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HistoryStretching from Europe to Asia, Russia spans 11 time zones. Heartland of the former Soviet Union, Russia is now officially a federation, with ethnic groups such as the Tatars and Bashkirs holding autonomous republics. The country has rich mineral and energy resources including natural gas, oil, coal, gold, and diamonds from Siberia. Commodities such as fur and timber also earn coveted foreign currency. The Baikal-Amur Mainline Railroad, begun in the 1930s, was finished in 1989. Russia's history reaches back more than a thousand years. Russia's leader adopted Byzantine Christianity in 988 and ordered his people to be baptized. Their faith evolved into Russian Orthodoxy and helped isolate Russia from Roman Catholic Europe. Invading Mongols controlled Russia from 1240 to 1380. In 1547 Ivan IV, a Muscovite prince, adopted the ancient title of caesar (tsar in Russian). Russia looked westward after 1698, conquering territory along the Baltic Sea, Peter The Great built his landlocked realm a port capital, St. Petersburg, and established Russia's first navy. Peter's successors acquired new regions and tried to Russianize their peoples. Russia entered the 20th century as enormous and imperial. The forced abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917 ended tsarist rule. In November Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a Marxist, wrested power from the provisional government. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was organized in 1922 out of four republics: Russia, Byelorussia, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia). Lenin's death in 1924 began a power struggle won by Joseph Stalin, who ruthlessly collectivized Soviet agriculture, replacing peasant farms with large state-run enterprises and developing heavy industry. In the 1940s Stalin moved the Soviet boundary westward, annexing Moldavia and western Ukraine; then coercing the three Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - into requesting annexation. Stalin's regime annihilated more than 20 million citizens. Subsequent leaders tried, with varying intensity, to curtail repression and quicken an economy moribund by the 1980s. Mikhail Gorbachev took office in 1985 and unveiled sweeping plans for economic restructuring (perestroika), soon followed by unprecedented political openness (glasnost). He also vested the Supreme Soviet, the core of the U.S.S.R.'s legislature, with power that challenged the Communist Party. Populist leader Boris Yeltsin rallied the people, following a doomed coup in 1991. In December that year, Russia and ten other republics abolished the U.S.S.R. and formed the Commonwealth of Independent States, which now includes Georgia. Russian financial markets collapsed in 1998, and the ruble plunged. Russia faces not only an economic crisis but also an identity crisis. For centuries, it was the center of an empire. Now its former dominions threaten to spin off into nationalistic orbits, as ethnic affiliations around the country reassert themselves. Ongoing Disputes: China continues to seek a mutually acceptable solution to disputed islands; various islands occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945, now administered by Russia, are claimed by Japan; boundary with Georgia has been largely delimited but not demarcated with several small, strategic segments remaining in dispute and OSCE observers monitoring volatile areas; equidistant seabed treaties have been signed with Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan in the Caspian Sea but no resolution on dividing the water column among any of the littoral states; Russia and Norway dispute their maritime limits and fishing rights; Russia continues to reject signing and ratifying the joint 1996 technical border agreement with Estonia; the Russian Parliament refuses to consider ratification of the boundary treaties with Estonia and Latvia, but has ratified a boundary treaty with Lithuania, legalizing limits of former Soviet republic borders; discussions are still ongoing among Russia, Lithuania and the EU concerning a simplified transit document for residents of the Kaliningrad coastal exclave to transit through Lithuania to Russia; land delimitation with Ukraine is ratified, but maritime regime is unresolved; delimitation with Kazakhstan was scheduled for completion in 2003; Russian Duma has not yet ratified 1990 Maritime Boundary Agreement with the US in the Bering Sea. Environment Issues: Air pollution from heavy industry, emissions of coal-fired electric plants, and transportation in major cities; industrial, municipal, and agricultural pollution of inland waterways and seacoasts; deforestation; soil erosion; soil contamination from improper application of agricultural chemicals; scattered areas of sometimes intense radioactive contamination; groundwater contamination from toxic waste; urban solid waste management; abandoned stocks of obsolete pesticides. StatisticsClimate: Ranges from steppes in the south through humid
continental in much of European Russia; subarctic in Siberia to tundra
climate in the polar north; winters vary from cool along Black Sea coast
to frigid in Siberia; summers vary from warm in the steppes to cool along
Arctic coast Map |
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