In 1480, the Grand Duke Ivan III of Muscovy, called "the Great", frees Moscow from Mongol or Tatar rule. Ivan began by subjugating most of Moscow's rival cities, and by the time he defeated the Tatars (what the Russians called the Mongols), he was in control of a large region of central Russia. However, it wasn't until the reign of his grandson, Ivan IV "the Terrible", that Russia became a unified state.

Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584) succeeded his father Vasily III as Grand Duke of Moscow in 1533 at the age of three. His mother served as regent until she too died, when Ivan was eight. For the next eight years, the young Grand Duke endured a series of regents chosen from among the boyars, the local nobility. Finally in 1547, he adopted the title of tsar (which is the Russian form of "caesar") and set about crushing the power of the boyars. In 1552 he conquered and sacked Kazan, and in 1556 Astrakhan, having thus destroyed the lingering power of the Golden Horde, the last of the Mongol kingdoms in the west. Ivan's Tatar campaigns opened vast new areas for Russian expansion, and it was during his reign that the conquest and colonization of Siberia began.

The palace revolt of Prince Boris Godunov in 1598 (the subject of a famous Russian opera by Mussgorsky), after the death of Ivan's son Fyodor, leads to the so-called "Time of Troubles". For eight years from 1604, there was outright civil war. The Polish kingdom took advantage of Russian weakness to occupy Moscow itself. But in 1613, the Poles were defeated, and the boyars unanimously elected Michael Romanov as Tsar. The Romanov dynasty was to rule Russia for the next 304 years, until the Russian Revolution brought an end to the Tsarist state.

Nurhachi unites the Tungus clans living in eastern Siberia around 1600 to form the Manchu nation. From a loose collection of mounted warriors, the Manchu army was reorganized into a tightly regimented system, the whole divided into eight "banners". (Look here for a typical rural landscape of eastern Siberia.)

In 1620, Nurhachi and his new army captured Mukden and made it his capital. He died in 1628, but Manchu power grew. Korea was occupied in 1637 and China itself invaded. Manchu troops had first been invited into China by the Ming emperor Tsung-tseng to help shore up his crumbling rule. But in 1644, the Manchu took Beijing and set up their own dynasty, called the Qing.