Ermak Crosses the Urals

1581

The Cossack ataman Ermak Timofeevich crossed the Ural mountains at the head of eight hundred men, defeated the Siberian khan Kuchum, and claimed western Siberia for Ivan the Terrible. Russian fur traders and Orthodox missionaries followed him east. The longest land expansion in history had quietly begun. The conquest, initially a private venture, became the founding event of Russia's three-century expansion across Siberia to the Pacific.