The region was absorbed by an expanding Russian Empire in the first half of the 19th century.
As a liberal city open to the world, Odessa was an aberration by the 19th-century standards of the Russian empire.
On the one hand, Poland was dominated by the USSR during the last century, and by the Russian Empire before World War I.
BBC: Russian Patriarch Kirill makes historic visit to Poland
Georgia was divided between the Ottoman and Persian empires for centuries until it became part of the Russian Empire in the 19th century.
After being conquered by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century, Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, was successfully integrated into the Russian empire.
Only after 42 years did the czarist army finally subdue the mountainous region and make it part of the expanding Russian empire, in 1859.
The discord dates back to the 1800s, when an expanding Russian empire managed to wrest control of most of what is modern-day Azerbaijan from Iran.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the fascist Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), frequently endorses the restoration of the historical Russia within the boundaries of the Russian empire.
He has an abiding fascination with the Russian empire and the respects in which it resembled and differed from its British, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian competitors.
In 1860 the Finns, already autonomous within the Russian Empire, were granted their own currency, the markka, a foretaste of the independence that would follow in 1917.
The first occasion demonstrated to the world that Japan had arrived as a legitimate military power with its stunning defeat of the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5.
The story of his quest to discover Gannibal's identity in places as far-flung as Novoselenginsk on the Chinese border, and Pskov at the other end of the Russian empire, is engagingly told.
However, the most noticeable representation of the Russian theme during this fashion week was the show by a Japanese designer, Tadashi Shoji, and his collection of dresses inspired by the fall of the Russian Empire.
In most of the former empire, Russian language and culture are still in headlong retreat.
Part coming-of-age story and part adventure, Kerbouchard travels from Brittany to Moorish Spain to Central Europe to the Russian Steppes to the Byzantine Empire, and features more than a few exciting action scenes and battles.
He goes on to argue, in a sweep that extends to Russia's privatisation programmes and left-over Russian communities in every last corner of the ex-Soviet empire, that the failure in Chechnya was symptomatic of a wider decline in Russia.
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