocks of little brown sheep" on the immeasurable pasture lands of the Czar, a constant but unanswered prayer ascends to the imperial head shepherd at remote Gatschina, for better railway facilities and some more practical display of the milk of human kindness.