The Russian Empire: An Enthralling Overview of Imperial Russia - Paperback

by Billy Wellman (Author)

How did a Viking invited to rule a frontier of rivers become the seed of the largest land empire on Earth, and why did it all come crashing down?
For more than a thousand years, Russia sat at the center of history's most violent and dramatic turns. Empires rose and fell around it. Invaders swept across its open plains. Ruler after ruler seized the throne and pushed its borders outward through force, reform, and sheer ambition, until Russia stretched across three continents and the very vastness that made it unstoppable began to make it impossible to hold.

It started in the unlikeliest place of all. A Norse adventurer named Rurik, invited by the very people his kind had been raiding, to bring order to the rivers of eastern Europe.

This is the story of that thousand-year rise and fall: how a scattered frontier became an empire that could claim land from Alaska to Poland, and how the forces that built it eventually tore it apart. Along the way you'll meet Mongol overlords, tsars both brilliant and monstrous, reforming emperors, and the artists who turned a frozen frontier into one of the world's great powers.

Inside, you'll discover:

• The raiders invited to rule. How Rurik and the Varangians founded the Russian state, and why a people would hand power to the very Norsemen who had been terrorizing them.
• Kievan Rus' and the Mongol yoke. The rise of the first Russian civilization, its conversion to Orthodox Christianity, and the brutal centuries spent under the Mongol Golden Horde.
• The first and most terrible tsar. How Ivan the Terrible broke the power of the boyars, crowned himself tsar of all Russia, and ruled with a paranoia and cruelty that became legend.
• Peter the Great and the window to the West. How a near-giant of a tsar dragged Russia into the modern age by force and built a brand-new capital out of a swamp to rival the courts of Europe.
• Catherine the Great's golden age. How a German princess seized the throne, traded letters with the philosophers of the Enlightenment, and expanded the empire until no one in Europe could ignore it.
• 1812 and the burning of Moscow. How the Russian winter and a ruthless scorched-earth retreat swallowed the largest army Europe had ever assembled.
• The reform that doomed the empire. How Alexander II freed more than twenty million serfs, and why the change meant to save Russia helped push it toward collapse.
• The treasures and the fall. The Fabergé eggs, the music of Tchaikovsky, the poetry of Pushkin, and the slow decline of the Romanovs that ended three hundred years of rule.

By the end, you'll understand not just what happened, but why a nation born on a Viking river grew into a colossus, why that colossus fell, and how its thousand-year story still shapes the world today.

Filled with unforgettable rulers, dramatic turning points, and an empire forever reaching beyond its grasp, this is a fast-moving introduction to the people and forces that forged Imperial Russia, and to the question at its heart: how much can one empire seize before it can no longer hold itself together?

Add it to your cart and begin your journey from the Viking rivers to the Winter Palace.