Russian Empire
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The Russian empire was proclaimed in 1721 when Peter the Great took the title of emperor, and it lasted until the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917. Peter, who had travelled as a young man in Holland and England, built a navy, founded St Petersburg on the Baltic marshes in 1703 and moved the capital there, cut the beards of his nobles and made them serve the state in uniform. Victory over Sweden in the great northern war gave Russia access to the sea and a place among European powers. The empire expanded south into the Caucasus and Crimea, east across Siberia to the Pacific, and in 1867 sold Alaska. Catherine the Great extended the frontier towards the Black Sea and partitioned Poland with Austria and Prussia. Serfdom, abolished only in 1861, bound millions to the land, and industrialisation from the 1890s brought strikes and a Marxist movement. Defeat by Japan in 1905 produced a revolution and a parliament, the Duma, that the tsar repeatedly dissolved. The strains of the first world war brought down the monarchy in March 1917, and after a year of dual power the Bolsheviks took the rest. The empire covered one sixth of the world's land.