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| - Aka the Russian Empire and before that, Czarist Russia ("Czar" or "Tsar" being a Slavic form of "Caesar", this title also existed in medieval Bulgaria and Serbia, but was most historically important in Russia). Massive in size (sometimes bigger than even the USSR was) and lasted for about 400 years. The Muscovite Tsardom began under the 15th-century grand prince Ivan III "The Great" (who used the tsar title only occasionally) and was established fully under his grandson, Ivan IV "The Terrible", who was crowned as a Tsar from the very beginning. It was a convoluted, very conservative realm that considered itself a successor state to the Byzantine Empire. Then there was the Time of Troubles — a Succession Crisis-cum-civil war. Not only Ivan the Terrible killed his son and crown prince in a fit of a blind rage, but his second son, the weak and simpleminded Feodor Ivanovich, was more interested in religion than in ruling the realm, and was childless to boot. The original Rurikid dynasty fell, and the Godunovs (relatives of Feodor's wife) took the throne. They didn't make it, and after an interregnum and a war with Poland, Romanovs (relatives of one of Ivan the Terrible's wives) became the tsars. In an interesting aside, during the Muscovite era, Russia was ruled by a double-decker aristocracy that consisted of two classes: the Boyars, who were the feudal rulers and councilors of the Tsar, and the Dvoryans, who served as military officers and civil servants, somewhat similar to the Japanese system where also existed two separate nobilities, based on the court aristocracy and the military class. The 17th century was an age of riots and turmoil, and is still known to Russian historians as the Buntashny vek (The Age of Rebellions). The most notable rebellion of this century was one of Stepan Razin, an adventurous Cossack Pirate who tried to topple the throne of the tsars. The early 18th century was the time of the tsar Peter the Great, who was obsessed with transforming Russia into an European power and later replaced the "tsar" title with "Emperor" (but the word "tsar" remained in unofficial usage). Russia was westernized, Western customs and noble titles were introduced. Peter the Great dismissed the Boyar class and made the Dvoryans into the only nobles of the realm, introducing the Table of Ranks, a legal mechanism that allowed lower-class people to achieve nobility by military or civil service. Since then, the word "Dvoryanin" was the only word for "noble" in Russia. After Peter's death, the Age of Palace Revolutions came into being. The succession law introduced by Peter was vague and left enough room for adventurous princes and (especially) princesses to seize the throne by force. Most of the rulers of Russia after Peter during the 18th century were women, culminating with Catherine the Great, who wasn't even Romanov by birth (she was a German princess and a Romanov by marriage — though, ironically, she was a Rurikid by a direct male succession). The Catherinian age was the golden age of Imperial Russia. After Catherine, her son Paul I introduced a new succession law that was very strict (perhaps to avoid the same fate as his father's. He didn't), ending the Palace Revolutions age. During the 19th century, the Russian Empire was relatively stable and growing, but the old feudal traditions impeded its progress, much like Peter the Great felt the old Orthodox Church traditions impeded progress in the late 17th century. During the early part of his reign, Alexander I and his chief minister Speransky flirted with liberal reforms, but the massive trauma of the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 undermined these efforts, and the liberal Speransky was dismissed and replaced by the reactionary Arakcheyev. The death (or a secret abdication — there was a persistent rumor at the time that Alexander I faked his own death and entered a monastery, and later the famous monk Feodor was said to be the abdicated Emperor) of Alexander I far from the capital engendered a coup attempt by liberal army officers known as the Decembrists who tried to put in place a democratic constitution — though it would probably strike the modern reader as rather stretching this definition. Nicholas I crushed the revolt and became a hated reactionary, and lost the Crimean War. Under Alexander II, many important reforms were implemented and the last vestiges of feudalism were removed, but a lot of these reforms were of the "too little too late" mold, and made it difficult for the country to adapt well to capitalism. To add the insult to the injury, the later emperors Alexander III (a very conservative giant of a man, a reactionary and a roaring drunk, though a shrewd and cautious ruler and a good diplomat) and his son Nicholas II — a weak and indecisive ruler, who constantly varied his policy and was basically a Tsar Focus Group — reversed many of these reforms. This resulted in an impoverished country. Well, the economy was booming, but the political climate was stifling, the wealth distribution unbelievably skewed and the intellectual classes widely believed the country to be a basket case (sounds familiar?) — which caused them to adopt a "the worse the better" attitude, and dive into the revolutionary ideas. A massive revolt followed, culminating in the overthrow of the Tsar and the Red October. And the rest is the matter of another article. It was an absolute monarchy (between the 17th century and 1905), ruled by a Tsar or a Tsarina until the Russian Empire and an Emperor after that, but the latter was still usually called the Tsar.
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