In January 1787 Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia, took a long boat trip down the Dnieper River to visit her latest conquests. A few years earlier, her armies had defeated the Ottoman Empire and annexed the Crimea, and the within the imperial court, the hope was that these wild southern steppes would form the basis of an entire new satellite territory known as ‘New Russia’, along the lines of New England, or the French and Spanish colonies of North America. The indigenous population would be swept aside; Russian settlers would descend from the north in search of a new life, populating new towns and villages that would be built from scratch: cementing the power and span of the Russian empire, spreading the Russian values of civilisation and enlightenment all the way to the Black Sea…
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