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The first fires broke out that same night, and new ones kept starting. The victorious Napoleon offered peace; the beaten Alexander refused to negotiate. The victorious Napoleon decided he had to retreat; the Russians harried him all the way back to Germany. Closer to home, Napoleon was still able to beat back all attackers, but Alexander persuaded the Prussians and Austrians to march directly on Paris. Napoleon's underlings succeeded in persuading him to abdicate. Alexander's triumph made Russia for the first time a great European power, and filled the Russians with an intoxicating sense of greatness. From now on, not only Alexander but his successors felt they had a God-given right to intervene in the Balkans, to keep attacking the Ottoman Empire, to expand anywhere they wanted in the wastelands of Central Asia.
It was Alexander's brother Nicholas I who took over northern Armenia from Persia in 1828, then invaded the Balkans to make the Turks recognize him as the protector of all Christians. The British and French joined in resisting that demand in the bloody stalemate of the Crimean War (1853-56). Resisted in the West, the succeeding Czar Alexander II looked east. He was repeatedly urged in this direction by Prussia's Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. "Russia has nothing to do in the West," Bismarck once declared. "There she can only catch nihilism and other diseases. Her mission is in Asia. There she represents civilization."
This new crusade began with the seizure of the east bank of the Amur valley as far south as Vladivostok, which a now enfeebled China ceded in 1860. On the enormous Pacific island of Sakhalin, the Russians first established a joint "condominium" with the Japanese in 1855, then took over the whole place in 1875. In the rugged and thinly settled borderlands of Central Asia, the Russians simply invaded. They stormed legendary Tashkent in 1864 and turned the whole of Turkistan into a Russian province. They besieged the sacred city of Samarkand, site of the tomb of the medieval chieftain Timur the Great (the Tamburlaine of Christopher Marlowe's epic play), and pillaged it for four days. It was from these little noticed conquests that there emerged the until recently little noticed Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. "The policy of Russia is changeless," said one disapproving observer, Karl Marx. "Its methods, its tactics, its maneuvers may change, but the polar star of its policy -- world domination -- is a fixed star."