Resultado de búsqueda
11 de mar. de 2024 · Russian Empire, historical empire founded on November 2 (October 22, Old Style), 1721, when the Russian Senate conferred the title of emperor (imperator) of all the Russias upon Peter I. The abdication of Nicholas II on March 15, 1917, marked the end of the empire and its ruling Romanov dynasty.
- Alexander II
Russian Empire - Alexander II, Reforms, Autocracy: The...
- Russification Policy
Russian Empire - Russification, Autocracy, Centralization:...
- Nicholas II
Nicholas II, the last Russian emperor (1894–1917), whose...
- Nicholas I
Russian Empire - Autocracy, Reforms, Nicholas I: Nicholas...
- Alexander II
The Russian Empire, also known as Tsarist Russia, Tsarist Empire or Imperial Russia, and sometimes simply as Russia, was a vast realm that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its proclamation in November 1721 until its dissolution in March 1917.
In 1721, in the wake of the Great Northern War, Tsar Peter the Great renamed the state as the Russian Empire; he is also noted for establishing St. Petersburg as the new capital of his Empire, and for his introducing Western European culture to Russia.
- Overview
- Foreign policy
Russia in the 19th century was both a multilingual and a multireligious empire. Only about half the population was at the same time Russian by language and Orthodox by religion. The Orthodox were to some extent privileged in comparison with the other Christians; all Christians enjoyed a higher status than Muslims; and the latter were not so disadvantaged as the Jews. The basis of legitimacy was obedience to the tsar: Nicholas expected all his subjects to obey him, but he did not expect non-Russians to become Russians. Admittedly, he detested the Poles, but that was because they had been disloyal subjects and revolted against him.
The idea that Russians, as such, should have a status superior to that of other peoples of the empire was distasteful to Nicholas. Russian nationalism nevertheless received some support from Count Uvarov, who, in his famous report to the tsar in 1832, proclaimed three principles as “truly Russian”: Orthodoxy, autocracy, and the national principle (narodnost). In 1833 Uvarov set up a new university in Kiev to be the centre for a policy of spreading Russian language and culture through the schools in the western provinces, at the expense of the Polish. Nicholas approved of this, for the Poles had been guilty of rebellion, but when the attempt was made to Russify the Germans of the Baltic provinces, he objected. The Baltic Germans were loyal subjects and provided admirable officers and officials; they were therefore allowed to preserve their German culture and to maintain their cultural and social domination over the Estonians and Latvians. The young Slavophile and landowning nobleman Yury Samarin, a junior official in Riga, was severely reprimanded by the emperor for his anti-German activities.
The most revolutionary of the Decembrist leaders, Pavel Pestel, had insisted that all non-Russian peoples of the empire except the Poles should “completely fuse their nationality with the nationality of the dominant people.” Another group of Decembrists, however, the Society of United Slavs, believed in a federation of free Slav peoples, including some of those living under Austrian and Turkish rule. In 1845 this idea was put forward in a different form in the Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Methodius, in Kiev. This group, among whose members was the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, believed that a federation of Slav peoples should include the Ukrainians, whom they claimed were not a part of the Russian nation but a distinct nationality. The society was crushed by the police, and Shevchenko was sent as a private soldier to the Urals; Nicholas himself gave orders that the great poet should be forbidden to write or draw. But Ukrainian national consciousness, though still confined to an educated minority, was growing, and nothing did more to crystallize Ukrainian as a literary language than Shevchenko’s poetry.
During the first half of the century, Russia made substantial conquests in Asia. In the Caucasus the kingdom of Georgia united voluntarily with Russia in 1801, and other small Georgian principalities were conquered in the next years. Persia ceded northern Azerbaijan, including the peninsula of Baku, in 1813 and the Armenian province of Erivan (Yerevan) in 1828. The mountain peoples of the northern Caucasus, however, proved more redoubtable. The Chechens, led by Shāmil, resisted Russian expeditions from 1834 until 1859, and the Circassians were not finally crushed until 1864. In the 1840s Russian rule was established over the pastoral peoples of Kazakhstan. In East Asia, Russian ships explored the lower course of the Amur River and discovered the straits between Sakhalin and the mainland of Asia in 1849. The Russian-American Company, founded in 1799, controlled part of the coast and islands of Alaska.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Russian foreign policy was essentially concentrated on the three western neighbour countries with which it had been preoccupied since the 16th century: Sweden, Poland, and Turkey. The policy toward these countries also determined Russian relations with France, Austria, and Great Britain.
Russo-Swedish relations were settled during the Napoleonic era. When Napoleon met with Alexander at Tilsit, he gave the latter a free hand to proceed against Sweden. After two years of war, in which the Russians did not always fare well, the Swedish government ceded Finland to the tsar in 1809. Alexander became grand duke of Finland, but Finland was not incorporated into the Russian Empire, and its institutions were fully respected. In 1810, when Napoleon’s former marshal, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, was elected heir to the Swedish throne, he showed no hostility toward Russia. In 1812 he made an agreement recognizing the tsar’s position in Finland in return for the promise of Russian support in his aim to annex Norway from Denmark. Bernadotte achieved this in the Treaty of Kiel (January 14, 1814), and thereafter the relations between Russia and Sweden, now a small and peaceful state, were not seriously troubled.
Alexander I, influenced by his Polish friend Prince Adam Czartoryski, had plans for the liberation and unity of Poland, which had ceased to exist as a state in the 18th century, when it was partitioned among Russia, Prussia, and Austria. After his defeat by Napoleon in 1805, Alexander abandoned those plans in favour of an alliance with Prussia. In 1807 Napoleon established a dependency called the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and in 1809 increased its territory at the expense of Austria. Alexander’s attempts to win the Poles to his side in 1811 and to persuade Austria to make concessions to them failed; when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, he had 100,000 first-class Polish troops fighting for him. After Napoleon’s defeat, Alexander was not vindictive. He protected the Poles against the demands of Russian nationalists who wanted revenge and sought once more to create a large Polish kingdom comprising the territories annexed by Russia and Prussia in the partitions of the 18th century. He was opposed at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 by Austria and Britain; the ensuing kingdom of Poland, which, though nominally autonomous, was to be in permanent union with the Russian Empire, consisted of only part of the Prussian and Russian conquests.
Alexander was popular in Poland for a time after 1815. But real reconciliation between Poles and Russians was made impossible by their competing claims for the borderlands, which had belonged to the former grand duchy of Lithuania. The majority of the population of this region was Belarusian, Ukrainian, or Lithuanian; its commercial class was Jewish; and its upper classes and culture were Polish. Neither Russians nor Poles considered Belarusians, Ukrainians, or Lithuanians to be nations, entitled to decide their own fates: the question was whether Lithuania was to be Polish or Russian. Russians could argue that most of Lithuania had been part of “the Russian land” until the 14th century, and the Poles that it had been Polish since the 16th. Alexander had some sympathy for the Polish point of view and allowed the Poles to hope that he would reunite these lands with Poland, but the effective political forces in Russia were strongly opposed to any change. The disappointment of Polish hopes for Lithuania was probably the most important single cause of the growing tension between Warsaw and St. Petersburg in the late 1820s, which culminated in the revolt of the Poles in November 1830 and the war of 1831 between Polish and Russian armies. It ended in the defeat of the Poles and the exile of thousands of political leaders and soldiers to western Europe. Poland’s constitution and thus its autonomy were abrogated, and there began a policy of Russification of Poland.
International reactions to the Russo-Polish war were of some importance. Although the governments of France and Britain had failed to come to the aid of Poland during the war, there was much sympathy for the Poles in these countries; nonetheless, sympathy alone was not sufficient to influence Russian actions. On the other hand, the governments of Prussia and Austria strongly supported Russia. It is arguable that the cooperation among the three monarchies, which continued over the next two decades and was revived from time to time later in the century, had less to do with their eloquently proclaimed loyalty to monarchical government than with their common interest in suppressing the Poles.
Turkey had long been the main object of Russian territorial expansion; through a certain inertia of tradition, the Turkish policy had become almost automatic. It was to some extent reinforced by religious motives—by the romantic desire to liberate Constantinople (Istanbul), the holy city of Orthodoxy—but more important in the second half of the 19th century was the desire to assure the exit of Russian grain exports through the Black Sea. During certain periods, Russia sought to dominate Turkey as a powerful ally; this was its policy from 1798 to 1806 and again from 1832 to 1853. When this policy was successful, Russia supported the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and made no territorial demands. When it was not successful, Russia sought to undermine Turkey by supporting rebellious Balkan peoples or, more directly, by war: this was the case in 1806–12, 1828–29, and 1853–56.
19 de mar. de 2019 · From early Mongol invasions to czarist regimes to ages of enlightenment and industrialization to revolutions and wars, Russia is known not just for its political rises of world power and...
The Russian Empire stretched from the Baltic Sea and eastern Europe to the Pacific Ocean, and during its nearly two-hundred-year history (1721–1917), it was ruled by a succession of autocratic czars who assigned varying degrees of local authority to as many as fifty appointed provincial governors.
history of Russia. Learn about this topic in these articles: Assorted References. major treatment. In Russia: Prehistory and the rise of the Rus. …is now the territory of Russia since the 2nd millennium bce, but little is known about their ethnic identity, institutions, and activities.
