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Russia (Russian: Росси́я, Rossiya; pronounced [rʌ'sʲi.jə]), also[1] the Russian Federation (Росси́йская Федера́ция, Rossiyskaya Federatsiya; [rʌ'sʲi.skə.jə fʲɪ.dʲɪ'ra.ʦɪ.jə],(Russian language) listen ), is a country that stretches over a vast expanse of Asia and Europe. With an area of 17,075,400 km², Russia is the largest country in the world [2], covering almost twice the territory of the next-largest country, Canada, and has significant mineral and energy resources. Russia has the world's eighth-largest population. Russia shares land borders with the following countries (counter-clockwise from northwest to southeast): Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It is also close to the United States, Sweden, and Japan across relatively small stretches of water (the Bering Strait, the Baltic Sea, and La Pérouse Strait, respectively). Formerly the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), a republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russia is now the Federation of Russia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. After the Soviet era, the area, population, and industrial production of the Soviet Union (then one of the world's two Cold War superpowers) that were located in Russia passed on to the Russian Federation.
HistoryAncient RussiaImage:Muromian-map.png An approximative map of the cultures in European Russia at the arrival of the Varangians. Prior to the 1st century, the vast lands of southern Russia were home to scattered tribes, such as Proto-Indo-Europeans and Scythians [4]. Between the 3rd and 6th centuries, the steppes were overwhelmed by successive waves of nomadic invasions, led by warlike tribes which would often move on to Europe, as was the case with Huns and Turkish Avars. A Turkic people, the Khazars, ruled southern Russia through the 8th century. They were important allies of the Byzantine Empire and waged a series of successful wars against the Arab caliphates. A statue of a Vedic god recently excavated in the Volga region points to a link to India around the 9th century[5] In this era, the term "Rhos" or "Rus" first came to be applied to the Varangians and later also to the Slavs who peopled the region [6]. As well as one of the rulers who contributed to the name "rus" [...] In the tenth to eleventh centuries this state of Kievan Rus became the largest in Europe and one of the most prosperous, due to diversified trade with both Europe and Asia. The opening of new trade routes with the Orient at the time of the Crusades contributed to the decline and fragmentation of Kievan Rus by the end of the twelfth century. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the constant incursions of nomadic Turkish tribes, such as the Kipchaks and the Pechenegs, led to the massive migration of Slavic populations from the fertile south to the heavily forested regions of the north, known as Zalesye. The medieval states of Novgorod Republic and Vladimir-Suzdal emerged as successors to Kievan Rus on those territories, while the middle course of the Volga River came to be dominated by the Muslim state of Volga Bulgaria. Like many other parts of Eurasia, these territories were overrun by the Mongol invaders, who formed the state of Golden Horde which would pillage the Russian principalities for over three centuries. Later known as the Tatars, they ruled the southern and central expanses of present-day Russia, while the territories of present-day Ukraine and Belarus were incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland, thus dividing the Russian people in the north from the Belarusians and Ukrainians in the west.
MuscovyUnlike its spiritual leader, the Byzantine Empire, Russia under the leadership of Moscow was able to revive and organize its own war of reconquest, finally subjugating its enemies and annexing their territories. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Muscovite Russia remained the only more or less functional Christian state on the Eastern European frontier, allowing it to claim succession to the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire. While still under the domain of the Mongol-Tatars and with their connivance, the duchy of Moscow began to assert its influence in Western Russia in the early fourteenth century. Assisted by the Russian Orthodox Church and Saint Sergius of Radonezh's spiritual revival, Muscovy inflicted a defeat on the Mongol-Tatars in the Battle of Kulikovo (1380). Ivan the Great eventually tossed off the control of the invaders, consolidated surrounding areas under Moscow's dominion and first took the title "grand duke of all the Russias". In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Russian state set the national goal to return all Russian territories lost as a result of the Tatar invasion and to protect the southern borderland against attacks of Crimean Tatars and other Turkic peoples. The noblemen, receiving a manor from the sovereign, were obliged to serve in the military. The manor system became a basis for the nobiliary horse army. In 1547, Ivan the Terrible was officially crowned the first Tsar of Russia. During his long reign, Ivan annexed the Tatar khanates (Kazan, Astarkhan) along the Volga River and transformed Russia into a multiethnic and multiconfessional state. By the end of the century, Russian Cossacks established the first Russian settlements in Western Siberia. But his rule was also marked by the atrocities against both the nobility and the common people on vast scale which eventually, after his death, lead to the civil war of the Time of Troubles in early 1600s. In the middle of the seventeenth century there were Russian settlements in Eastern Siberia, on Chukchi Peninsula, along the Amur River, on the Pacific coast, and the strait between North America and Asia was first sighted by a Russian explorer in 1648. The colonization of the Asian territories was largely peaceful, in sharp contrast to the build-up of other colonial empires of the time. Imperial RussiaImage:Image-Neva55.jpg View of Neva River in Saint Petersburg. Image:Prokudin-Gorskii-05.jpg Three generations of a Russian family, c.1910. Muscovite control of the nascent nation continued after the Polish intervention under the subsequent Romanov dynasty, beginning with Tsar Michael Romanov in 1613. Peter the Great (ruled in) defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War, forcing it to cede Ingria, Estland, and Livland. It was in Ingria that he founded a new capital, Saint Petersburg. Peter succeeded in bringing ideas and culture from Western Europe to a severely underdeveloped Russia. After his reforms, Russia emerged as a major European power. Catherine the Great, ruling from 1762 to 1796, continued the Petrine efforts at establishing Russia as one of the great powers of Europe. Examples of its eighteenth-century European involvement include the War of Polish Succession and the Seven Years' War. In the wake of the Partitions of Poland, Russia had taken territories with the ethnic Belarusian and Ukrainian population, earlier parts of Kievan Rus'. As a result of the victorious Russian-Turkish wars, Russia's borders expanded to the Black Sea and Russia set its goal on the protection of Balkan Christians against a Turkish yoke. In 1783, Russia and the Georgian Kingdom (which was almost totally devastated by Persian and Turkish invasions) signed the treaty of Georgievsk according to which Georgia received the protection of Russia. In 1812, having gathered nearly half a million soldiers from France, as well as from all of its conquered states in Europe, Napoleon invaded Russia but, after taking Moscow, was forced to retreat back to Europe. Almost 90% of the invading forces died as a result of on-going battles with the Russian army, guerillas and winter weather. The Russian armies ended their pursuit of the enemy by taking his capital, Paris. The officers of the Napoleonic wars brought back to Russia the ideas of liberalism and even attempted to curtail the tsar's powers during the abortive Decembrist revolt (1825), which was followed by several decades of political repression. Another result of the Napoleonic wars was the incorporation of Bessarabia, Finland, and Congress Poland into the Russian Empire. The perseverance of Russian serfdom and the conservative policies of Nicholas I of Russia impeded the development of Imperial Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. As a result, the country was defeated in the Crimean War, 1853–1856, by an alliance of major European powers, including Britain, France, Ottoman Empire, and Piedmont-Sardinia. Nicholas's successor Alexander II (1855–1881) was forced to undertake a series of comprehensive reforms and issued a decree abolishing serfdom in 1861. The Great Reforms of Alexander's reign spurred increasingly rapid capitalist development and Sergei Witte's attempts at industrialization. The Slavophile mood was on the rise, spearheaded by Russia's victory in the Russo-Turkish War, which forced the Ottoman Empire to recognize the independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro and autonomy of Bulgaria. The failure of agrarian reforms and suppression of the growing liberal intelligentsia were continuing problems however, and on the eve of World War I, the position of Tsar Nicholas II and his dynasty appeared precarious. Repeated devastating defeats of the Russian army in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, and the consequent deterioration of the economy led to widespread rioting in the major cities of the Russian Empire, and ultimately to the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917. At the close of this Russian Revolution of 1917, a Marxist political faction called the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and Moscow under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. The Bolsheviks changed their name to the Communist Party. A bloody civil war ensued, pitting the Bolsheviks' Red Army against a loose confederation of anti-socialist monarchist and bourgeois forces known as the White Army. The Red Army triumphed, and the Soviet Union was formed in 1922. Russia as part of the Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union was meant to be a trans-national worker's state free from nationalism. The concept of Russia as a separate national entity was therefore not emphasized in the early Soviet Union. Although Russian institutions and cities certainly remained dominant, many non-Russians participated in the new government at all levels. StalinOne of these was a Georgian named Joseph Stalin. After Lenin's death in 1924, a brief power struggle ensued, during which Stalin gradually eroded the various checks and balances which had been designed into the Soviet political system and assumed dictatorial power by the end of the decade. Leon Trotsky and almost all other Old Bolsheviks from the time of the Revolution were killed or exiled. At the end of 1930s, Stalin launched the Great Purges, a massive series of political repressions. Millions of people whom Stalin and local authorities suspected of being a threat to their power were executed or exiled to Gulag labor camps in remote areas of Siberia or Central Asia. Stalin forced rapid industrialization of the largely rural country and collectivization of its agriculture. In 1928, Stalin introduced his "First Five-Year Plan" for modernizing the Soviet economy. Most economic output was immediately diverted to establishing heavy industry. Civilian industry was modernized and many heavy weapon factories were established. The plan worked, in some sense, as the Soviet Union successfully transformed from an agrarian economy to a major industrial powerhouse in an unbelievably short span of time, but widespread misery and famine ensued for many millions of people as a result of the severe economic upheaval. The Soviet Union's involvement in World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, started with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 22, 1941. The German army had considerable success in the early stages of the campaign, but they suffered defeat when they reached the outskirts of Moscow. The following attack on Leningrad also failed, and nazi troops decided to turn south - toward rich oil fields of Caspian Sea. The Red Army then stopped the Nazi offensive at the devastating Battle of Stalingrad in winter of 1942-43, which became the decisive turning point for Germany's fortunes in the war. The Soviets then not only cleared their own territory from nazi troops but decided to liberate european nations suffering occupation too. They then drove through Eastern Europe and in spring of 1945 captured Berlin forcing Germany to unconditionally surrender in May of 1945 (see Great Patriotic War). When russian troops entered Berlin, Hitler (hiding in bunkers from heavy bombardment) unwilling to evacuate nor to accept defeat commited suicide. During the war, the Soviet Union lost more than 27 million citizens (including eighteen million civilians). Although ravaged by the war, the Soviet Union emerged from the conflict as an acknowledged superpower. The Red Army occupied Eastern Europe after the war, including the eastern half of Germany. Stalin installed loyal communist governments in these satellite states. During the immediate postwar period, the Soviet Union first rebuilt and then expanded its economy, with control always exerted exclusively from Moscow. The Soviets extracted heavy war reparations from the areas of Germany under their control, mostly in the form of machinery and industrial equipment. The Soviet Union consolidated its hold on Eastern Europe (see Eastern bloc). The United States helped the Western European countries establish democracies, and both countries sought to achieve economic, political, and ideological dominance over the Third World. The ensuing struggle became known as the Cold War, which turned the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, into its foes. Stalin died in early 1953 presumably without leaving any instructions for the selection of a successor. His closest associates officially decided to rule the Soviet Union jointly, but the secret police chief Lavrenty Beria appeared poised to seize dictatorial control. General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and other leading politicians organized an anti-Beria alliance and staged a coup d'état. Beria was arrested in June 1953 and executed later that year; Khrushchev became the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. KhrushchevUnder Khrushchev, the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, and the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth aboard the first manned spacecraft, Vostok 1. Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive. Foreign policy toward China and the United States suffered reverses, notably the Cuban Missile Crisis provoked by US - when Khrushchev began installing nuclear missiles in Cuba in response to the United States installed Jupiter missiles next to Russian border in Turkey. This incident nearly provoked a war with the Soviet Union, and was averted by intense diplomatic negotiations between US and Soviet Union during which US promised to remove missiles. Over the course of several angry outbursts at the United Nations (like one when american U2 spy plane flew over Russia and was shot down, but US did not want to acknowledge the spying) Khrushchev was increasingly seen by his colleagues as belligerent, boorish, and dangerous. The remainder of the Soviet leadership removed him from power in 1964. BrezhnevFollowing the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of rule by collective leadership ensued until Leonid Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the pre-eminent figure in Soviet politics. Brezhnev is frequently derided by historians for stagnating the development of the Soviet Union (see "Brezhnev stagnation"). Others have acknowledged that despite its inertia and repression (though very mild relative to the Stalin years), the Brezhnev era did offer a relative prosperity to a populace and leadership battered by decades of war, famine, collectivization and crash industrialization, deadly political crises, arbitrary mass murder and arrest, and the volatility of the Khrushchev years. In contrast to the revolutionary spirit that accompanied the birth of the Soviet Union, the prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was one of aversion to change--partly because the USSR's economic woes were proving to be deeply systemic and hence immune to reform within the context of the Stalinist-Soviet system. GorbachevIn the mid 1980s, the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. He introduced the landmark policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), in an attempt to modernize Soviet communism. Glasnost meant that the harsh restrictions on free speech that had characterized most of the Soviet Union's existence were removed, and open political discourse and criticism of the government became possible again. Perestroika meant sweeping economic reforms designed to decentralize the planning of the Soviet economy. However, the Stalinist system was probably beyond repair, and the Gorbachev reforms started in motion forces of change that demonstrated that meaningful reform would eventually threaten Communist Party hegemony, i.e. the Soviet system would not survive any successful reform program intact. His initiatives also provoked strong resentment amongst conservative elements of the government, and in August of 1991 an unsuccessful military coup that attempted to remove Gorbachev from power instead led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin came to power and declared the end of exclusive Communist rule. The USSR splintered into fifteen independent republics, and was officially dissolved in December of 1991 (see History of the Soviet Union). Since then, Russia has struggled in its efforts to build a democratic political system and a market economy to replace the strict centralized social, political, and economic controls of the Soviet era. Corruption has run rampant, and the Yeltsin government conspired with insiders to loot countless billions in cash and assets from the State. Under Vladimir Putin, (who stabilized falling apart Yeltsyn regime) despite that political freedom has waned considerably, economy and defense greatly improved, and currently Russia enjoys state of rapid growth and increasing prosperity.[citation needed] Post-Soviet Russia
Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin had been elected President of Russia in June 1991 in the first direct presidential election in Russian history. In October 1991, as Russia was on the verge of independence, Yeltsin announced that Russia would proceed with radical market-oriented reform along the lines of "shock therapy". After the disintegration of the USSR, the Russian economy went through a crisis. Russia took up the responsibility for settling the USSR's external debts, even though its population made up just half of the population of the USSR at the time of its dissolution. The largest state enterprises (petroleum, metallurgy, and the like) were controversially privatized for the small sum of $US 600 million, far less than they were worth, while the majority of the population plunged into poverty. Russia's Congress of People's Deputies, in which the Communist presence was the strongest, attempted to impeach Yeltsin on March 26, 1993. Yeltsin's opponents gathered more than 600 votes for impeachment, but fell 72 votes short. On September 21, 1993, Yeltsin disbanded the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People's Deputies by decree, which was illegal under the constitution. On the same day there was a military showdown: the Russian constitutional crisis of 1993. With military help, Yeltsin held control. The conflict resulted in a number of civilian casualties, but was resolved in Yeltsin's favor. According to different sources, the total number of deceased was between 300 and 2,000 people. Elections were held and the current Constitution of the Russian Federation was adopted on December 12, 1993. Image:FED3-4.jpg Modern Moscow-City under construction. The 1990s were plagued by armed ethnic conflicts in the North Caucasus. Such conflicts took a form of separatist insurrections against federal power (most notably in Chechnya), or of ethnic/clan conflicts between local groups (e.g., in North Ossetia-Alania between Ossetians and Ingushs, or between different clans in Chechnya). Since the Chechen separatists declared independence in the early 1990s, an intermittent guerrilla war (First Chechen War, Second Chechen War) has been fought between disparate Chechen groups and the Russian military. Some of these groups have grown increasingly Islamist over the course of the struggle. The total number of refugees and internally displaced persons from these territories today is about 100,000 people. After Yeltsin's presidency in the 1990s, the recently appointed Prime Minister (who was also head of the FSB from July 1998 through August 1999) Vladimir Putin was elected in 2000. Although President Putin is still the most popular Russian politician, with a 70% approval rating, his policies raised serious concerns about civil society and human rights in Russia. The West--particularly the United States--expressed growing worries about the state control of the Russian media through Kremlin-friendly companies, government influence on elections, and law enforcement abuses.[7] At the same time, high oil prices and growing internal demand boosted Russian economic growth, stimulating significant economic expansion abroad and helping to finance increased military spending. Putin's presidency has shown improvements in the Russian standard of living, as opposed to the 1990s.[8] Even with these economic improvements, the government is criticized for lack of will to fight wide-spread crime and corruption and to renovate deteriorated urban areas. PoliticsThe politics of Russia (the Russian Federation) take place in a framework of a federal presidential republic, whereby the President of Russia is the head of state and the Prime Minister of Russia is the head of government. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the two chambers of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. Most of this happens in Moscow from within the Kremlin. Subdivisions
Image:Russia Div.png Map of the subdivisions of the Russian Federation The Russian Federation comprises 86 federal subjects, namely:
Federal subjects are grouped into federal districts, four in Europe and three in Asia. Unlike the federal subjects, the federal districts are not a subnational level of government, but are a level of administration of the federal government.
Geography and climateTopographyThe Russian Federation stretches across much of the north of the supercontinent of Eurasia. Although it contains a large share of the world's Arctic and sub-Arctic areas, and therefore has less population, economic activity, and physical variety per unit area than most countries, the great area south of these still accommodates a great variety of landscapes and climates. The mid-annual temperature is -5.5°C (22°F).[citation needed] For comparison, the mid-annual temperature in Iceland is +1.2°C (34°F) and in Sweden is +4°C (39°F), although the variety of climates within Russia makes such a comparison somewhat misleading, due to the extremely low temperatures in Siberia. Areas in the south of Russia have a subtropical climate, where year-round temperatures do not fall below +8°C. The average summer high temperature ranges between 26°C and 32°C (80 to 88°F) with occasional extreme heat in some interior locations exceeding 51°C (112°F) Most of the land consists of vast plains, both in the European part and the part of Asian territory that is largely known as Siberia. These plains are predominantly steppe to the south and heavily forested to the north, with tundra along the northern coast. The permafrost (areas of Siberia and the Far East) occupies more than half of the territory of Russia. Mountain ranges are found along the southern borders, such as the Caucasus (containing Mount Elbrus, Russia's and Europe's highest point at 5,642 m / 18,511 ft) and the Altai, and in the eastern parts, such as the Verkhoyansk Range or the volcanoes on Kamchatka. The more central Ural Mountains, a north-south range that form the primary divide between Europe and Asia, are also notable. Russia has an extensive coastline of over 37,000 kilometres (23,000 mi) along the Arctic and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Baltic, Black and Caspian seas. Some smaller bodies of water are part of the open oceans; the Barents Sea, White Sea, Kara Sea, Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea are part of the Arctic, whereas the Bering Sea, Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan belong to the Pacific Ocean. Major islands and archipelagos include Novaya Zemlya, the Franz Josef Land, the New Siberian Islands, Wrangel Island, the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin. (See List of islands of Russia). The Diomede Islands (one controlled by Russia, the other by the United States) are just three kilometers (1.9 mi) apart, and Kunashir Island (controlled by Russia but claimed by Japan) is about twenty kilometres (12 mi) from Hokkaidō. Many rivers flow across Russia; see Rivers of Russia. Major lakes include Lake Baikal, Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega; see List of lakes in Russia. BordersImage:Rs-map.png Map of the Russian Federation The most practical way to describe Russia is as a main part (a large contiguous portion with its off-shore islands) and an exclave, Kaliningrad, (at the southeast corner of the Baltic Sea). The main part's borders and coasts (starting in the far northwest and proceeding counter-clockwise) are:
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