Russia's expansionism has always been a point of interest and controversy. British leaders in the 19th century entered into a sort of "crisis mode" at several points during the century, trying to get Russia to stop expanding towards India. Some historians have attributed this to a sense of perpetual fear that if Russia did not expand and subjugate distant and unrelated peoples it would lose it's advantages. The irony in this is of course that, as a Russian statesman at the time whose name escapes me said, this was an "expansion of weakness". Russian overexpansion has been cited as one of the main causes for their fall from their seat of power in the 1850's.