Russian exploration

The history of exploration by citizens or subjects of the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, the Tsardom of Russia and other Russian predecessor states forms a significant part of the history of Russia as well as the history of the world. At 17,075,400 square kilometres (6,592,850 sq mi), Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than a ninth of the Earth’s land mass. In the times of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire the country's share in the world's land mass reached 1/6. Most of these territories were first discovered by Russian explorers (if indigenous peoples of inhabited territories are not counted). Contiguous exploration in Eurasia and the building of overseas colonies in Russian America were some of the primary factors in Russian territorial expansion.

Apart from their discoveries in Siberia, Alaska, Central Asia and the Extreme North, Russian explorers have made significant contributions to the exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic, the Pacific islands, as well as deep-sea and space exploration.

Following the settlement of East Slavs in the Russian Plain in the middle of the 1st millennium BC, through the next thousand years, most of European Russia came into the sphere of Slavic cultural and political influence, and finally became a part of the Russian state. From the 11th century on, a group of Russians which settled the shores of the White Sea and became known as Pomors ("seaside-dwellers") began navigating in the freezing seas of the Arctic Ocean, gradually developing the first icebreaking ships known as kochi. As early as the 11th century Russians from the Novgorod Republic had occasionally penetrated into Siberia. In the 14th century the Novgorodians started exploring the Kara Sea and the West-Siberian river Ob. Russians were among those rare medieval Europeans who traveled deep into Central Asia or visited South Asia. Prince Yaroslav II of Vladimir and his sons Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky and Andrey Yaroslavich traveled to Karakorum, the capital of the Mongolian Empire in the 1240s, while Afanasy Nikitin, a merchant from the Principality of Tver, traveled to Persia and India in A Journey Beyond the Three Seas in 1466-1472.

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