Russian Empire
Though the Empire was only officially proclaimed by Tsar Peter I following the Treaty of Nystad (1721), some historians would argue that it was truly born either when Ivan III of Russia conquered Veliky Novgorod in 1478, or when Ivan the Terrible conquered the Khanate of Kazan in 1552. According to another point of view, the term "Tsardom", which was used after the coronation of Ivan IV in 1547, was already a contemporary Russian word for empire.
Stroganov family
The Stroganovs or Strogonovs (), referred to in French as Stroganoffs, were a family of highly successful Russian merchants, industrialists, landowners, and statesmen. From the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century they were the richest businessmen in the Tsardom of Russia. They financed the Russian conquest of Siberia and Prince Pozharsky's reconquest of Moscow from the Poles. The Stroganov School of icon-painting takes its name from them. The most recent common ancestor of the family was Fyodor Lukich Stroganov, a salt industrialist. His elder son, Vladimir, became the founder of the lineage that degraded to state peasants; this lineage is still continued. The lineage from his youngest son, Anikey, died out in 1923. Anikey's descendants had made it to the high Russian nobility under the first Romanovs.