High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Russian Colonialism extended over regions forming modern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Finland and the Baltic countries, Moldavia, Central Asia, Siberia and the Caucasus. Its beginnings can be dated to the Muscovite conquest of the Republic of Novgorod in 1478 and its subsequent colonization by settlers from Muscovy. Although Russian colonialism formally ended in 1991 with the political independence of the former Republics, in practice Russian capital still dominates those territories and can be said to maintain a neo-colonial relationship to them, much as the US and European countries still control their former overseas colonies. Russian settlers who arrived in Soviet times still tend to identify culturally and intellectually with Moscow and Russian, rather than the nations they live in. The media in the newly independent non-Russian former Republics, with the exception of the Baltic states, remain heavily Russified. Much more audio-visual products are in Russian than warranted by the percentage share of the Russian population.