How Moscow Conquered a Continent

How Moscow conquered a continent — from a forest town paying tribute to an empire from the Baltic to the Pacific. Peter the Great, Catherine, 1812, the serfs, the Trans-Siberian — this is the rise of the Russian Empire, animated. Chapters: 0:00 The Empire Rises 0:16 The Forest Town 0:55 The First Tsar 1:47 The Giant Tsar 2:54 The Great Expansion 3:43 The Test of 1812 4:12 A People Not Free 5:05 Tied Together With Iron 5:39 The Fall of the Empire 6:01 What Russia Left What this video covers: Moscow's tribute years and the 1480 stand at the Ugra, Ivan IV crowned first tsar (1547) and St. Basil's, the eastward push across Siberia to the Pacific, Peter the Great — carpenter-tsar, the beard tax, St. Petersburg founded on a swamp (1703), Poltava (1709) — Catherine the Great and the Black Sea, Crimea (1783), the growth map from Baltic to Pacific, Napoleon's 1812 invasion and the burning of Moscow, the serfs and emancipation (1861) with the writers the world still reads, the Trans-Siberian Railway (1891–1916), the fall of 1917 as a closing chapter only, and the legacy — a forest town that became a continent. For viewers who love animated history: empires, engineering, and how ordinary people built extraordinary things.