ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Russia's use of both the foreign policy aimed at acquisition of an empire and the subsequent internal growth and pacification policies in territories for maintaining an aggressive defense. It traces Russia's rise and fall through four different imperial iterations, concluding with its present policy of creeping reimperialization. Russia's first great empire was the Kievan Rus, who ruled from their capital in Ukraine from about 880 and lasted to the middle of the thirteenth century and became servants of the Mongol invaders until the fifteenth century. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia from the end of the decade of the Troubles in 1613 until deposed in 1917. The principality of Moscow was transformed over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the Russian Empire. The pattern of outward expansion that has characterized the foreign policy aims of the several versions of a Russian empire was disrupted in 1989, but it was not extinguished.
