Unlike European Colonisation after 1492,  and American invasion (both North and South), Russian expansion over during roughly the same period needs to be understood in different terms. Russia was an ancient feudal society right through until the 1917 revolution. The character of her expansion and colonisation reflected this fact. In this blog, I compare Russia’s imperial expansion mainly with the USA, the only other land colonisation of the period.

The many great empires in every continent, that spread across the world in 1492 when Drake first crossed the Atlantic Ocean had already been in existence for many hundreds and in some cases thousands of years. Between 1500 and 1918, all the existing ancient empires in the Americas, Asia Africa and Europe would be destroyed. First to go were the Aztecs and the Incas, in the 16th century. In Europe, the Holy Roman Empire disappeared in 1815, and the Austro/Hungarian empire 100 years later after the 1914/18 war.