On a much greater scale than the expansion of France was the expansion of the already vast Russian Empire during this period.  The history of Russia in the nineteenth century is made up of a series of alternations between a regime of comparative liberalism, when the interest of government and people was chiefly turned towards the west, and a regime of reaction, when the government endeavoured to pursue what was called a ‘national’ or purely Russian policy, and to exclude all Western influences.  During these long intervals of reaction, attention was turned eastward; and it was in the reactionary periods, mainly, that the Russian power was rapidly extended in three directions—­over the Caucasus, over Central Asia, and in the Far East.

Before this advance, the huge Russian Empire had been (everywhere except on the west, in the region of Poland) marked off by very clearly defined barriers.  The Caucasus presented a formidable obstacle between Russia and the Turkish and Persian Empires; the deserts of Central Asia separated her from the Moslem peoples of Khiva, Bokhara and Turkestan; the huge range of the Altai Mountains and the desert of Gobi cut off her thinly peopled province of Eastern Siberia from the Chinese Empire; while in the remote East her shores verged upon ice-bound and inhospitable seas.  Hers was thus an extraordinarily isolated and self-contained empire, except on the side of Europe; and even on the side of Europe she was more inaccessible than any other state, being all but land-locked, and divided from Central Europe by a belt of forests and marshes.

The part she had played in the Napoleonic Wars, and in the events which followed them, had brought her more fully into contact with Europe than she had ever been before.  The acquisition of Poland and Finland, which she obtained by the treaties of 1815, had increased this contact, for both of these states were much influenced by Western ideas.  Russia had promised that their distinct national existence, and their national institutions, should be preserved; and this seemed to suggest that the Russian Empire might develop into a partnership of nations of varying types, not altogether unlike the form into which the British Empire was developing.  But this conception had no attraction for the Russian mind, or at any rate for the Russian government; and the reactionary or pure-Russian school, which strove to exclude all alien influences, was inevitably hostile to it.  Hence the period of reaction, and of eastward conquest, saw also the denial of the promises made in 1815.  Poland preserved her distinct national organisation, in any full degree, only for fifteen years; even in the faintest degree, it was preserved for less than fifty years.  Finland was allowed a longer grace, but only, perhaps, because she was isolated and had but a small population:  her turn for ‘Russification’ was to come in due course.  The exclusion of Western influence, the segregation of Russia from the rest of the world,