Russian Empire by Milenioscuro for Wikipedia “Russian Empire” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

(2) RUSSIAN & SOVIET EMPIRES

Bizarro European empire and third largest empire by size in history, such that even the residual state of Russia remains the largest nation in the world.

Why bizarro European empire? Well, for one thing, as J.M. Roberts pointed out in Triumph of the West, it’s always been unclear where the West ends going east – and in particular on which side of the line of Western civilization the Russian state falls.

For another, the Russian Empire was distinct from other European empires, but ironically its closest parallel is with the United States, albeit still weirdly so, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed when he presciently predicted them – in 1835! – as the future global powers on parallel but opposing paths:

“There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time.

All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and they have only to maintain their power; but these are still in the act of growth. All the others have stopped, or continue to advance with extreme difficulty; these alone are proceeding with ease and celerity along a path to which no limit can be perceived. The American struggles against the obstacles which nature opposes to him; the adversaries of the Russian are men. The former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization with all its arms. The conquests of the American are therefore gained with the ploughshare; those of the Russian by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm. The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”

The primary distinction with other European empires was that, with one notable exception, the Russian Empire was not a maritime empire. Indeed, it was famously landlocked, with an equally famous strategic policy of seeking unobstructed warm-water ports.

Instead, it was a good old-fashioned territorial empire, expanding eastwards from European Russia across Siberia and central Asia, hence its parallel with the United States and its westward ‘manifest destiny’ or territorial expansion (in both cases to the Pacific).

Unlike the United States, it had more arguable justification in terms of its security against historical invasions of nomadic tribe from the steppes, most famously the Mongols – but like the United States (and unlike European maritime empires), it absorbed and retained its territorial conquests or expansion into itself as a nation.

Ultimately, the Russian empire’s eastward expansion brought it to the Pacific Ocean but more fundamentally, to the borders of an Asian state armed with firearms and robust enough to resist it – Qing China, in its prime and powerful enough to defeat Russia in the Sino-Russian border conflicts of the seventeenth century.

Of course, Qing China famously waned in the nineteenth century, while Russia had grown stronger such that it was again able to make encroachments eastwards, but was confronted by Britain and the new rising power in north-east Asia – Japan.

However the Pacific saw that one notable exception for Russia’s maritime empire – as a latecomer in the first phase of European imperialism in the Americas, most famously claiming Alaska (equally famously bought from them by the United States in 1867) but also extending to California and even Hawaii before receding back.

The Russian Empire also expanded southwards through central Asia, but was again blocked by Britain in the so-called Great Game, as well as more regional empires such as the Ottoman Empire. That saw the southernmost extent of the Russian Empire, which did not scramble for Africa like other European empires and was constrained by its naval limitations from extending elsewhere in Asia.

It also expanded westwards into Europe itself, taking Finland from a waning Sweden and partitioning territory (with Prussia and Austria) from the waning Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Despite all this, the Russian imperial state came crashing down like the three other great imperial states of Europe brought down by the First World War – Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire – but more dramatically or spectacularly as it was succeeded by the world’s first communist state, the Soviet Union.

As a communist state, the Soviet Union styled itself as anti-imperialist, but ironically closely emulated or even exceeded the imperialism of its predecessor – arguably in the tradition of two other states that styled themselves as anti-imperialist as they created empires of their own, the United States and Japan.

Initially Soviet imperialism was limited within the former Russian empire itself, but with its rise to superpower escalated to reclaiming its predecessor’s lost territory and then to extending further than the Russian empire ever did, except across the Pacific to the Americas – starting westward to the heart of Europe with its subject satellite states after the Second World War, opposed by the United States in the Cold War, fulfilling de Tocqueville’s prediction.

It also renewed the Russian sphere of influence in north-east Asia, although that fell afoul of a resurgent China, ironically a rival communist state originally within (and a product of) that influence.

The most dramatic success of Soviet imperialism was when it graduated from the traditional territorial empire of its predecessor to the maritime empire of European empires, ironically as those empires were scrambling out of Africa and elsewhere – indeed expanding its influence under its continued anti-imperial guise of supporting decolonization or ‘liberation’ movements from those empires, with overlapping successes in Cuba, south-east Asia and Africa.

Despite all this – and accelerated by one imperial expedition too many into Afghanistan – the Soviet state came crashing down in the end of the Cold War, but not before President Reagan had famously characterized it as the “evil empire”, an epithet much relished by its east European subjects who in turn revolted against it in its death throes.