Russia

Russia reaches across the whole north of Asia and the eastern side of Europe, so that when the sun sets over Kaliningrad on the Baltic it is already the next morning on the Pacific coast. The low Ural Mountains divide the European plain, where most Russians live, from Siberia. Across the far north runs Arctic tundra, then the taiga, an immense belt of conifer forest, and in the south a band of steppe. Siberian rivers flow north to the Arctic, while the Volga, Europe’s longest river, empties into the Caspian.

Russian statehood grew from the medieval principalities of the East Slavs. Muscovy threw off Mongol overlordship in the fifteenth century and gathered the surrounding lands, Ivan IV was crowned tsar in 1547, and Cossacks and fur traders reached the Pacific within a century. Peter the Great founded Saint Petersburg in 1703 and turned the empire towards Europe. The revolution of 1917 created the Soviet Union, which industrialised by force, lost tens of millions of people in the Second World War and broke apart in 1991.

Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, and a ballet tradition copied around the world gave Russian culture its widest reach. The Orthodox Church shapes religious life for most believers, alongside long-established Muslim communities in Tatarstan and the North Caucasus and Buddhists in Buryatia. Wealth comes from what lies underground: oil and gas from western Siberia, coal, nickel from Norilsk, diamonds from Yakutia and gold, together with wheat from the black-earth south.