How did Russia gain control over such vast territory?
Russia was traditionally only a small city-state that comprised of Moscow and the outer areas – the whole area was called Muscovy under the control of the Grand Dukes. Moscow in the 14th Century was an area that paid tribue to the Tartars from Mongolia that spread into China and into Eastern Europe. The Grand dukes of Muscovy, traditionally from the House of Rurik, fought with their neighbours the kings of Poland, Sweden as well as the tartars. Grand dukes as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan III, pushed Muscovy borders to include Pskov, and to push also west. Ivan III used his marriage to sophie, the sister of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine, to push his own imperial ambitions – Russia as the ‘Third Rome’. But it was under Ivan IV – the first to call himself Tsar, that Russia pushed her control further east into Siberia. Ivan was also the first to establish the modern state of what is now Russia, and to extend the Tsar’s control over the aristocracy and the bureaucracy as well as over
