For the country of Russia, there are roughly five stages in history, the first stage is the tribal era that belongs to the early civilization; The second stage is the Kiev-Russian era with Kiev as the core city; The third is the era of statelessness that encountered the powerful conquest of the Mongols; The fourth is the era of barbaric foreign conquest that became independent as a Muscovite principality after the overthrow of Mongol rule; The fifth is the era of Great Russia, which became the world's largest in terms of area, starting with the Muscovite principality, no matter how the name of the country was changed, its essence did not change, no matter how the tsar changed, the encroachment on the territory of neighboring countries did not stop.
Slavic unified history
The Slavs are actually a large race in Europe, and after leaving many countries in Northern Europe, they began to integrate the tribes and human resources of Eastern Europe, and then tried to establish an independent country, but in the Middle Ages, the Mongol Khan Genghis Khan's war against the world suddenly broke out and swept through Europe, which broke the original Russian plan.
At that time, many small countries established by the Slavs were completely annihilated by the Mongols, and the era of more than 200 years of rule began, during which Russia was ruled by the Golden Horde, one of the four major Mongol empires, and the empire established by Genghis Khan's eldest son Shuchi. Later, with the decline of the Central Dynasty Yuan Dynasty, these four major khanates also experienced different degrees of decline.
The Slavs also took advantage of the decline of the Mongols and began to establish their own Muscovite principality in the remoteness, during this period still did not dare to challenge the authority of the Golden Horde, maintained regular tribute every year, and then developed obscenely, and finally drove out the Mongols at the time of Ivan III, completed their unification, and since then Russia has begun a miracle of foreign expansion, which is comparable to the Mongols in those years.
We can try to look at the timeline of how quickly Russia expanded that year, starting from the time when Ivan III unified the Muscovite principality and expelled the Mongols, in 1533, when the area of their country was 2.8 million square kilometers. But just in 1868, after the name was changed to Tsarist Russia, the land area of Russia had reached 22.8 million square kilometers, and the difference was only 10 times larger in three hundred years.
Russia versus the Eastern miracle
Ivan IV was an important monarch in Russian history, and during his accession to the throne, the entire Muscovite principality experienced a long period of turmoil. His true pro-government began after his mother and uncle and nobles took turns, and he killed all magnates who had the ability to interfere with him. And crowned himself tsar, in Slavic terms, which means Roman emperor. The Moscow principality at that time was also renamed "Tsarist Russia".
Ivan IV used political means to divide the Golden Horde into small states, used force to forcibly annex the Kazan Khanate and Astra Khanate that split from the Golden Horde, and then succeeded in gaining access to the Caspian Sea, and it took five years to defeat the capital defense of the Kazan Khanate, but it was actually quite worthwhile, because it marked that the Slavs directly broke the myth of the invincibility of the Mongols under equal conditions.
After defeating these two khanates, Russia's goal became the Siberian Khanate in the east. At that time, the Siberian Khanate was shocked to see the great power of Tsar Ivan IV, and felt that it was not an opponent of Tsarist Russia, so it began to send emissaries to choose submission, but did not accept the military stationing of Tsarist Russia, when Ivan IV considered the national strength and felt that Tsarist Russia could not fight on all sides, so he temporarily agreed to the request of the Siberian Khan and transformed to deal with other places.
After more than forty years of Ivan IV's rule, the Siberian Khanate was finally captured by Russian soldiers, but the remnants of the force could not be underestimated, and it was not until 1598 that the armed forces of the entire Siberian Khanate were killed by Tsarist Russia. Therefore, at the end of the 17th century, Tsarist Russia had controlled the whole of Siberia, and the Siberian Khanate at that time had asked for help in Mongolia, but the Mongol tribes were not unified because of their division, so they had not sent soldiers and horses to the Siberian Khanate for a long time, and could only watch the Siberian Khanate, which was also of Mongol blood, be destroyed.
The Russian occupation of Central Asia and Eastern Europe
After the death of Ivan IV, because he had no successors, the Rurik dynasty in Tsarist Russia disappeared from history. At that time, Poland, a large country in Eastern Europe, was quite strong, taking advantage of the period when Tsarist Russia had no monarch to directly send soldiers and horses to capture the capital of Tsarist Russia, Moscow, and then re-conducted the tsarist election under the auspices of the Polish army, and a new dynasty began, which is called the "Romanov dynasty" in Russian history.
The founding monarchs of the Romanov dynasty were actually very average, because they were elected by the Poles, so they were only promised throughout their lives. But it was not the same by the time of his grandson Peter the Great, who had already conquered the Ukrainian region before he ascended the throne and forced the Ukrainian Cossack leaders to sign an unequal treaty to permanently annex Tsarist Russia, and then began a war of foreign expansion no less than that of Ivan IV.
During Peter the Great, in order to seek access to the sea in Eastern Europe, he directly sent troops to fight Sweden, which lasted for 21 years, but still did not conquer Sweden as territory, and the Baltic Sea was fortunate to avoid the destruction of the Slavs, and did not become the internal sea of Tsarist Russia. After the Russian army was completely annihilated by Sweden, Peter the Great began to deeply reflect, why could he not win against the small country of Sweden with many people?
This was followed by reforms in Russian history, in order to enhance the combat effectiveness of the army, Tsarist Russia also moved its capital to St. Petersburg in order to learn advanced Western military tactics. Later, Peter the Great carried out four countries at the same time to Sweden, Poland, Denmark, and Lithuania, and successfully took Estonia, Northern Latvia and other regions, although the Baltic Sea has not completely become the internal sea of Tsarist Russia, but Tsarist Russia has obtained access to the sea here.
Invasion of Central Asia and the East
After the Russian Empress Catherine ascended the throne, Poland was successfully partitioned after three wars and directly annexed the country of Lithuania, and Finland in 1809 was also laughed at by Tsarist Russia. After more than 100 years of monarchs, Russia at that time occupied most of the Baltic Sea. But their pace did not stop, and after the Eastern European goals were completed, the conquest of the Caucasus in Central Asia began.
Because Tsarist Russia felt that it already had access to the sea in both the Caspian and Baltic Seas, and it was too much to go without taking an outlet in the Black Sea. This was followed by the forcible seizure of the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus and Armenia from the Ottoman Turks, and Turkmenistan in Central Asia was destroyed by Tsarist Russia in 1884, and the whole of Central Asia became the territory of Tsarist Russia, followed by aggression against China, a great power in the East.
According to the chronology of the Chinese emperor, the invasion of China by Tsarist Russia began since the Kangxi era, and the Treaty of Nebuchu directly cut off jurisdiction over the Yenisei River basin in Eastern Siberia of China; During the Yongzheng period, Tsarist Russia directly ceded the Baikal region of China through the Treaty of Kyakhta; Sakhalin in the Qianlong era, the largest island in northern China, was annexed by Tsarist Russia; During the time of the Daoguang Emperor, 1 million square kilometers of land including Kazakhstan and Brut were annexed by Tsarist Russia.
During the Xianfeng period, more than 1 million square kilometers of land in the outer northeast and outer northwest were annexed by Tsarist Russia; During the reign of Tongzhi, the Bukhar Khanate was annexed for 1 million square kilometers; During the Guangxu period, Ladakh, a southwestern vassal state of the Great Qing Dynasty, was divided and annexed; Finally, when the Qing Dynasty collapsed, they also planned to annex 1.56 million square kilometers of Outer Mongolia, but unfortunately the annexation was not successful, but the October Revolution interrupted the process, and later Outer Mongolia became the largest buffer state between China and Russia.
epilogue
The nature of foreign expansion in Tsarist Russia, whether it was the former Muscovite principality or Stalin's Soviet Union, has never changed. Once when the People's Republic of China was founded, the Dalian and Lushun areas were still occupied by them; After the Sino-Soviet war in the sixties, he even put millions of soldiers on the Chinese border, threatening to carry out a nuclear strike on China; Many people say that China suffered losses at the hands of Tsarist Russia, directly or indirectly losing tens of millions of territory, and the two countries that have caused the most harm to China in modern history, one is Japan, and the other is him.