History of Russian exploration

The road to Asia was opened, and in 1581 Yermak Timofeyevich crossed the Ural Mountains with a band of adventurers, defeated the Siberian Khanate and started the Russian conquest of Siberia.

[4] The rapid exploration of the vast territories of Siberia was led primarily by Cossacks and Pomors hunting for valuable furs, spices and ivory.

[9] The Academic Squad of the expedition, composed of the early members of the young Russian Academy of Sciences such as Gerhard Friedrich Müller, Johann Georg Gmelin and Stepan Krasheninnikov, inaugurated the first ethnographic, historic, and scientific research into Siberia and Kamchatka.

The Russian colonization of the Americas followed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, through the joint efforts of the state and private enterprises such as the Russian-American Company, led by Grigory Shelikhov, Nikolay Rezanov, Alexander Baranov and others.

Russians mapped most of the Alaskan coasts and nearby islands, explored the inner areas of the peninsula, and went as far south as Fort Ross in California.

In 1820–1821 a round-the-world expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev on sloops Vostok and Mirny discovered the continent of Antarctica.

The complex orographic systems of Central and Eastern Siberia were established by such scientists as Alexander Middendorf, Ivan Chersky and Vladimir Obruchev.

The Russian conquest of Central Asia was accompanied by the penetration of many explorers into the depths of Eurasia, including Mongolia, Jungaria and Tibet.

Modern era polar icebreakers, dating from Stepan Makarov's Yermak, made Arctic voyages safer and led to new attempts to explore the Northern Sea Route.

The last major unknown archipelago on Earth, Severnaya Zemlya, was discovered by Boris Vilkitsky during his 1913 expedition on the icebreakers Taymyr and Vaygach[13] and later explored and mapped in 1931 by Nikolay Urvantsev and Georgy Ushakov.