On June 7, 2024, just before the plenary session of the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, an event hosted by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, the lights in the hall abruptly went out. The vast screen behind the podium lit up to deliver a poignant history lesson to the large, high-profile international audience. “For 500 years,” a commanding voice declared, “European civilization plundered Africa, China, India, the Middle East and the Americas.” As scenes of ruthless colonizers and the suffering of subjugated peoples flashed in rapid succession, an unsettling soundtrack heightened the atmosphere of disquiet. The tension built relentlessly until, suddenly, a burst of light engulfed the screen, transforming it into a colossal Russian flag.
“A new era has begun,” the narrator triumphantly asserted. “Russia is the only country in human history that managed to withstand Western colonization and, at the beginning of the 21st century, led the struggle of nations for a new world order.”
Not since the final years of the Cold War has the Kremlin wielded the concept of colonialism as a tool of its foreign policy as aggressively as it does today. The portrayal of Russia as a timeless “anti-colonial” power with a deep-seated aversion to all forms of colonialism has become a cornerstone of post-2022 Kremlin diplomacy. In this resurgent political mythology, “anti-colonialism” is not only a hallmark of Soviet Russia — a self-proclaimed anti-imperial force — but even of Russia under the tsars. As Putin himself asserted at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in September 2023, “We have never been colonizers anywhere.”
The surge of this discourse, emerging against the backdrop of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has fueled heated debates about the colonial dimensions of the country’s own imperial past. Strikingly, however, by focusing on the territories formally incorporated into the Russian Empire, these debates have tended to downsize the scope of Russia’s imperial drive, overlooking key areas where Russia sought to expand its sway.
To fully grasp the scope and nature of Russia’s colonialism in the final decades before the collapse of the tsarist state in 1917, one should look well beyond its formal borders. During the age of high imperialism, Russia’s informal empire transcended political boundaries — and violated them along the way. From the Middle East to East Asia, this empire was held together not only by brute military force — though violent interventions across this vast space may suggest otherwise — but also by a complex web of trade, finance, settlers, communication networks, diplomatic corps and various other instruments of influence and domination.
By employing tried-and-tested colonial tactics — from foreign-controlled concessions and unequal treaties to extraterritorial privileges — the Russian Empire actively participated in the “scramble for Asia,” asserting itself as a full-fledged Western colonial power. Competing for resources, captive markets, access to warm seas and political hegemony, Russia joined other empires in carving Asia into “spheres of influence” — a familiar concept from the vocabulary of imperialism, now violently revived in the 2020s.
Not long before World War I, the journal of the tsarist War Ministry published an article whose author advocated the creation of a ministry that Russia had never previously had. He argued that Russia was “faced with the fatal inevitability of, in one way or another, having to become involved in the affairs of certain morally degraded peoples” — in China, Iran and beyond. He contended that governing the peoples destined to fall under Russia’s influence, as well as the tsarist subjects in the Caucasus and Central Asia, could not be effectively achieved within the existing imperial framework. To manage these territories properly, he argued, Russia needed a specialized administration, modeled on the examples already existing in Britain and France — the Russian Ministry of Colonies.
These were far from idle fantasies. The author, a senior Russian military official stationed in Tehran, sensed that new challenges demanded new solutions — and he understood precisely what those challenges entailed. In the final decade of the 19th century, the tsarist empire embarked on a relentless push into the depths of the Asian continent, in a bid to outmaneuver rival imperial powers in nominally independent states struggling to maintain their sovereignty. It was China, in particular, that captivated the imagination of the young Tsar Nicholas II.
Russia’s advance into the Middle Kingdom did not begin in the 1890s. Already, in the mid-19th century, the Russian Empire had taken advantage of the turmoil of the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion to seize Outer Manchuria, aiming for convenient access to the Pacific Ocean. Count Nikolai Muraviev, the governor-general of Eastern Siberia, dispatched troops to the Chinese-held territory along the Amur River, assuring Chinese representatives of Russia’s supposedly benign intentions: “Do not believe, gentlemen, that Russia is seeking to expand its borders: The vastness, strength and power of our state can serve as sufficient assurance that such calculations are not part of our plans and intentions.”
Russia’s sole concern, according to Muraviev, was “securing its borders.” And yet, security concerns warranted forward expansion. As he wrote on another occasion, “The neighboring populous China, currently powerless due to its ignorance, could easily become dangerous to us under the influence and guidance of the English and the French.” Within just a few years, China was compelled to sign two unequal treaties, in 1858 and 1860, ceding vast territories — the size of France and Germany combined — that would come to be known as the Russian Far East.
Some 35 years later, the tsarist government exploited China’s defeat in the war against Japan in 1895 to launch an ambitious, and remarkably modern, colonial venture. Among the most vocal proponents of Russia’s pivot to the East was Prince Esper Ukhtomskii, who harshly criticized the predatory behavior of Western European empires in China and across the globe. He painted Russia as the only great power acting without selfish motives, bound to Asia by deep ties of friendship. “Russia has no — or rather, should not have — solidarity of vital interests in Asia with powers that feed on its sweat and blood,” he wrote.
Yet the supposed friendship Ukhtomskii preached was laced with unsettling undertones. He argued that Russia’s benevolence granted it a moral right to expand, insisting that this was precisely what the peoples of Asia supposedly desired most. He ominously claimed, “In Asia, for us, there are essentially no bounds and cannot be any, except for the boundless blue sea, as untamed as the spirit of the Russian people, freely lapping at its shores.” Ukhtomskii admitted that many would object to this idea, arguing that Russia already had “plenty of land” and had “spread and expanded to monstrous proportions,” but he dismissed critics of Russian expansion as shortsighted. In his view, they failed to recognize the true danger: The Asian peoples, “awakened” by Western European powers, would ultimately present a far greater threat to Russia than the West itself.
The Russian Empire certainly had its bounds, but its young and energetic finance minister from 1892 until 1903, Sergei Witte, recognized none. Rising rapidly through the state service thanks to his efficient career as a railway manager, Witte was determined to transform Russia into a modern industrial powerhouse by expanding its railway network. His grandest vision, the Trans-Siberian Railway, was designed to connect the empire’s heartland with its distant outpost on the Pacific, Vladivostok.
But Witte’s ambitions did not stop there. A bold element of his plan was to carve a shortcut through the Middle Kingdom, establishing a direct rail route that would dramatically reduce travel times. This ambitious endeavor evolved into a colossal project of its own. The Chinese Eastern Railway, a pseudo-private but effectively Russian-owned enterprise, became the largest railroad concession any foreign power had ever wrested from the Qing Empire. Cutting through the ancient homeland of the Qing dynasty — Manchuria — it was far more than a simple rail line for Russian locomotives. It laid the foundation for Witte’s sprawling personal empire in northern China, complete with the Russo-Chinese bank, resource extraction concessions, steamships, industrial enterprises and newly established cities along the route, all guarded by a private army and sustained by the labor of tens of thousands of locals.
Contemporaries likened Witte to Cecil Rhodes, who was simultaneously building his own empire in South Africa. Just like Rhodes, Witte’s ambitions extended well beyond immediate profits. As he admitted, the railway was designed to enable the gradual and “peaceful annexation of Manchuria” in the coming decades, but his true goal was far grander: to establish Russian dominance over all of the Qing Empire. “We will follow the historical path southward,” he declared. “It was not worth making a fuss over Manchuria. All of China, all its wealth, is mainly located in the south.”
The emergence of a “Russian” Manchuria was made possible by the Sino-Russian Treaty of 1896, a deal struck under the guise of protection and friendship. In exchange for Russian military support, the war-weary Qing government granted Russia extensive concessions. Although the Chinese Eastern Railway was the most important of them, the concessions were also supposed to include an ice-free port on Chinese soil — a long-coveted aim of Russia’s imperial ambitions. Yet despite Nicholas II’s repeated reassurances that “Russia already has plenty of land, so there is no need to seize more,” the Chinese government steadfastly refused, suspecting St. Petersburg of expansionist intentions. As the administrator and diplomat Li Hongzhang, one of the empire’s most influential figures, bluntly told Ukhtomskii in 1897: “We let you into the yard, but you want to climb into our very rooms, where our wives and little children are.”
The newly forged alliance quickly unraveled. In late 1897, German troops landed at Kiautschou Bay, claiming it as a naval station, a move that sparked outrage among figures like Ukhtomskii, who furiously proclaimed, “Asia must not become another Africa, which exists purely for the white man to exploit.” Yet Russia’s response was hardly aligned with such lofty ideals. Seizing the moment, Russian warships steamed toward the southern tip of the Liaotung Peninsula, occupying the strategic ports of Dalien and Port Arthur. Although Russian officials insisted this was a temporary measure, they arrogantly refused to provide China with any written guarantees, dismissing such requests as beneath the dignity of a great power. Ultimately, the territory was formalized as Kvantun (Kwantung) Oblast — a Russian-controlled leased region carved out of Qing China.
The outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion against foreign domination in China provided the Russian Empire with a convenient pretext to expand its presence. Joining the international coalition that intervened in Beijing in 1900, Russia launched its own military campaign into Manchuria the same year, occupying the provinces of Fengtian, Heilongjiang and Jilin. Despite the assurances of Count Vladimir Lamsdorf, Russia’s foreign minister, to other powers that Russia had “no designs of territorial acquisitions in China,” the occupation dragged on long after the rebellion had been crushed. Although the 1902 agreement promised a phased withdrawal of its troops, Russia failed to uphold its commitment. Every senior official found his own advantage in the occupation of Manchuria without formal annexation. For Witte, it was a colonial quest for markets and resources. For War Minister Aleksey Kuropatkin, as he confessed on one occasion, keeping Asians beyond the empire’s borders meant retaining “the purity of our race.” The Foreign Ministry, in turn, justified the invasion on the grounds of security concerns, framing it as a defensive measure to preempt a supposed Chinese threat. The occupation of Manchuria had become a self-serving project, cloaked in the language of protection and security but driven by imperial voracity.
Around this time, the tsarist empire set its sights on yet another East Asian state, gradually entangling itself in its domestic and foreign affairs. By the 1880s and 1890s, Korea was attracting growing interest from St. Petersburg’s policymakers. Although the Russian government lacked a concrete strategy for Korea, which was gradually falling under Japan’s influence, its military and naval officers repeatedly visited the country and its coastal waters on reconnaissance missions. Their reports to the Main Staff painted a vivid picture of the region’s strategic potential, fueling ambitions that would soon escalate beyond mere observation.
In 1895, as Korea obtained nominal independence from China, Russia’s military attache in Japan, Col. Konstantin Vogak, argued for supporting Korean independence “until the day we ourselves have the opportunity to lay our hands on it, which, sooner or later, is bound to happen if only to prevent someone else from doing so.”
Lt. Col. Vladimir Alftan, who travelled to Korea from late 1895 to early 1896, went even further, devising a plan for its outright subjugation. In his view, this would be made easier by the Koreans’ ostensible desire to be under Russia’s control. Alftan argued that the full annexation of Korea by Russia, its “fate-decider,” was the most effective way to secure the country’s markets, ice-free ports and strategic locations.
But if Russia was not prepared to go to war with Japan, both empires should “amicably divide Korea into two parts,” with Russia obtaining Pyongyang, Chemulpo and Seoul — “an important political center, which, being in our hands, will make it easier for us to rule the Korean people,” as Alftan put it. In making northern Korea a “protectorate,” he insisted, Russia should discard any “philanthropic feelings” and be guided exclusively by “state interests,” which would ground its policy “on a more solid basis than the fleeting sentiments of dubious gratitude from the entire Korean nation.”
After an attempted Japanese coup in early 1896, Korea’s king, Kojong, took refuge in the Russian legation, and the country was exposed to increased Russian influence. Entrepreneurial tsarist capitalists seized the moment, securing a number of resource concessions from the Korean government, which was eager to use Russia’s financial stakes as a counterweight to Japan’s colonial schemes. The tsarist government maintained a “wait-and-see” approach, officially supporting the status quo. Yet diplomats like Mikhail Khitrovo, a Russian envoy in Tokyo, asserted that “Korea will not slip away from us, and sooner or later, one way or another, it will become our possession,” while his successor, Roman Rozen, firmly believed that, in the future, Korea must ultimately become a Russian “protectorate.”
Within just a few years, the Russian leadership used these early gains as a springboard to subdue Korea. New Russian efforts were centered around a 2,200-square-mile lumber concession on the Yalu River, granted by Kojong to the Russian merchant Yulii Briner in 1896. It was Russia’s charge d’affaires in Korea, Nikolai Matiunin, alongside a group of like-minded officers and bureaucrats, who saw an opportunity to transform the concession into a tool for colonial domination. Their plan was to establish a large, chartered East Asian Company that would oversee all of Korea’s finances, control the administration of the kingdom’s state budget, manage its mineral wealth and ultimately exert full authority over the country’s affairs. The company was envisioned as a foundation for a future Ministry of Colonies. Nicholas II, along with several senior officials, eagerly embraced the idea, despite strong opposition from the finance, foreign and war ministries.
As part of this plan, hundreds of Russian soldiers disguised as workers were ordered to the mouth of the Yalu River, marking a covert occupation that was soon exposed, putting Russia and Japan on a collision course. In several rounds of negotiations with Japan, Russian representatives insisted on delineating spheres of influence within Korea, demanding that the northern part of the country, up to the 39th parallel, be designated as outside Japan’s control and potentially within Russia’s own imperial sphere — a move that foreshadowed the post-WWII division of Korea. However, Russia’s subsequent defeat in its war against Japan in 1905 put an end to its ambitions in East Asia, prompting tsarist officials to redirect their efforts elsewhere.
News of Japan’s stunning defeat of Russia on the battlefields of Manchuria and the destruction of the Russian fleet at Tsushima made waves across different parts of the colonial and semicolonial world. Remarkably, the impending triumph of the expansionist Meiji Empire, which sealed Korea’s fate, was celebrated by anti-colonialists willing to overlook Japan’s own colonial ambitions as long as it emerged victorious in its bloody struggle against a European imperialist aggressor. One of the places where this news was met with particular satisfaction was Tehran, where a series of protests demanding civil rights and freedoms soon escalated into a nationwide “constitutional” revolution.
Starting from the 1880s, Persia — as Iran was officially known in the West — became the target of the same novel and sophisticated form of tsarist colonialism that Russia applied in East Asia. But Russia’s efforts at “peaceful conquest” were built upon many decades of asymmetrical relations between the two countries. Both Russian and international leaders and observers viewed Iran as part of a larger “Great Game” geopolitical chessboard on which the empires of St. Petersburg and London vied for dominance over the Asian theater. In Persia, more than anywhere else, Britain and Russia were fixated on countering each other’s advances. For Russia, this often meant not so much seeking favorable conditions for itself, but creating obstacles for its erstwhile rival.
The apogee of this policy came in 1890, when, in an effort to safeguard its interests in Iran from foreign competition, Russia imposed an agreement on the Iranian government forbidding the construction of any railroads. By enforcing the agreement, dubbed “sterilizing” and a “monopoly of roadlessness,” the tsarist government willingly underdeveloped Persia, even if in practice this policy limited Russia’s own ability to expand its trade networks within the country. In response, Shah Naser al-Din of Iran complained: “Why should we not build roads and open factories so that we do not have to rely on foreign goods? If we started building roads, hunger and high prices would not keep recurring every two or three years in Tehran and other cities, and many would be saved. … No state is in the same position as Persia has found itself.”
If this was a major difference from Witte’s railroad imperialism in China, many other tools of dominance remained remarkably similar. The hunt for concessions drew influential capitalists from the Russian metropole. The most active among them, Leon Poliakov, secured a series of lucrative concessions from the shah, which Witte eventually took over to use for state interests. These concessions included a monopolistic concession for insurance and transportation, granting exclusive rights to insure everything from commercial goods to agriculture and real estate; road concessions connecting Russia with Tehran, key trade hubs and the Caspian port of Anzali; and the Russian Loan and Discount Bank, which came to dominate financial operations in northern Iran.
The latter proved perhaps the most formidable weapon of Russian foreign policy. The tsarist government exploited Tehran’s financial desperation, extracting further concessions as conditions for loans essential to keeping Iran’s economy afloat. As the major source of credit, Russia gained the leverage to interfere in Iran’s domestic affairs, knowing that unpaid loans would force Tehran to seek new funds in a vicious cycle of dependence.
As in other semicolonial contexts, Russia publicly portrayed itself as a disinterested power committed to protecting Iran’s sovereignty. But this rhetoric concealed far less altruistic objectives. In a directive issued to a Russian envoy in Tehran in 1904, Foreign Minister Lamsdorf outlined these aims explicitly: “to gradually subordinate Persia to our dominant influence without, however, violating either the external signs of its independence or its internal structure.” “In other words,” he wrote, “our task is to politically make Persia an obedient and useful — meaning sufficiently strong — weapon in our hands, and economically, to secure the vast Persian market for the free application of Russian labor and capital.”
Russia had no immediate plans for territorial acquisitions in Iran, but the option of military intervention — drafted and mapped in great detail by military officers — had long remained on the table. The political upheaval that swept through Iran the following year provided a convenient pretext for action. Mass protests against the shah’s government, sparked in late 1905 by Tehran’s merchants over high customs tariffs dictated by Russia in exchange for lavish loans to the Qajar dynasty, soon escalated into a national revolution demanding a constitution and representation. As thousands of protesters sought refuge in the British legation, setting up a makeshift camp with hundreds of tents and a food distribution system, Russian diplomats in Iran were quick to construe these developments — entirely spontaneous and grassroots in nature — as the result of British intrigues.
Ironically, however, it was not the rivalry, but an unexpected alliance between the two long-standing adversaries that ultimately shaped Iran’s fate. In 1907, Britain and Russia resolved their competition by dividing Iran into two spheres of influence, with a buffer zone in between. Russia “received” the entire northern part of the country, with its most fertile provinces and wealthy urban centers, including the capital. With Britain now an ally, Russia gained a free hand in its actions.
In June 1908, the Russian-led Persian Cossack Brigade, under the command of the newly appointed military governor of Tehran, Col. Vladimir Liakhov, bombarded the palace housing the Iranian parliament (the Majles) and its surroundings, attempting to dismantle Iran’s fledgling constitutional experiment. But the Russian-backed royalist coup only fueled the revolution further. Iran’s largest city, Tabriz, rose in rebellion. In 1909, after months of threats to send troops under the pretext of protecting Russian nationals, Russian forces occupied the city. While the occupation succeeded, it did not prevent the revolutionaries from marching on Tehran and deposing Mohammad Ali Shah, who sought refuge in Russia.
To shift the course of events, Russian authorities resorted to their final counterrevolutionary option — assisting the exiled shah’s return to Iran two years later in his attempt to regain power. This effort was unsuccessful and, by late 1911, Russian troops had overrun all of northern Iran, from Azerbaijan to Khorasan, inflicting extraordinary violence. As the Russian tricolor flew over Tabriz, tsarist forces executed those resisting the occupation. Dozens, including the prominent Shiite cleric Mirza Ali-Aqa Tabrizi, were publicly hanged. The peak of this terror came in April 1912, when Russian artillery bombarded Iran’s holiest site, the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, and looted its treasury.
The tsarist occupation of its “sphere of influence” in Persia transformed it into Russia’s most prized colonial domain, a protectorate in everything but name. Concessionaries enjoyed virtually unrestricted access to Iran’s natural riches, while Russian manufactured goods, such as sugar and textiles, flooded the local markets. Russian consuls amassed such significant power that they were frequently referred to as de facto governors, and a settler-colonial movement saw thousands of “pioneers” from the tsarist heartland establish Russian settlements throughout Khorasan. It was not without reason that, in 1915, the Russian minister in Tehran, Ivan Korostovets, proposed establishing “the direct dependence of Persia’s northern provinces on the Caucasus viceroy and the Turkestan governor-general.”
This colonial project came to an end only with the October Revolution of 1917. In March 1918, a member of the Russian community in Tehran made a public appeal to the Iranians, asking for forgiveness: “The last echelon is leaving Persia. There are no more Russian soldiers here, and if anyone has accidentally remained within Persian territory, we hope you will release them as safely as you did us. It’s not our fault that we were sent here, to a foreign and neutral country, with weapons in hand.” Russia’s informal empire was disintegrating under the weight of its overreach — a lesson not fully learned by its Soviet successor, which would face a similar fate some 70 years later.
During the early decades of Bolshevik rule, Soviet historians made significant efforts to reveal the full extent of tsarist Russia’s colonial ambitions in semicolonial states — a term used by Lenin, who argued that, in these places, Russia’s otherwise rigid imperial machine, reliant on brute force, had evolved into a more advanced form of imperialism akin to that of Western European capitalist powers. Over time, however, this narrative was gradually suppressed. Ironically, the late imperial narrative found support in Soviet ideology. Much like Panteleimon Simanskii, a historian of the Russo-Japanese war, who in the 1910s argued that Russia’s actions in East Asia were solely a response to the aggressive behavior of other great powers in “friendly” China and Korea, Soviet guardians of the past contended that Russia’s expansion in Asia was provoked by external threats. The “security concerns” argument, which originated in a colonial context during the age of empires, was later used by the Soviet leadership to justify its actions toward European neighbors in the early years of World War II.
The nature of Russia’s “deep-rooted friendship” today with Iran, China and North Korea — countries that form the loose alliance recently labeled the “axis of upheaval” — hearkens back to a time when Russia sought to dominate and exploit them, either jointly or in competition with other colonial empires. This underscores that today’s “anti-imperialist” alliances are not always forged along lines of shared colonial traumas. Histories of European intervention and domination can be selectively invoked as political arguments or conveniently silenced when advantageous, or even contorted into an anti-colonial frame.
Much like today’s Kremlin, many high-ranking tsarist officials insisted on their country’s imperial benevolence, denying any aggressive intentions. Yet, unlike observers of today’s Russia, historians have the opportunity to scrutinize the inner workings of the Russian imperial mindset at the turn of the 20th century, revealing the genuine motives, arguments and ambitions concealed behind the facade of Russia’s purportedly friendly embrace.
Just like its imperial rivals and allies, the Russian Empire was not always hell-bent on conquest, and it lacked a master plan for territorial aggrandizement. Often, it was drawn into wars and interventions by factors beyond its control. But the underlying imperial impulse — the need for expansion — persisted as long as Russia remained what it was: a major global empire. The fundamental difference between Western European and Russian imperial histories lies in Russia’s systematic silencing and emphatic denial of its own colonial record.
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