NARRATOR: It was an
empire that rose out of the ashes of barbarian
conquest, straddled 15 time zones, and swallowed one-sixth
of the entire world's landmass. And the first
thing to deal with is just this enormous size. NARRATOR: Fueled by
400 years of chaos, the Russian Empire was forged
by a lion's den of larger than life tsars whose tyrannical
designs were as colossal as the country itself. CYNTHIA HYLA
WHITTAKER: She wrote from building. Building is like a disease. NARRATOR: These visionaries
would drive Russia's rise to greatness, adapting
foreign technologies to seize power, capture
territory, and engineer an empire. But the same drive that
fueled Russia's thirst for everlasting glory
would ultimately devour its own people. [music playing] 1480, Moscow, an
up-and-coming Russian leader is making an unprecedented
play for power. His name is Ivan III. For centuries, his people
have been under the thumb of Eurasia's most
brutal conquerors, a Mongol sect called the Tatars. But now, Ivan III would gamble
everything to take them down. In one move, he tears up the
pact binding him to the Tatars and declares Russia his. In the balance hangs the
future of the Russian people. If Ivan loses, it
means his life. If he wins, Russia will
become the land of the tsars. PETER WELLER: Hello,
I'm Peter Weller. Some say the
history of Russia is a history of its great cities. Now, what we think of as Russia
today actually began in the 9th century when a very diverse
people started to coalesce around a single dominant
clan called the Kievan Rus'. The Kievan Rus' were
from the Ukraine. But they migrated here
to a very forested area around many rivers and lakes and
started a small trading hamlet called Novgorod,
meaning new city. Oral tradition tells us
that life in Novgorod was so chaotic and so tumultuous
that the people actually invited a Viking warrior named
Rurik from across the Baltic Sea to come here
and establish order. NARRATOR: In Novgorod, the
Kievan Rus' flourished. They borrowed the religion
and building technology of their neighbors,
the Byzantines, to build new cities and towns
as the population spread. One of these outposts, located
in the fertile heart of Western Russia, was called Moscow. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD: Moscow,
whose date of founding is officially given as 1147,
was a small, essentially, log fort on a river by the
name of Moscow, Moskva. NARRATOR: As their
cities developed, the Kievan Rus' became
known as Russians. But with no unified
ruler or defenses, Russian cities were prime
targets for invasion by the era's most aggressive
conquerors, the Tatars. 1237, the Tatars charged
across the Volga River with 120,000 riders. The early Russians were no
match for this seasoned militia. For nearly 24 months, the
Tatars devastated Russia. But for the rulers of
Moscow, the invasion was an opportunity to buy
favor with the invaders and rebuild better than before. Moscow's rise had started
in the 14th century, very clever, cunning,
ruthless politics on the part of the grand princes of Moscow,
who managed to ingratiate themselves with
the Tatar masters and achieve the ability
to collect taxes from the other Russian
principalities. NARRATOR: Under the
protection of the Tatars, Moscow began to bleed
its Russian brothers dry, swallowing up neighboring
territories to form a single Muscovite state. But its leaders were still
forced to pay off their hated Tatar overlords. All that would change
in 1462 with Ivan III. Ivan came to power determined to
end Tatar domination of Russia. He takes the title Grand
Prince of all Russia and begins to plot an
overthrow of the Tatars. CYNTHIA HYLA WHITTAKER:
Ivan, I think, had all of the
characteristics he needed to be a good and
successful tsar and to earn the title, The Great. He was ambitious. He was opportunistic. He was ruthless. He was smart. NARRATOR: The new tsar would
hit the ground running. He marries into the empire that
have given Russia its religion and architecture, Byzantium. With this alliance
in place, Ivan adopts the Byzantine symbol
of the two-headed eagle and declares Russia
the third Rome. Then in 1472, he begins to lay
down his engineering legacy. He commissions a new
cathedral to be built as an unmistakable sign
that Russia was now a force to be reckoned with. Workers began construction
on the massive project in the early 1470s. But Mother Nature
had other ideas. In 1474, a small
tremor shook Moscow. Two years of construction
on the mighty church collapsed into a pile of rubble. Built crudely of heavy stone
on insufficient foundations, it was an accident
waiting to happen. But Ivan would turn
disaster into opportunity. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD:
At this point, people. And the best people of that
period, the 15th century, were in Italy. NARRATOR: Ivan finds one
Aristotle Fioravanti. Fioravanti was known as a
skilled master architect throughout Italy. But before he could
re-engineer Moscow's cathedral, he had to completely
demolish the site. In the first of
several innovations, Fioravanti uses siege technology
in the form of a battering ram to raze the ruins of the church. And that amazed
the Muscovites. What they had taken
months to erect, unsuccessfully, he was able
to batter down in 3 weeks. NARRATOR: Fioravanti then got
to work building the cathedral. Today, we know it as the
Cathedral of the Assumption. He began by using ancient
Russian limestone churches as his model but
infused the construction with Western
building technology. The result revolutionized
Russian architecture. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD: To start
with the foundation instead of the rubble-filled
trench, which was typical of early
medieval Russian building, he cleared the trench and
put large oak pilings, which are much more stable means
of supporting the building. So that the building doesn't
later crack or deform in ways that will lead it to
ultimately collapse. NARRATOR: From there,
Fioravanti's innovations expanded. Instead of using stacked pieces
of limestone poorly mortared together, he arranges
his limestone blocks in an interlocking bond
to make them more stable. With his walls
completed, he next turns to the delicate and
dangerous operation of building the heavy vaulted ceilings. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD: When you
begin to vault the roof, there's an enormous amount
of weight coming down on those walls. So the third element that he
introduced was iron tie rods. Well, they were
just iron rods that were inserted into the
masonry and extended across at the level of the vaulting. It serves as an additional
form of support. It ties the structure together. NARRATOR: Last, instead of
building the church's rounded cupolas and drums
in heavy stones, he introduced the use of
lighter and sturdier brick, teaching his Russian
builders how to fire and lay this new material. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD: So that
from the pilings to the wall bonding, to the tie rods,
to the upper structure, Fioravanti used a new set of
techniques, which had been mastered in Italy, but put
them within the context of Russian symbols. NARRATOR: The finished cathedral
stood over 150 feet tall. It was a stunning
and imposing edifice. With his symbol
of power in place, Ivan was now ready to
challenge the Tatars. Their response is quick. They raise a massive
army and charge Moscow. Ivan raises his own force. And the two sides clash at
the Ugra River, 300 miles west of Moscow. After months of standoff,
the Russians finally overrun the Tatars. Ivan had successfully
vanquished the oppressors who had subjugated the Russians
for nearly three centuries. And with his legacy cemented
in mighty monuments of brick and stone, Ivan III
becomes Ivan the Great. By the time of
his death in 1505, Ivan had created an
independent Russia. But he had not yet
created an empire. That distinction would
belong to another Ivan, whose absolute authority
and inhuman cruelty would earn him the
title Ivan the Terrible. In 1472, Ivan III married
Sophia Palaeologus, the niece of the last
Emperor of Byzantium. Pope Paul II arrange
their marriage. At the end of Ivan the
Great's reign in 1505, he had freed the Russian people
from subservience to the Tatars and tripled Moscow's territory. CYNTHIA HYLA WHITTAKER:
In other words, was an enormous
accomplishment in itself. And that would earn him
the title The Great. NARRATOR: But the
Tatars were still a problem Although they
had retreated from Moscow, their capital Kazan stood in the
way of Russia's expansion east. It would take the dark
determination of Ivan III's grandson to rid
Russia of the Tatars and transform it into an empire. He would become known
as Ivan the Terrible. WILLARD SUNDERLAND: I think
the greatest single period of expansion was under
Ivan the Terrible. The Muscovite tsardom
encompassed the Volga, the Euro regions, and then,
eventually, all of Siberia. NARRATOR: This great
emperor would start out as a deeply troubled young man. Ivan's father died
when he was a child, leaving him witness to a
brutal struggle for power involving torture,
execution, and murder. These atrocities would
scar Ivan for life. Ivan the Terrible's traumatic
background as a child, I think, produced an
Ivan who was terrible. Even as a young child,
he tortured animals. He seemed to be
cruel and sadistic. NARRATOR: By the time he
came to power in 1547, he was convinced that he
was personally anointed by God to rule Russia. SEYMOUR BECKER: He was
the first Russian ruler to have himself crowned
formally as tsar. And tsar is simply a Russian
derivative of Caesar. It's an imperial title. NARRATOR: As tsar, Ivan
found the perfect outlet for his fierce and
ruthless intellect, by launching Russia's first
modern offensive called the Siege of Kazan. Ivan first created a new
army of nearly 150,000 men, including artillery and
engineering units trained in the latest siege
tactics from Europe. His engineers adapted
these foreign teachings to suit Russian warfare. In a first for
Russian engineering, they designed a
portable structure to defend Russian troops on
Eurasia's exposed plains. It was called the gulyay-golrod. This was actually
movable fortress. Gulyay-golrod consisted of
wooden screens or wooden holes. NARRATOR: These shields were
assembled in varying patterns to defend infantry
gunners called Streltsy, the Russian word for shooter. MIKHAIL KROM: Russian
infantry stood inside these movable
fortress and used guns, used cannons
against the cavalry. And another way to use it was
against the besieged city, like Kazan. NARRATOR: August 23,
1552, with his army assembled and equipped,
Ivan begins fighting his way to Kazan. It was done very ingeniously,
as the Russians moved up and would very quickly
erect prefabricated, log fortresses, as they
inched ever closer to Kazan, in other words, tightening
the noose around the city. NARRATOR: Once entrenched
outside the city, Ivan's troops unleashed
a relentless assault, rolling in 30-foot
high gulyay-golrods to fire a barrage of artillery
over the fortress walls. They killed many,
many defenders in the streets of the city
using these movable towers. NARRATOR: But the
fortress stood strong. So Ivan's generals ordered
in a team of engineers to take a crack at the castle. They devised a
daring plan to tunnel under the fortress walls, lay
mines, and blow the fort wide open. On September 30,
they light a fuse that would decide the
bloody fate of Kazan. [explosion] The force of the explosion
stops the battle in its tracks. That was the signal
to the rest of the army. And all the regiments
of the tsarist army simultaneously started the
assault of the fortress. NARRATOR: After eight days of
bloody battle, Kazan falls. Ivan was a conqueror. And Russia becomes an empire. This was a monumental feat. Because the taking
of Kazan meant that Russia was incorporating
the former Tatar lands to which he
had been beholden. And Kazan opened
the way for Russia to expand truly into an empire. It opened the way South to the
Caspian and the Black Seas. And it opened the
way East to Siberia. NARRATOR: In 1555, to
commemorate his victory, Ivan commissions a
building that would become the most recognizable
symbol of the Russian Empire. Today it's known as
St. Basil's Cathedral. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD: The
Cathedral of the Intercession, which we know as St. Basil's,
is based on the technology of brick towers that
the Italians brought in, and the Russians later
adapted to create votive tower churches. NARRATOR: Constructed
almost entirely of brick, the cathedral was actually
eight churches in one. It was laid out in
a geometric pattern, with each church circling a
central tower, symbolizing the eight days of
the Siege of Kazan. In the 1580s, the cathedral's
most distinctive feature was added. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD: The onion
dome takes its form, its image, from that flair that
occurs at its base. It rests on a cylinder
called a drum. And from that cylinder,
the top of that cylinder, it flares out very sharply,
rises up, and then culminates in a peak. That is the onion dome. NARRATOR: The onion domes on St.
Basil's were completely unique. Each one was constructed
of individually textured, hand painted metal sheets,
laid over an iron frame. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD: If you
strip that metal sheath away, it looks something
like a birdcage that had been squashed, so
that you got the flair. NARRATOR: The result was a
stunning architectural feat never before seen in Russia. By 1553, Ivan's dominions
were the largest in Europe. And he was at the
height of his power. But his deepening
paranoia and iron grip on the jugular of the
nation were slowly strangling his empire. He launched a series of
costly and foolish wars and sadistically struck out at
anyone who opposed his power. The flames of Ivan's insanity
were consuming his own people. And no one was safe,
not even his own family. Another reason Ivan IV
could be called The Terrible is probably the
finale of his reign, when he murdered his
son who was trying to protect his pregnant
wife from Ivan's rage. NARRATOR: Ivan had beaten the
woman so severely that she miscarried. When his son confronted him,
Ivan turned on him, too. In a blinding rage, he struck
out, killing him instantly. With one swift move, Ivan
had destroyed his own line of succession. By the time of
his death in 1584, the empire was in a shambles. SEYMOUR BECKER: Soon after
Ivan came the decade long, so-called, time of
troubles, a civil war combined with a war
foreign intervention. In the course of
that, Muscovy, Russia, came very close to
losing its independence. NARRATOR: Just one century
after achieving independence, Russia was on the
brink of disaster. But soon a Russian giant would
appear on the world stage, stunning everyone by
engineering a shining city in the middle of nowhere. Ivan the Terrible
married seven times and even proposed to a lady in
the court of Queen Elizabeth I of England. 1696, a new tsar comes to
power with a revolutionary plan to pick up where Ivan
the Terrible left off and transform his backward
nation into a modern empire. His name is Peter the Great. SEYMOUR BECKER: Peter the
Great was an absolutely unique person, a giant, both
physically, 6 and 1/2 feet tall, as well as in
terms of personality. He disregarded
convention and tradition. He was endlessly curious
about new things. NARRATOR: Peter's enormous
size was matched by his ego. A constant whirlwind of
activity occurred around him. And he took on the
tasks of a dozen men. He was really an extraordinary,
larger than life person. NARRATOR: Peter had spent
his early years in Moscow, carousing with artisans
and military men in the city's foreign quarter,
learning about their tactics and technology. SEYMOUR BECKER: Peter
was not only entranced with European
technology, he was also very aware of Russia's
backwardness and weakness vis-a-vis Europe. He wanted to remedy
that situation. PETER WELLER: So one
of his first acts was he went to Europe. And he went to Europe incognito. And there he studied the
craft of shipbuilding with the Dutch, who
were masters at it. He also learned the
art of navigation from the English Navy. pulling out of their
overseas colonies. And he figured
they might have use for Russian natural resources. But what Peter really wanted
was a piece of the action. And he knew that in
order to cut into the pie he would have to drag his
country kicking and screaming out of its gloomy
medieval backwardness into the great white light
of the new commercialism of the Western world. When he got back to Russia,
Peter resolved to transform his country into a naval force
that would not only trade with the European empires,
it would compete with them as a military power. NARRATOR: Peter sets his
sights on a stretch of land 400 miles north of Moscow,
near the Baltic Sea on the Neva River. With God-like vanity, he began
envisioning a new naval city that would put Russia
on Europe's map. He would call his
vision St. Petersburg. A city on that spot had direct
maritime access to Europe. NARRATOR: The only problem
was that this land on the Neva belonged to Sweden. Peter would not be deterred. In 1700, he launched
an all-out attack and took the land by force. By 1703, the cornerstone
of the city was laid. The new capital that
Peter had in mind, it was to be a fortress,
was to be the center of the Army and the Navy. It was to be the window
on Europe, through which Western ideas, modern ideas,
were going to flood and spread throughout the entire empire. NARRATOR: Out of
bloodshed and warfare, St. Petersburg was born. But for the people of
Russia, their tsar's ambition would prove to be a
double-edged sword. Peter chose the site of his
future city for its access to the Baltic Sea. But this advantage would
come with a steep price. For five months out of
the year, the river delta and its surrounding swamps would
freeze and then predictably, reliably flood when they
thawed with the warmer months. The building of this city would
be a monumental challenge. So Peter turned to the
one natural resource that compensated in Russia when
all else failed, raw manpower. NARRATOR: The people of
Russia would literally build St. Petersburg
with their bare hands. Surrounded by nothing
but swamp, supplies were almost
impossible to come by. In order to raise the
foundations of the fortress above tide waters, workers
had to dig piles of earth with their bare hands and then
transport thousands of pounds of soil in their
jackets and shirts. Everything had to be imported. Even lumber had
to be cut upstream and floated down
in huge quantities to stabilize the
city's foundations. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD:
There's no bedrock there, so that any large structure
had to be built on pilings. NARRATOR: To do this, engineers
designed a pulley system to drive thousands of
piles into the soft earth. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD: And
you'd raise the head. And they would drop it. And that would drive the
pile into the ground. at Petersburg. Within five months, thousands
and thousands of laborers had erected the hexagonal walls
and the timber bastions of this fortress you see behind me. At night, they'd come
home to their camps freezing and tired and hungry. And just as they had
come by the thousands, so they would die
by the thousands By 1708, a rough estimate
of 25,000 laborers had perished building
this fledgling city, which gave rise to its nickname
the City of Bones. There is no statistic that tells
us exactly how many people died before the city was finished. But a 19th century historian
says that, up until that point, there was no single battle in
the annals of military history that cost as many lives as the
number of laborers who perished in the building
of St. Petersburg. NARRATOR: For Peter, the
human toll was merely a means to an end. In 1706, he launched his first
warship from St. Petersburg Admiralty Shipyard. This was the city's first
industrial compound. It housed shipbuilders, sail
and rope makers, forges, and a cannon foundry. Russia now had a Navy. And its tsar was
single-handedly changing the face of the empire. In 1712, with his
usual brisk efficiency, he makes the biggest
change of all. In a simple and stunning decree,
Peter makes St. Petersburg the capital of Russia. In an instant, Moscow's nearly
300 years supremacy in Russia was over. The citizens of
Moscow were stunned. Many Russians reacted
to Peter as though he were an alien from outer space. They didn't understand him. He imposed his strange
ideas on his country, using the full force of
an autocratic and absolute monarch, which he inherited
from his predecessors. But he knew very well how
to use it to get his will. CYNTHIA HYLA
WHITTAKER: His vision throughout his life. Nothing and no one escaped
some kind of an effect from this revolutionary process. NARRATOR: Peter had
spared no expense to create a city from scratch. But by 1714, St. Petersburg
was still a long way from being the European
power center he envisioned. And Peter's years
of hard living were about to catch up with him. Without his dogged will, the
entire fantastic endeavor threatened to crumble,
leaving Russia once again on the verge of chaos. In 1698, Peter the
Great issued a beard tax to be paid by anyone
refusing to cut off their old-fashioned
Russian beards in favor of a clean shaven Western look. PETER WELLER: For
decades, Peter the Great had been monastically focused
on his twofold task of turning Russia into a great
empire and St. Petersburg into its glittering
capital, with one exception. He still held his
legendary bouts of drinking with his buddies. But as always, his hard
partying had very little effect on his relentless energy. He defeated Sweden in
the Great Northern War. He'd extended Russia's
boundaries from the Baltic all the way to the Pacific. He built a new European capital. He built a Navy. He built schools of
engineering and science. And it increased
Russian trade sevenfold. Military and politically,
Russia had become an empire. But it's still lacked
the one element essential to all
empires, prestige. NARRATOR: In 1714, Peter
began sketching designs for a grand palace atop a
50-foot bluff overlooking the sea, 25 miles outside
of St. Petersburg. He would call it Peterhof. The palace would be surrounded
by over 600 acres of gardens and crowned by a gilded
network of fountains, running down the entire
face of the bluff. Work on the monumental
project began in 1716. Large numbers of army
soldiers were actually sent to the estate to dig
the trenches that would feed the water through a
pipe system to the fountains. NARRATOR: In 1719, the country's
first hydraulic engineers began work on the
intricate system. The palace was
built on the heights. And the heights are
what feed the water. It's that drop, the
gravity in that drop, that actually powers
the fountains. NARRATOR: Using the natural
slope of the terrain and water from nearby springs,
workers constructed a 14-mile gravity-fed system. The water was stored
in upper reservoirs. In a flash, it was released
to shoot through wooden pipes down a 50-foot cascade to
the fountain's centerpiece. The speeding water
accumulated enough force to shoot 65
feet into the air. The result was breathtaking. The fountains were
so spectacular, they were dubbed
Russia's Versailles. But Peter didn't have much
time to enjoy his showpiece. In 1725, after wading
into freezing water to save a drowning sailor, the
great Peter took ill and died. By the end of his reign,
Peter had taken Russia from a backward, isolated country
to a state-of-the-art empire. But the job was far from done. It would be the ambitious
and tenacious German wife of Peter's grandson who would
complete St. Petersburg's transformation from a naval fort
to the glittering capital we recognize today. Her name was
Catherine the Great. CYNTHIA HYLA
WHITTAKER: Catherine comes to power in the year 1762
by overthrowing her husband, who had been the Russian
emperor for only six months. And she very was able to
quite easily topple him. NARRATOR: With her power
secure, Catherine picks up where Peter the Great left
off, transforming Russia into a world power. SEYMOUR BECKER: As a
foreigner, as a European, she virtually completed the
process of Europeanization which Peter the Great had
begun at the beginning of the century. In fact, Catherine
regarded herself as Peter's rightful heir. In the 18th century, in order
to be a successful monarch, you had to expand
your territory. And this Catherine
did brilliantly. NARRATOR: Catherine annexed
some 200,000 square miles of territory, adding vast new
wealth to Russia's coffers and expanding the empire to
its greatest lengths to date. Second, you were to introduce
a wide ranging program of reform. And this she did. NARRATOR: On the home front,
Catherine used her new wealth to modernize her city. She was one of the
first Russian rulers to address the squalid living
conditions of Russia's poor, with plans for hospitals,
sanitation, services, and schools. CYNTHIA HYLA WHITTAKER:
Catherine, during her reign, set up architectural norms
for the building of new towns. And she did, in fact, build 216
new towns, complete with plans for how the grid should be laid
out, how the central square should be laid out, what kind
of facades there should be, what kind of materials should
be used in construction. NARRATOR: But Catherine's most
prestigious building project was the renovation of her royal
residence, the empire's most extravagant monument
to self-indulgence, the Winter Palace. The Winter Palace was three
stories high and 650 feet long. The entire exterior
was decorated in more than 200 columns
and over 150 carved statues. Inside, it contained
more than 500 rooms, almost four times the number
of rooms in the White House. Over the course of
her reign, Catherine spearheaded a building boom
unlike any the empire had ever seen. Her unrivaled power completely
transformed St. Petersburg into an ostentatious
and unashamed display of the culture, wealth, and
power of the Russian Empire. She wrote to one of
her correspondents, I can't stop myself
from building. But building is like a disease. It's almost like alcoholism. NARRATOR: Unrestrained building
wasn't the tsarina's only vice. Behind the doors of
the Winter Palace, Catherine was known for
another form of patronage, taking good care of her numerous
and often much younger lovers. CYNTHIA HYLA WHITTAKER: She
was a hard-working woman. At night, she wanted
to have male company. And there were a
number of lovers. She treated them very
nicely and very generously. She gave them land. She gave them serfs. NARRATOR: But Catherine's lavish
court and her absolute power to give human beings as gifts
symbolized the gulf that existed between the ruling
elite and the average laboring Russian. While she sympathized
with her subjects, on the throne of supreme
power, Catherine's reforms went only so far. By the end of Catherine's
reign in 1796, Russia was a superpower. But the country's
strength brought it new glory and new enemies. By 1812, Europe's
most ambitious general was engaged in a
march of conquest across Europe, unlike any
seen since the Roman Empire. And Russia was about to
become his next victim. Catherine the Great
was the first leader to initiate a large scale
inoculation program. In 1768, she immunized
herself and her subjects against smallpox. At the time of
her death in 1796, Catherine had added 200,000
square miles of territory to the Russian Empire. Over 40 million people were
now considered Russians. When her grandson, Alexander
I, took the throne in 1881, Russia was a major
player in world affairs. This made Russia
an alluring trophy for Europe's most dangerous
general, Napoleon Bonaparte. And in 1812, Tsar Alexander
would face a challenge unseen in Russia since the
Mongol invasion six centuries earlier. Napoleon posed a
considerable threat to Russia. He had already brought
virtually all of Europe under his control. NARRATOR: Napoleon
entered Russia with an unprecedented
army of over 500,000 men. The Russians knew they
could not stop this army on the battlefield. So they adopted a tactic
of strategic retreat, burning the countryside to
starve out Napoleon's troops as they pushed toward Moscow. Once in the capital,
Napoleon would realize he had underestimated
the steely resolve of the Russian tsar. Napoleon probably thought that
having invaded Russia, seized the old capital, Alexander would
be willing to come to terms with him. He simply ignored Napoleon,
until a very harsh winter forced Napoleon to realize that
there was nothing to be gained by sitting in Moscow. And so Napoleon
began to retreat. NARRATOR: Forced to march back
over the demolished and frozen landscape from which
they came, less than 10% of the men out of Napoleon's
original army survived. Mother Russia had broken
the unbeatable general. In 1883, Alexander's successor
commissioned a grand monument to be placed in the heart of
St. Petersburg's Palace Square. It would be a towering
symbol of Russian defiance. ■ was called the
Alexander Column. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD:
The Alexander Column rests on a granite shaft,
red finish granite. It's a monolith. And it's one piece. NARRATOR: Once again, a
Russian tsar forced his people to literally move mountains to
build a monument in the name of the empire. An army of Russians methodically
carved the shaft of the column out of the side of a
mountain in one piece and shipped it to
St. Petersburg. It was a process that took three
years and thousands of workers. Once in St.
Petersburg, engineers face the daunting
task of raising the 700-ton, 830foot
tall granite monolith. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD: It was
sort of a giant halter that was fastened on to the column. And then placed around it were
cap stands, which were manned by dozens of people. And at a given signal,
they would all move, and, through a pulley system,
the column would gradually move upward and fall into the
place that had been prepared for it on the base. NARRATOR: Today, the column
remains free-standing on its pedestal, at a
full height of 155 feet. WILLIAM BRUMFIELD: It has proved
to be absolutely, perfectly engineered. NARRATOR: Napoleon's collapse
eliminated any threat to Russia's status as
the world's largest overland empire. By the turn of the 19th century,
Russia stretched 6,000 miles from the Baltic Sea in the
West to the Pacific in the East and all the way to Alaska. It consisted of one-sixth
of the world's landmass, crossed 15 time zones,
and, under a new tsar, it would continue expanding. WILLARD SUNDERLAND: Nicholas II,
because of his early experience traveling in Asia,
the first of the czars to travel to Asian destinations,
took into his reign a real conviction that Russia's
future lay on the Pacific. NARRATOR: But with
its territory now extending beyond the
horizon, the empire was in danger of collapsing
under its own size. Russia's engineers would
execute a solution as far reaching as the empire itself. They would build the
Trans-Siberian Railroad. SEYMOUR BECKER: Those who
promoted the building of, what was then, the world's
longest railroad in the 1890s had in mind both economic
and political objectives. It was to open up the Far
East to Russian exports. At the same time, it was
to establish Russian power in the Far East. NARRATOR: On May 31,
1891, the first piece was laid of a railroad that
would span a distance of 5,768 miles, the equivalent of
crossing the continental United States twice. This was an engineering
project on a scale never before attempted. The question of how the
railway was built is a-- is frankly one that
makes you stop in awe. NARRATOR: The
railroad was designed to be built in sections. And it would require thousands
of workers, engineers, soldiers, and even
convicts to do the job. In a typical stretch
of the railway, cutting across vast areas
of Southern Siberian forest, an initial wave of workers
would clear the land, felling the trees to open
the path of the railroad. Then a great deal
of labor would go Then once the woods were
cleared and the bulwark was established, the rails
would be brought in and laid. NARRATOR: Transporting
supplies to these remote sites would prove to be
a major challenge. After all, the railroad
did not yet exist. Tracks had to be laid piecemeal,
so that workers could use the emerging railroad to
transport steel from the West and continue building
section by section. And this process was
repeated week after week, month after month,
over all the years of the late imperial period. NARRATOR: The endless toil broke
the backs of Russia's workers. WILLARD SUNDERLAND: It was
a very hard job to take, a very hard job to take. I mean, you've got to conjure
an image of isolated wilderness that was transformed into
rough and ready worker's camps, with workers camped out under
tents or, in some cases, in earthen dugouts, working
for months at a time on stretches of track with
relatively limited supplies. In the winter, subject to
extremely cold temperatures. In the summer, to the
terrific heat of Russia's continental climate. NARRATOR: By 1904, the
core railroad was complete. Russia had a
lifeline to the East and was free to pursue its
next object of conquest, Asia. SEYMOUR BECKER: The
problem, of course, was that this put Russia
into direct conflict with Japan, which
had very similar political and
economic objectives. This conflict of
objectives led to war between Russia and Japan. NARRATOR: In 1905,
Russia went to war and suffered a
humiliating defeat at the hands of the Japanese. Back at home, the
loss fanned the flames of growing resentment
toward the tsar. Then in 1914, the
tsar led his country into yet another war that would
starve, ravage, and utterly decimate the population,
World War I. After centuries of building the world's
largest empire with blood, the Russian tsar was
now pushing his people to their breaking point. On March 15, 1917,
the people revolted. Tsar Nicholas II was
removed from power. The nearly 500-year reign
of the Russian tsars had been destroyed. The key factor in the
disintegration of the Russian Empire in 1917, '18 was the
collapse of the tsarist regime. Because it was the emperor
who really provided the glue that held the empire together. NARRATOR: The tsars
had used their power to build breathtaking
cathedrals, whole cities from swamps, railroads
that crossed a continent, and sumptuous palaces
that remain unrivaled in their opulence. The history of
the Russian Empire can be read as an
enormous achievement. At the same time,
that achievement came at important costs. In many respects, the empire
was built on the backs of ordinary Russians. NARRATOR: In late 1917, the
tsars' achievements would be rewritten by
a new regime, one determined to level the playing
field for Russia's poor. PETER WELLER: As the
mighty empire grew, it would consume more
and more of its own to build a palatial
playground for the rich and an industrial
hell for the rest. By the beginning of
the 20th century, Russia's overworked and
illiterate poor had had it. Broken by world war,
incited by radicals, these people would rise up to
demolish the Russia they had suffered for in a fiery
revolution that would have replaced one colossal
empire with another. I'm Peter Weller for
the History Channel.
