Quotes About Russian Empire

What lay to the east of Siberia was in the eighteenth century uncharted, uncivilised and, most importantly, uncolonised. It was all too tempting. For a period of almost eighty years, between 1725 and the end of the century, adventurous gentlemen from the Russian Empire - military, academic, mercantile, or simply mercenary - embarked upon voyages of exploration to map the coastlines and islands, investigate and civilise the native peoples, and seek out trading opportunities.

I think that if a United States of Europe were to be formed, it would be in our interests to fight for it, as all our old traditions would remain in such a united Europe, whereas if we were to start now as part of the Russian Empire, everything that had ever been in Germany would disappear.

The Orthodox Church has been central to Russian identity and empire since 988,

Modern Armenia survived only because it was the single province controlled, and protected, by the Russian Empire. The rest of the territory within its historical borders is almost wholly devoid of ethnic Armenians.

Before the Second World War, more than nine million Jews were living in Europe, most of them in lands that were or had been part of the Russian Empire.

Still, Berlin was the new center of Jewish intellectual and literary life. Writers and thinkers from the Russian Empire had fled there, and young and old now frequented the same cafés and competed for the same commissions from American Jewish publications—getting paid in dollars was the best way to survive Germany's galloping inflation. Dubnow

Serfdom's abolition in the Caucasus began three years later than in the rest of the Russian empire, in October 1864.

The Russian empire, it is estimated, grew by fifty-five square miles (142 square kilometres) per day after the Romanovs came to the throne in 1613, or 20,000 square miles a year. By the late nineteenth century, they ruled one sixth of the earth's surface—and they were still expanding. Empire-building was in a Romanov's blood.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

The double-headed eagle that serves the Russian Empire as its crest illustrates quite magnificently the entire system of government of that country, where any matter of even the slightest importance is not entrusted to a single authority but at least two

One day, maybe not too long from now, the Russian empire will begin to crack. One day soon, the Romanians

The history of Chechnya is one of imperialism gone terribly wrong. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Chechens were among the few peoples to fend off Mongol conquerors, but at a terrible cost. Turks, Persians, and Russians sought to seize Chechnya, and it was finally absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1859.

Russian espionage directed against the West has been rising since 2001. We kind of forgot that you don't need communism to set up an east/west squabble between the Russian Empire and Western Europe—in fact, communism was a distraction.

Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, on the periphery of the Russian Empire. His father was a hard-drinking cobbler whose relationship with Joseph's mother, Keke Geladze, came to an end when the boy was around six years old.

Until the absorption of the Polish territories, the Russian Empire had had practically no Jews, and it was uniquely ill-equipped to handle this new addition to its ethnic and religious mix.

Back in the mid-18th century, in 1745-1747, Ossetia was the first to become part of the Russian Empire. At that time, it was a united entity; North and South Ossetia were one state.

Torn between obsessive insecurity and proselytizing zeal, between the requirements of Europe and the temptations of Asia, the Russian Empire always had a role in the European equilibrium but was never emotionally a part of it.

In Soviet writing the demonization of all forms of Ukrainian nationalism has a long tradition, and would make an interesting study in itself. Soviet writers considered almost any criticism of their state—and, from the 1930s, of the Russian Empire—as "fascist" or "counterrevolutionary,