and his descendants, with no greater success, hammered at the door leading to the West.

The thirst growing with defeat became a national instinct.
When Peter the Great first looked out upon the sea, at Archangel, and when he created that miniature navy upon the Black Sea, and when he dragged his capital from "Holy Moscow" to the banks of the Neva, planting it upon that submerged tract, he was impelled by the same instinct which is to-day making history in the Far East.
It was in 1582 that Yermak, the Cossack robber and pirate, under sentence of death, won a pardon from Ivan IV.

("the Terrible") in exchange for Siberia--that unknown region stretching across the Continent of Asia to the Pacific.

Eight hundred Cossacks under the daring outlaw had sufficed to drive the scattered Asiatic tribes before them and to establish the sovereignty of Yermak, who then gladly exchanged his prize with the "Orthodox Tsar" for his "traitorous head." It was the tremendous energy of one man, Muraviev, which led to the development of Eastern Siberia.

Pathfinder and pioneer in the march across the Asiatic continent, drawing settlers after him as he moved along, he reached the mouth of the Amur river in 1846, and, at last, the empire possessed a naval station upon the Pacific, which was named Nikolaifsk, after the reigning Tsar, Nicholas I.
It was this Tsar, great-grandfather of Nicholas II., who, grimly turning his back upon Western Europe, set the face of Russia toward the East, reversing the direction which has always been the course of empire.