It was in 1582 that Yermak, the Cossack robber and pirate, under sentence of death, won a pardon from Ivan IV. ("the Terrible”) in exchange for Siberia—­that unknown region stretching across the Continent of Asia to the Pacific.  Eight hundred Cossacks under the daring outlaw had sufficed to drive the scattered Asiatic tribes before them and to establish the sovereignty of Yermak, who then gladly exchanged his prize with the “Orthodox Tsar” for his “traitorous head.”

It was the tremendous energy of one man, Muraviev, which led to the development of Eastern Siberia.  Pathfinder and pioneer in the march across the Asiatic continent, drawing settlers after him as he moved along, he reached the mouth of the Amur river in 1846, and, at last, the empire possessed a naval station upon the Pacific, which was named Nikolaifsk, after the reigning Tsar, Nicholas I.

It was this Tsar, great-grandfather of Nicholas II., who, grimly turning his back upon Western Europe, set the face of Russia toward the East, reversing the direction which has always been the course of empire.  What had Russia to gain from alliances in the West?  Her future was in the East; and he intended to drive back the tide of Europeanism which his predecessors had so industriously invited.  Russian youths were prohibited from being educated in Western universities, and at the same time there was established at Canton a school of instruction where they might learn the Chinese language and the methods and spirit of Chinese civilization.  It was a determined purpose to Orientalize his empire.  And violating all the traditions of history, the flight of the Russian Eagle from that moment was toward the rising, not the setting sun.

Muraviev, now Governor of the Eastern Provinces of Siberia, was empowered to negotiate a treaty with China to determine the rights of the two nations upon the river Amur, which separated Manchuria, the northernmost province of China, from Russian Siberia.  The treaty, which was concluded in 1858, conceded the left bank of this river to Russia.

Nikolaifsk, a great part of the year sealed up with ice, was only a stepping-stone for the next advance southward.  From the mouth of the Amur to the frontier of Korea there was a strip of territory lying between the sea on the east and the Ussuri river on the west, which to the Russian mind, at that time, seemed an ideal possession.  How it was accomplished it is needless to say; but China reluctantly agreed that there should be for a time a joint occupation of this strip, and, in 1859, needing Russia’s friendship, it was unconditionally bestowed.  The “Ussuri Region” was now transformed into the “Maritime Provinces of Siberia,” and the Russian Empire, by the stroke of a pen, had moved ten degrees toward the south.  Vladivostok, at the southern extremity of the new province, was founded in 1860, and in 1872 made chief naval station on the eastern coast, in place of Nikolaifsk.