Russian Empire (Rise of the South Map Game)

The Russian Empire (Pre-reform Russian orthography: Россійская Имперія, Modern Russian: Российская империя, translit: Rossiyskaya Imperiya) is a state that was established in 1721 as a successor state to the Tsardom of Russia. It is currently the worlds largest nation with more than 28,000,000 square kilometers. The Russian Empire is currently a superb landmass, only surpassed by the Mongol Empire. It currently spans across Europe, Eurasia, and North America.

The Eighteenth Century
Peter I the Great (1672-1725) introduced autocracy in Russia which introduced the Russian Empire to the European state system. However, Russia during the time period only had a population of 14 million within its vast borders, many of which were farmers. Only a small portion of the population during the time period lived in towns. The class of kholops, close to the class of slave remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter I converted household kholops into house serfs, thus including them into poll taxation. Russian agriculture kholops were formally converted into serfs earlier in the year of 1679.

Peter reorganized the government of Russia based on the most latest political models at the time, moulding Russia into an absolutist state. He replaced the old boyar Duma (Council of Nobels) with a nine-member senate, in effect a supreme council of state. The Russian countryside was soon divided into new provinces and districts. Peter told the senate that its mission was to collect tax revenues and increase the income from tax. In turn tax revenues tripled over the course of his reign. As part of the government reform the Orthodox Church was partially incorporated into the government's administrative system, thus making it a tool of the state. Peter abolished the patriarchate and replaced it with a collective body, the Holy Synod, led by a government official. Meanwhile, all vestiges of local self-government were removed. Peter continued and intensified his predecessors' requirement of state service for all nobles.

When Peter I the Great took power his first military efforts were against the Ottoman Empire. His attention soon turned into the north. Russia at the time still lacked a secure northern sea port, except at Archangel on the White Sea. However, nine out of twelve months every year the body of water surrounding Archangel would freeze, rendering trade from the north impossible and dangerous. The ability to access the Baltic Sea was blocked by Sweden, whose territory enclosed it on three sides. Peter's ambition to for "a window to the sea" lead him into making an alliance with Kingdom of Saxony, Denmark, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth against Sweden, resulting in the Great Northern War. The war ended in 1721 when Sweden asked Russia for peace. Peter I acquired four provinces south and east of the Gulf of Finland. The wanted access to sea was now secured. There he built Russia's new capital, St. Petersburg to replace Moscow which has been Russia's long time cultural center.

Peter I the Great died in 1725, leaving an unsettled succession within Russia. Catherine I soon took reign as Empress of the Russian Empire, which was short-lived. The crown then passed to Empress Anna who slowed down reforms of the Russian Empire and led a successful war against the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish war of 1735–1739. This brought significant weakening of the Ottoman vassal Crimean Khanate, a long term Russian adversary.

The discontent over the dominant positions of Baltic Germans in Russian politics brought Peter I's daughter Elisabeth on the Russian throne as Empress of the Russian Empire. Elisabeth supported the arts, architecture and the sciences. However, she did not carry out significant structural reforms. Her reign, which lasted nearly 20 years, is also known for her involvement in the Seven Years' War. It was successful for Russia militarily, but fruitless politically against Great Britain, Portugal, and the Holy Roman Empire.

Catherine II the Great, was a German princess who married Peter III, the German heir to the Russian crown. After the death of Empress Elisabeth of the Russian Empire, she came to power, when her coup d'état against her unpopular pro-Prussian husband succeeded. She contributed to the resurgence of the Russian nobility that began after the death of Peter the Great. State service was abolished and ridden of, and Catherine delighted the nobles further by turning over most state functions in the provinces and districts to them.

Catherine the Great extended Russian political control over the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Her actions included the support of the Targowica confederation, although the cost of her campaigns, on top of the oppressive social system that required serfs to spend almost all of their time laboring on their owners' land, provoked a major peasant uprising in 1773, after Catherine legalised the selling of serfs separate from land. Inspired by a Cossack named Pugachev, with the emphatic cry of "Hang all the landlords!", the rebels threatened to take Moscow before they were ruthlessly suppressed and killed. Instead of the traditional punishment of being drawn and quartered, Catherine issued secret instructions that the executioner should carry the sentence out quickly and with a minimum of suffering, as part of her effort to introduce compassion into the law. She also ordered the public trial of Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova, a member of the highest nobility, on charges of torture and murder. These gestures of compassion garnered Catherine much positive attention from Europe experiencing the Enlightenment age, but the specter of revolution and disorder continued to haunt her and her future successors.

First Half of the Nineteenth Century
During the Napoleonic Conquests, Napoleon Bonaparte of France launched an invasion of the tsar's realm in 1812. The campaign and the invasion was a catastrophe claiming the lives of more than 380,000 French, Polish, Austria, and Prussian soldiers and destroying more than half of Napoleon's Grande Armée. Although Napoleon's Grande Armée made its way to Moscow, the Russians' scorched-earth strategy prevented the invaders from living off the country. Due to the harsh weather of the Russian mainland, thousands of Napoleon's troops were killed by attrition, as well as being killed by peasant guerrilla fighters. As the Grand Armée retreats back across Europe, Russian troops have managed to storm the gates of Paris, and end the Napoleonic Conquests. After Russia and its allies defeated France, Tsar Alexander I became known as the "savior of Europe", also presiding over the redrawing of the map of Europe during the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Although the Russian Empire is a great power in the world, Russia lagged behind in technological development. While most nations during the time were going through the Industrial Revolution, it created problems for Russia. This status concealed the inefficiency of its government, the isolation of its people, and its economic backwardness.

On the 1 December 1825 the liberal Tsar war replaced by his younger brother Nicholas I (1825-1855), who ruled the Russian Empire for thirty years. At the beginning of his reign Nicholas I was confronted by the. The revolt started due to many well-educated officers traveling in Europe during military in the course of military campaigns, where their exposure to the liberalism of Western Europe encouraged them to seek change on their return to autocratic Russia. The result of this uprising sparked the Decembrist Revolution (December 1825). However, this revolt was easily crushed, leading Nicholas to turn away from modernization of the Russian Empire which begun by Peter the Great. Instead Nicholas I has chosen to champion the ideology and the doctrine of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

The retaliation for the revolt made the day of "December Fourteenth" a day long remembered by later revolutionary movements. In order to repress further revolts, censorship was intensified, including the constant surveillance of schools and universities. Textbooks were strictly regulated by the government. Police spies were planted everywhere. Would-be revolutionaries were sent off to Siberia. Under the reign of Nicholas I hundreds of thousands were sent to Katorga which was a prison camp located in Siberia.

Second Half of the Nineteenth Century and Present Time
In 1855 Tsar Nicholas I has passed away with his ideology heavily disputed within the Russian Empire. One year earlier, Russia had became involved with the Crimean War, conflict within the Crimean Peninsula with multiple belligrents from across Europe, including the British Empire, Ottoman Empire, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and Bulgaria. The Crimean War ending by the Treaty of Paris of 1856 has exploited and confirmed Tsar Nicholas I failures, leading the Russian Empire to lose its territory it had been granted at the mouth of the Danube, Russia was forced to abandon its claims to protect Christians in the Ottoman Empire in favour of France, Russia lost its influence over the Romanian principalities, which, together with Serbia, were given greater independence, and in the long run the war marked a turning point in Russian domestic and foreign policy. Russian intellectuals during this time period used the defeat to demand fundamental reform of the government and social system. Russian signatories of the Treaty of Paris were Alexey Fyodorovich Orlov and Philipp von Brunnow. Since playing a major role in the defeat of Napoleon, Russia has been regarded as militarily invincible, but, once opposed against a coalition of the great powers of Europe, the reverses it suffered on land and sea exposed the decay and weakness of Tsar Nicholas' regime.

When Alexander II ascended the throne in 2 March 1855, desire for change and reform was widespread among a large portion of the populace. Growing humanitarian movements such as the Abolitionists of the United States of America before the American Civil War, attacked Serfdom. In 1859 more than 23 million serfs were living within the borders of the Russian Empire, most of which living in conditions worse than peasants in other nations across Europe on 16th-Century manors. Alexander II made up his own mind to abolish serfdom from above, rather than wait for it to be abolished from below in a revolutionary way.

In 1861 the emancipation of the serfs has begun and considered as one of the most important parts of 19th-Century Russian history to the current date. This was the beginning of the end for the landed aristocracy's monopoly of power. The emancipation has also made the current emperor known as Alexander the Liberator. Emancipation brought free labor to the cities and urban areas across Russia, stimulating the industry, thus growing the middle-class in size and influence at exponential rates. However, instead of former serfs receiving their lands as a gift, the freed peasants had to pay a special tax for what amounted to their lifetime to the government, which in turn paid the landlords a generous price for the land that they had lost. In most cases, peasants would gain very small portions of land. All the property turned over to the peasants was owned collectively by the mir, a village community, which divided the land among the peasants and supervised household belongings. Although serfdom was abolished its abolition was achieved on unfavorable terms to the peasants, revolutionary tensions were not abated, despite Alexander II's intentions and efforts. Revolutionaries believed that the newly freed serfs which were now peasants were merely being sold into wage slavery in the onset of the industrial revolution, and that the bourgeoisie had effectively replaced landowners.

Geography
As of this date Russia is currently the largest nation of the world spanning over 28,000,000 sq km, a little more than 1/6 of the Earth's landmass. A majority of the population is currently living within European-Russia in the western portion of the empire. Hundreds of ethnic groups currently live within the Russian Empire, including Ukrainians, Finnish, and Polish.

The Emperor
In Peter the Great changed his name from Tsar in 1721, when he was declared Emperor of all Russia. The emperor of the Russian Empire rules as an absolute monarch with only two limits to his power. Both of which are intended to protect the current system and maintain a stable regime. The Emperor and his consort must both belong to the Russian Orthodox Church, and he must obey the laws of succession that were established by Paul I. Beyond this, the power of the Russian Autocrat was virtually limitless.