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RUSSIA from the Turks; that of Tiflis, 1813, deprived the Persians of parts of the Caucasus; and then the Vienna Congress of 1815 gave the remainder of Poland to Russia. The desire to possess further dominions of the Sultan led to a war against Turkey in 1853, in which England, France, and Sardinia also took part in 1854, and which ended in the peace of Paris, 1856. (See .) In 1858 Russia acquired, by agreement with China, the sparsely populated but widely extended district of the Amur. A ukase of 1868 annihilated the last remains of the independence of Poland by incorporating it completely in the czardom. On the other hand, Russian America was sold to the United States in 1867.

In 1877 Russia declared war against Turkey, ostensibly to free the Bulgarians from Turkish misrule. The military operations terminated in the following year in favor of Russia, whose forces reached the gates of Constantinople, where, at San Stefano, on March 3, 1878, a treaty was agreed to whereby Turkey would have been practically expelled from the whole European continent. The treaty was radically revised a few months later at Berlin, largely at the instigation of Great Britain and Germany, with the result that Russia was brought to realize that she could not hope to reach her much-desired outlet to the open sea by way of the Balkan Peninsula with the consent of the other Great Powers. It then became a policy of the Imperial Government to seek this outlet in the Far East.

In May, 1896, a treaty was made with China permitting the construction of a railroad by Russia through Manchuria, and the Liao-tung ports, Talien-wan and Port Arthur were placed at the disposal of the Russian Government for commercial purposes. These privileges Russia sought constantly to enlarge. To what extent these encroachments on Chinese sovereignty might have extended is not a matter of history, for gradually the pretensions of Russia in the Far East clashed with those of Japan, terminating in the Russo-Japanese War, in 1904, with the result that Russian expansion was effectually checked in this direction.

Meanwhile domestic troubles were assuming a share in shaping the destiny of the Empire. The first popular discontent with the autocracy of the Russian Government manifested itself in the early 70's, shaping itself into that revolutionary movement which was generally known under the name of Nihilism. At first this was merely a disorganized protest against the degraded state of the peasantry on the part of young university students and the sons and daughters of the liberal land-owning class. These youthful enthusiasts began establishing informal schools among the villagers, in which nothing more harmful than reading and writing were taught. Much has been said of the liberality of Alexander II., at that time Czar, who had indeed signed the decree liberating the serfs, in 1861, but the fact remains that his counsellors initiated a very severe policy of repression against these harmless educators of the common peasants. Finally, after one of them, a woman, had been disrobed and subjected to degrading punishment by a Russian chief of police, the Nihilists resorted to terrorism—assassination. One after another the higher officials, known to be in sympathy with the policy of suppression, were picked off by the Nihilists, with the result that this underground warfare, the secret police on the one side, the Nihilists on the other, became more and more acute. Finally, on March 13, 1881, the Czar himself was slain by one of the conspirators, who at the same time sacrificed his own life by being blown up with the same bomb that destroyed the autocrat.

So strenuous became the efforts of the secret police after this event that the Nihilists were practically cleaned out of Russia; the majority were killed, hanged or sent to Siberia, while a small minority escaped into exile abroad, mostly to England, Switzerland and Bulgaria. For the following ten years or more there was comparative quiet in Russia. Gradually, however, shortly before the close of the century, the revolutionary movement began again to manifest itself, this time through the more thoroughly organized Social Democrats and Social Revolutionists, who represented ideas more definite than a mere blind protest against the tyranny of the autocracy. The latter represented largely the same elements which had composed the Nihilists; the sons and daughters of the minor nobility and university students. While all were radicals, imbued with the principles of Socialism, they were more directly concerned with the peasantry, whose lot they sought chiefly to improve and whom they hoped to inspire to revolutionary uprisings.

The Social Democrats represented the Marxian Socialists, who believed that the salvation of society lay in the hands of the industrial workers. Many of their leaders were young Jews who had gone abroad, especially to Switzerland and Germany, to acquire the university education which was denied them by the country of their birth. The government's policy of persecution of the Jews,