That empire is the most extensive in our hemisphere.  Poland, the Arctic Ocean, Sweden, and China lie on its boundaries.  It is so vast that when it is mid-day at its western extremity it is nearly midnight at the eastern.  It is larger than all the rest of Europe, than the Roman Empire, than the empire of Darius which Alexander conquered.  But it will take centuries, and many more such Tsars as Peter, to render that territory populous, productive, and covered with cities, like the northern lands of Europe.

The province nearest to our own realms is Livonia, long a heathen region.  Tsar Peter conquered it from the Swedes.

To the north is the province of Revel and Esthonia, also conquered from the Swedes by Peter.  The Gulf of Finland borders Esthonia; and here at this junction of the Neva and Lake Ladoga is the city of Petersburg, the youngest and the fairest of the cities of the empire, built by Peter in spite of a mass of obstacles.  Northward, again, is Archangel, which the English discovered in 1533, with the result that the commerce fell entirely into their hands and those of the Dutch.  On the west of Archangel is Russian Lapland.  Then, ascending the Dwina from the coast, we arrive at the territories of Moscow, long the centre of the empire.  A century ago Moscow was without the ordinary amenities of civilisation, though it could display an Oriental profusion on state occasions.

West of Moscow is Smolensk, recovered from the Poles by Peter’s father Alexis.  Between Petersburg and Smolensk is Novgorod; south of Smolensk is Kiev or Little Russia; and Red Russia, or the Ukraine, watered by the Dnieper, the Borysthenes of the Greeks—­the country of the Cossacks.  Between the Dnieper and the Don northwards is Belgorod; then Nischgorod, then Astrakan, the march of Asia and Europe with Kazan, recovered from the Tartar empire of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane by Ivan Vasilovitch.  Siberia is peopled by Samoeides and Ostiaks, and its southern regions by hordes of Tartars—­like the Turks and Mongols, descendants of the ancient Scythians.  At the limit of Siberia is Kamschatka.

Throughout this vast but thinly populated empire the manners and customs are Asiatic rather than European.  As the Janissaries control the Turkish government, so the Strelitz Guards used to dispose of the throne.  Christianity was not established till late in the tenth century, in the Greek form, and liberated from the control of the Greek Patriarch, a subject of the Grand Turk, in 1588.

Before Peter’s day, Russia had neither the power, the cultivated territories, the subjects, nor the revenues which she now enjoys.  She had no foothold in Livonia or Finland, little or no control over the Cossacks or in Astrakan.  The White, Black, Baltic, and Caspian seas were of no use to a nation which had not even a name for a fleet.  She had to place herself on a level with the cultivated nations, though she was without knowledge of the science of war by land or sea, and almost of the rudiments of manufacture and agriculture, to say nothing of the fine arts.  Her sons were even forbidden to learn by travel; she seemed to have condemned herself to eternal ignorance.  Then Peter was born, and Russia was created.