What Was the Russian Empire’s Largest Extent?
On 14 May 1896 (O.S. 2 May), in the Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin, Nicholas II was crowned Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, and the Khan of Khiva and Bukhara. The court address listed his domains “from Finland to the Caucasus, from the Vistula to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Pamirs.” It was not rhetoric. The 1897 Pervaya vseobshchaya perepis’ naseleniya (first general census of the Russian Empire) reported an imperial population of 125,068,231, on a territory of 22,400,000 square kilometres. The empire was the largest contiguous land empire since the Mongols and the third-largest empire in modern history after the British and the Qing. Of the world’s then-current population of 1.65 billion, about 7.5 percent lived under the Romanov crown (Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1997; Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, 2001).
The regions
The imperial territory, even at maximum extent, was a patchwork of very different legal and administrative regimes.
European Russia proper — fifty-nine governorates, with Moscow and St Petersburg at the centre — was the demographic, economic, and military heartland. The 1897 census counted 92,962,802 in the 50 Russian governorates and the 9 Polish governorates combined. The Central Agricultural Region, the Central Industrial Region, the Volga and the Northern provinces each had their own social structure.
The Baltic provinces — Estland, Livland, and Courland (acquired in 1721, with Courland added in 1795) — retained their German-speaking landowning class and their local German university system at Dorpat (renamed Yuryev in 1893). In 1897 the Baltic governorates had 2,900,000 subjects, of whom 45,000 were Baltic German barons.
The Grand Duchy of Finland, taken from Sweden in 1809, had its own constitution of 1772, its own Diet from 1863, and its own currency, the Finnish markka. The 1897 census recorded 2,623,000 Finns.
The Kingdom of Poland (Congress Poland), created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 from the Duchy of Warsaw, had its own constitution and a separate administrative system; the Russian Empire gained the rest of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth through the Three Partitions (1772, 1793, 1795) and through the “Vistula Provinces.”
The Western and Southwestern Territory — the nine Ukrainian and Belarusian governorates, the Vistula Provinces, and the Lithuanian provinces — were administered as ordinary Russian governorates after 1831 and 1864.
The Caucasus — Circassia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Dagestan — was, by 1864, fully under Russian administration; the territory was reorganised in the 1880s into the governorates-general of the Caucasus, with a viceroy at Tiflis.
Siberia and the Far East — from the Urals to Bering Strait, with the ports of Vladivostok, Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, and, until 1867, Russian America. The Governorate-General of Siberia was reorganised in 1822; the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed in 1901. The 1897 census recorded 5,757,000 in Siberia and the Steppe.
Central Asia — the Steppe, the Turkestan Governorate-General, the Transcaspian, and the khanates conquered between 1865 and 1884 (Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Merv, and the Turkmen oases). The 1897 census recorded 7,234,000 in the Central Asian governorates.
A multi-ethnic state
The empire’s diversity was, and is, the single most striking feature. In 1897 the empire counted about 100 languages with more than 50,000 speakers. No single ethnic group had an overall majority; the Great Russians were 44.3 percent of the imperial total. The Germans, Finns, Poles, Jews, Tatars, Central Asians, Caucasian peoples, and the Siberian indigenes each had their own cultural and political traditions, and the Russian imperial administration governed most of them through traditional elites: the Baltic German barons, the Polish and Lithuanian landowning classes, the Georgian princely families, the Tatar mullahs, the Central Asian begs and aksakals, and the Buryat and Kazakh elders (Kappeler, 2001; Hosking, 1997).
Administering the empire
The central administration was the Committee of Ministers (from 1861) and the Senate (from 1711), with the Holy Synod regulating the Orthodox Church. The empire was divided into 97 governorates (gubernii) and 786 smaller uyezdy by 1914; frontier regions were grouped into 21 governorates-general under a viceroy. Special regimes applied to Finland, the Kingdom of Poland before 1867, the Baltic Provinces, the Caucasus, and the Central Asian protectorates. The system of indirect rule through the zemstvos and mir for the Great Russian and Ukrainian peasantry, and through the various mir and aul assemblies for the non-Russian populations, was reinforced after 1864 by the politsiya and the Separate Corps of Gendarmes (Lieven, The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, 2001).
The succession of the territorial structure
Almost every border drawn in 1721–1917 became a border again in 1991. The Baltic states emerged from the former Governorates-General of the Baltic. The Ukrainian and Belarusian borders run, in large part, along the lines of the 1914 governorate boundaries. The Central Asian states are a near-direct match to the khanate conquests of the 1860s and 1880s. The Finnish, Polish, Caucasian, and Bessarabian borders went through the twentieth century without ever quite settling.