How did they do it?

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>>3392065

>>3392065
exist in a place no one wanted. why do you think past empires there have been so large as well. its just the terrain not the people.

>>3392065
for Siberia and most of Central Asia, there weren't very many people living there in the first place, let alone any governments with structures sound enough to raise armies that could challenge Russia. After the Mongols collapsed, all the land in North Asia was left to local warlords who couldn't hold a candle to any major power who decided to move in.

As for the advancing into Eastern Europe, raw manpower mostly, Russia has such a massive population pool to draw soldiers from that they could simply outlast any European power in a war of attrition. Many of Russia's opponents in the early modern era (Sweden, France, The Ottomans, etc) would simply be driven to exhaustion before any meaningful gains could be made against Russia.

This also put Russia in a diplomatically advantageous position due to their sheer strength in soldiers, with other Continental powers seeing more to gain in allying Russia rather than directly challenging them, which made these allies less able to contest Russian gains such as the carving up of Poland-Lithuania.