The Rise of the Russian Empire

Russia, which is blessed with a rich variety of tribes and peoples, the despair of the ethnographical geographer, who can scarcely find enough distinctive colours wherewith to d...

Whatever the nature of the causes that led up to this irruption of stranger folk, the fact and, to a certain extent, the manner of their coming is substantially set forth in the...

The history of Russia during the next two hundred years is little more than a long chronicle of aimless and inconsequent feuds between the multiple Princes of the Blood--“the mu...

my servants to do. Night and day, summer and winter, I was perpetually moving about. I wished to see everything with my own eyes.... I made it my duty to inspect the churches an...

As an advancing tide, engulfing in its progression the stretches of ooze-land which lie in its onward path, sends scurrying before it flights of waders and other shore-haunting...

While the Golden Horde was dealing out death and destruction in the neighbouring western kingdoms, Russia was exerting her powers of recuperation to regain some of the life that...

Never since the overthrow on the Sit had a Russian ruler been as emphatically and unquestionably Grand Prince as was Simeon Ivanovitch, yclept “the Proud.” Some of the most valu...

With the accession of Ivan III. to the throne of Moskva, Russian history takes new shape and direction. This dark, watchful, brooding kniaz was but the continuator of a dynasty...

The lapse of 500 years found the principles of settled hereditary government in much the same condition in Russia as they had been when the infant Sviatoslav succeeded to the th...

When the people of Moskva became sufficiently familiar with the fact that their terrible Gosoudar was dead and safely buried, even if their imagination could not picture him, as...

In all historical ages men have been found ready to believe in the pretensions of the personators who seem to spring up as the natural aftermath of a vanished dynasty or a quenc...

In the midst of Russia’s direst despondency, when the throne of Monomachus was empty and the lawful Patriarch starving in prison, and when the tombs and temples of Moskva’s sacr...