Cool, useful resource here: Границы России 1462-2018 гг
Associated video below:
Couple of infographics to go along with that:
Russian territory over time.
Territories gained/lost by each ruler.
Biggest gainz: Mikhail Romanov & Alexey Mikhailovich (Siberia).
Biggest losers: Gorbachev, Lenin
Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.
Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.
Apart from writing books, reviews, travel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.
They are definitely wrong about Vasily III. They must have confused minus and plus. Vasily III added Smolensk, a very important city.
Mikhail Romanov actually lost it later as well as the Neva estuary (OK, he was very young and it was the aftermath of the Time of Troubles).
Fyodor III only lost a few small cities along the PL border (he also was very young).
Good maps:
http://www.hrono.ru/proekty/ostu/russia.html
There should be a “fuzzy set approach” to such maps.
If the empire claims a square of x km², start with fuzzy membership value of 1.0, and then decrease:
1) Reduce value depending on density of population
2) Reduce value if neighbouring empires also claim the square as their own
3) Reduce value if neighbouring empires actually have the power to take the square over by force
4) Reduce value if population doesn’t know that it is part of the empire, doesn’t give a toss, doesn’t like to be part of the empire, holds a grudge and/or has long memories
Then the fat green would be replaced by a nice density map that would lead to long evening discussions.
Anatoly, what do you think that the ideal historical borders for Russia would have been?
The Polish incursions in the Time of Troubles were ignored.
So was WW2.
The map clearly focuses on the formal recognized territory of whichever polity is in control of Russia in any one year.