Russia
Russia, the largest country in the world, occupies one-tenth of all the land on Earth.
GEOGRAPHY
Russia, the largest country in the world, occupies one-tenth of all the land on Earth. It spans 11 time zones across two continents (Europe and Asia) and has coasts on three oceans (the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic).
The Russian landscape varies from desert to frozen coastline, tall mountains to giant marshes. Much of Russia is made up of rolling, treeless plains called steppes. Siberia, which occupies three-quarters of Russia, is dominated by sprawling pine forests called taigas.
Russia has about 100,000 rivers, including some of the longest and most powerful in the world. It also has many lakes, including Europe's two largest: Ladoga and Onega. Lake Baikal in Siberia contains more water than any other lake on Earth.
PEOPLE & CULTURE
There are about 120 ethnic groups in Russia who speak more than a hundred languages. Roughly 80 percent of Russians trace their ancestry to the Slavs who settled in the country 1,500 years ago. Other major groups include Tatars, who came with the Mongol invaders, and Ukrainians.
Russia is known all over the world for its thinkers and artists, including writers like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, composers such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and ballet dancers including Rudolf Nureyev.
NATURE
As big as Russia is, it's no surprise that it is home to a large number of ecosystems and species. Its forests, steppes, and tundras provide habitat for many rare animals, including Asiatic black bears, snow leopards, polar bears, and small, rabbit-like mammals called pikas.
Russia's first national parks were set up in the 19th century, but decades of unregulated pollution have taken a toll on many of the country's wild places. Currently, about one percent of Russia's land area is protected in preserves, known as zapovedniks.
Russia's most famous animal species is the Siberian tiger, the largest cat in the world. Indigenous to the forests of eastern Russia, these endangered giants can be 10 feet (3 meters) long, not including their tail, and weigh up to 600 pounds (300 kilograms).
GOVERNMENT & ECONOMY
Russia's history as a democracy is short. The country's first election, in 1917, was quickly reversed by the Bolsheviks, and it wasn't until the 1991 election of Boris Yeltsin that democracy took hold.
Russia is a federation of 86 republics, provinces, territories, and districts, all controlled by the government in Moscow. The head of state is a president elected by the people. The economy is based on a vast supply of natural resources, including oil, coal, iron ore, gold, and aluminum.
HISTORY
The earliest human settlements in Russia arrived around A.D. 500, as Scandinavians (what is now Norway, Denmark, and Sweden) moved south to areas around the upper Volga River. These settlers mixed with Slavs from the west and built a fortress that would eventually become the Ukrainian city of Kiev.
Kiev evolved into an empire that ruled most of European Russia for 200 years, then broke up into Ukraine, Belarus, and Muscovy. Muscovy's capital, Moscow, remained a small trading post until the 13th century, when Mongol invaders from central Asia drove people to settle in Moscow.
In the 1550s, Muscovite ruler Ivan IV became Russia's first tsar, or emperor, after driving the Mongols out of Kiev and unifying the region. In 1682, 10-year-old Peter the Great and his older brother, Ivan, both became tsar (though Peter’s aunt and Ivan’s mother, Sophia, was in charge). Soon after, Sophia was overthrown, and Peter was considered by most to be the real tsar, though he allowed his brother to keep his official position. For 42 years, Peter worked to make Russia more modern and more European.
In 1762, Peter took a trip to Germany, and his wife, Catherine, named herself the sole ruler of Russia. Just six months later the tsar died—perhaps on his wife’s orders. Now known as Catherine the Great, the empress continued to modernize Russia; supported arts and culture; and expanded its territory, claiming Ukraine, Crimea, Poland, and other places. She ruled for 34 years.
In 1917, Russians unhappy with their leadership overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and formed an elected government. Just a few months later, though, a communist group called the Bolsheviks seized power. Their leader, Vladimir Lenin, created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R., or the Soviet Union) uniting Russia and 11 other countries.
The Soviet Union fought on the side of the United States in World War II, but relations between the two powers and their allies became strained soon after the war ended in 1945. The United States and many of its allies were worried about the spread of communism, the type of government the Soviet Union was. (In a communist society, all property is public and people share the wealth that they create.)
These concerns led to the Cold War, a long period of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. That ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up after many of its republics—such as Ukraine, Lithuania, and Estonia—decided they didn’t want to be part of the communist country anymore.
INDEPENDENT REPUBLICSAfter the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 under the moderate Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the former republics became 15 independent states, or nations. The largest and most powerful of these is Russia. Others include Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus.
During this time, Boris Yeltsin became president, and Russia went through many changes. Instead of the government being controlled by the Communist party, people were elected to serve in a representative democracy with many political parties. Private businesses were now allowed to function instead of the government controlling most everything. Citizens had also had new political and cultural freedoms to express themselves without fear of breaking the law.
Yeltsin was reelected in 1996, but his bad health prevented him from completing his term. He resigned a few years later and named his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, to replace him as acting president.
In 2000, Putin was formally elected by the citizens of Russia. In the first years of his presidency, Putin continued many of Yeltsin’s reforms and supported the United States in the war on terror after the attacks on September 11, 2001. But he got rid of some of the cultural freedoms and took control of national television networks. This allowed his government to influence news reports.
Putin was elected to a second term in 2004. But as in the United States, he couldn’t serve more than two consecutive four-year terms. So in 1998 he appointed an aide, Dmitri Medvedev, to take his place as prime minister. Many believe that Putin still ruled Russia from behind the scenes during this time.
In 2012, Putin ran again for president and won. But he wasn’t as popular among the people, and citizens protested against unfair elections. His government arrested many political opponents and called the protesters traitors to Russia who wanted to be more like the West, especially the United States.
In 2014, Russian troops invaded the Crimean Peninsula, an area of land in southern Ukraine bordered by the Black Sea. Putin said that the people of Crimea had voted for independence from Ukraine.
Many Ukrainians and leaders from several other countries didn't like Putin’s actions and thought the "vote" wasn't real. But in March of that year, Putin signed a treaty with some Crimean leaders that said that Crimea was part of Russia. Ukrainian officials announced that they would not recognize the agreement and still considered Crimea part of Ukraine, not Russia.
Russian forces remained in Crimea to keep Ukraine from taking it back. Later in 2014, fights along the eastern border broke out between Ukrainians and Russian-backed rebels who wanted all of Ukraine to become part of Russia.
In 2019, comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine. Zelensky ran on a platform of uniting the country and ending border battles in the east with Russia. To help with that, the United States planned to give Ukraine millions of dollars in military aid to help fight the Russian occupations.
In July 2019, U.S. president Donald Trump was accused of withholding those funds unless Zelensky investigated Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden. He refused, and Trump was eventually impeached, or formally accused of misconduct in office, by the U.S. House of Representatives over these claims. (Ukraine received the aid later in the year.)
RUSSIA INVADES
In February 2022, Putin announced an invasion on the country and sent troops to take over major cities, including the capital, Kyiv. Ukrainian citizens have been fighting back against the attacks, and Zelensky has vowed to remain in the country and fight until Ukraine regains its freedom.
Many world leaders strongly condemned Putin’s actions, and some punished Russia by stopping trade with the country or putting travel bans in place. The hope is that these punishments—called sanctions—will hurt Putin and Russia enough to stop the fighting before the war spreads into other European nations.
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