>>513617875 (OP)the conquest of Siberia and the rest of north Asia was actually a lot like the conquest of the Americas with the trade off of the native Asians already being exposed to the same diseases the Russians had but being much, much lower in population density to begin with. Russia tried to expand into Europe and the Caucuses and South Asia but expansion in these directions was always extremely difficult and any gains were prone to collapse as soon as the Russian central government buckled. a big reason Russia has historically been able to get its shit back together after imploding is that Russia is so remote from the other traditional locations for empires - China, Europe, Iran, Turkey, etc., and even then only European attackers have a clear topographic shot into the Russian heartland itself after clearing all that massive distance. its also worth noting that much of the land Russia claims was virtually worthless before modern mining/oil harvesting and even now it is prohibitively expensive to develop because of how remote it is, how brutal the annual thaw/freeze patterns are on infrastructure, and the fact that the Russian river system mostly runs in the wrong direction to enable shipping materials out to the borders of the country. Russia has a lot of natural resources but the land itself is almost worthless on average, even today local taxes are insufficient to maintain barebones highways and rail systems in like 99% of the country.
also the majority of actual Russians live outside of Moscow, Russian government just has a track record of parasitically funneling wealth into the capital across three radically different ideologies.
