Early modern Russia sat at the intersection of Eurasian trade networks, which allowed both commodities and information to move from east to west and north to south. Rhubarb exported from China had held a prominent position in Western medical treatments since the classical era, but improved transportation and communication between Europe and Asia through Russia enabled the growth of the medicinal rhubarb trade to unexpected heights after 1760. Earlier studies of rhubarb have focused on European interests in uncovering ‘true’ medicinal rhubarb, but this article will situate the plant as a part of the broader process of scientific exchange across Eurasia. Russia’s unique position in Eurasia ultimately allowed its specialists to contribute to the development of Western science through the importation of information from Asia and its own expeditions in Siberia, Russia’s internal ‘Asian’ territory.

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Muscovy's active period of eastward expansion began with the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan’ in 1552. By the seventeenth century, one observer claimed that the conquest of Kazan’ was the event that made Ivan IV a tsar and Muscovy an empire. With this victory, the tsar claimed new lands, adding to his subjects the diverse animistic and Muslim population of Turkic Tatars and Chuvashes, and Finno-Ugric Maris, Mordvins, and Udmurts. The conquest of Kazan’ provided both the Metropolitan of Moscow and Ivan IV (the Terrible) an opportunity to transform the image of Muscovy into that of a victorious Orthodox power and to justify the title of its Grand Prince as a new caesar (tsar). Since the conquest was the first Orthodox victory against Islam since the fall of Constantinople, commemorations of it were immediate, including the construction of the Church of the Intercession by the Moat (St. Basil's) on Red Square.The incorporation of the lands and peoples of Kazan’ has served traditionally to date the establishment of the Russian Empire. Accounts of the conquest have emphasized the victory of Orthodoxy against Islam, with the Russian Orthodox Church and its Metropolitan as the motive force behind this expansion. The conversion of the Muslims and animists of the region is portrayed frequently as automatic, facing little resistance. More recently, scholars have criticized this simplistic account of the conquest by discussing the conversion mission as a rhetorical construct and have placed increasing emphasis on the local non-Russian and non-Orthodox resistance to the interests of the Church and state.

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