Facts at a Glance
Full country name: Russian Federation
Area: 17.1 million sq km
Population: 150 million (growth rate 0.2%)
Capital city: Moscow (pop 9 million)
People: 80% Russian, 4% Tatar, Finno-Ugric, and numerous ethnic minorities
Language: Russian
Religion: Russian Orthodox, Islam, Animist
Government: Federation
President: Boris Yeltsin
Despite the disintegration of its empire, Russia is still huge - stretching from the borders with Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine and Turkey in the west, passing Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, to reach the Pacific Ocean some 6000km later. The landscape is predominantly flat, punctuated only by the Urals, which rise no higher than 1900m, and the more substantial ranges of the far east. The three major rivers west of the Urals - the Dnepr, Don and Volga - all rise within 400km of Moscow and flow south into the Black and Caspian seas. Russia's Far East is Siberia, with all its connotations of tundra, steppes, ranges, exile and mindblowing nothingness.
Due to its size, the land passes through several environmental bands. The northern forests of pine and spruce hide reindeer, wolves and brown bears. The mixed deciduous and coniferous forests are home to deer, lynx and the Siberian tiger (which has been known to wander into the suburbs of Vladivostok). The black earth steppes are the grain basket of Asia. Snow leopards, cheetahs, porcupines, gazelles, wild goats and the chamois grace the deserts of Central Asia, though pollution and fur-hunters threaten the existence of many species. There are over 140 state nature reserves, several of whose breeding programs have ensured the continued livelihood of animal species, including the European bison.
Moscow and St Petersburg share similar summer temperatures, both averaging around 24 degrees Celsius. Moscow is frozen by the end of November, with snow remaining until early April, and has an average January temperature of around -12 degrees Celsius. St Petersburg swings between lacking real darkness in summer to having only about five hours of murky light a day in winter. Its average January temperature is a sweltering -8 degrees Celsius. Spring in both cities brings the great thaw, the reappearance of vehicles on the road and a general sense of mayhem. Vladivostok, on Russia's Pacific coast, experiences slightly milder weather than elewhere in the Russian Far East. Its -13 degrees Celsius winter temperatures seem positively balmy compared to Oymyakon in the north-east, which just happens to be the coldest inhabited place on earth. Its winter temperatures drop to -65 degrees Celsius.
The founding of Novgorod in 862 by the Viking Rurik of Jutland is traditionally taken as the birth of what became the Russian state. Rurik's successor, Oleg, became the ruler of Kiev two decades later and in the 10th and 11th centuries Kiev became the dominant regional power until shifting trade routes left it in a commercial backwater. The merchants of Novgorod eventually declared independence from Kiev and joined the emerging Hanseatic League; a federation of city-states that controlled the Baltic and North Sea trade.
Centuries of prosperity and growth were brought to an abrupt halt in the 13th century by the marauding Mongolian Tatars who held sway until 1480. The 16th century witnessed the expansionist but ugly reign of Ivan the Terrible, whose incursions into the Volga region antagonised the neighbouring countries of Poland and Sweden to Russia's later cost. When the 700-year Rurikid dynasty ended with the childless Fyodor, vengeful Swedish and Polish invaders each bloodily claimed the Russian throne. The issue was finally settled in 1613, with the 16-year-old Mikhail Romanov issuing in a dynasty that was to rule until 1917. The dynasty's strongest ruler was Peter the Great, who finally made Russia a major world power. He celebrated his victory over the Swedes by building a new capital city on land taken from them: St Petersburg. To pay for the creation of his beautiful new city, he introduced a worrying assortment of taxes: on coffins, beards and the souls of lower-class adult males.
Off the record
The 19th century began with a bang thanks to Napoleon, and ended with the country in ominous turmoil. The long-suffering serfs were freed in 1861 and there was growing opposition to the repressive and autocratic tsarist rule. Peasants were angry at having to pay for land they regarded as their own, liberals advocated constitutional reform along Western European lines and terrorists managed to kill Alexander II in 1881. Many radicals fled abroad including the most famous exile Vladimir Ulyanov, better known by his later nom de guerre, Lenin.
Under the young but weak Nicholas II, ignominious defeat in the Russo-Sino War of 1904-05 led to further unrest and a petition for better working conditions was met with gunfire. What became known as Bloody Sunday led to mass strikes, mutinies and the murder of landowners and industrialists. Social Democrat activists formed workers' councils, or soviets, and a general strike in October 1905 brought the country to its knees. The tsar finally buckled and permitted the formation of the country's first parliament (duma), only to disband it when he didn't like its leftist demands. Russia's disastrous performance in WW I brought further unrest, with German advances leaving two million Russians dead and huge areas of land under German control. Soldiers and police mutinied and refused to fire on the demonstrating members of food queues and a reconvened duma assumed government, manned by representatives of the educated and commercial elite. Soviets of workers and soldiers were also formed, thus creating two alternative power bases. Both were unified in their demands for the abdication of the tsar, an action Nicholas was forced to undertake on 1 March 1917.
On 25 October a splinter group of Social Democrats (known as Bolsheviks and led by the exiled Lenin) seized control and empowered the soviets as the ruling councils. Headed by Lenin and supported by Trotsky and the Georgian Stalin, the soviet government was quick to introduce change. It redistributed land to those who worked it, signed an armistice with Germany, set up a secret police force to fight any opposition (the Cheka), and created the Red Army under the control of Trotsky. In March 1918 the Bolshevik Party was renamed the Communist Party and the nation's capital was moved from Petrograd (St Petersburg's new, un-German-sounding name) to Moscow. The murder of the former tsar and his family was part of a systematic program of arrests, torture and executions. Strongholds of those hostile to the communist regime had developed in the south and east of the country, their collective name, the Whites, their only source of cohesion. Three years of civil war resulted, with approximately 1.5 million citizens fleeing to exile.
Lenin monument, Ulan Ude (10K)
The economic consequences of the civil war were disastrous, culminating in the enormous famine of 1920-21, when between four and five million people died. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established in 1922 and, following Lenin's death in January 1924, a new world record in the mistreatment of fellow humans was achieved by his successor, Stalin. He introduced farm collectivisation, destroying the peasantry both as a class and as a way of life. Most farmers resisted, and millions were executed or exiled to concentration camps in Siberia and Central Asia.
Russia's nonagression pact with Germany set the scene for World War II, with Hitler and Stalin passing states between them like so many apples. The tables were turned in 1941 when Hitler's Operation Barbarossa issued in a bloody period of warfare and suffering which would eventually kill between 26 and 28 million Russians - a sixth of the population. The battles for Leningrad (former Petrograd) and Stalingrad (today again known as Volgograd) were particularly protracted and obscene. One million Soviet troops died defending Stalingrad, the symbolically important namesake of their leader.
At the war's end, the Soviet's 'liberation' of Eastern Europe was soon recognised as a misnomer. Russia's extended control over much of Eastern Europe was the key to its postwar recovery and emergence as one of the two major world powers. Stalin re-established the old pattern of unpredictable purges and, as the Cold War developed, he made the country's new enemy the ideology and influence of the West. Following Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Krushchev emerged as leader and cautiously attempted to de-Stalinise the Party and brazenly arm Cuba. His efforts were undone by conservative Brezhnev, who put Stalin back on a pedestal, and JFK's diplomacy (read brinkmanship). Despite increased repression, dissident movements sprang up, fuelled by resentment of the lavish lifestyles of the Party elite. But change was on the way and Russian communism's poor image was soon thoroughly overhauled by that soviet iconoclast, Mikhail Gorbachov.
Gorbachov introduced political and economic reforms (perestroika) and called for greater openness (glasnost). In 1988 he shocked the world by holding elections to transfer power from the Party to a new parliament. Reduced repression led to the eventual independence of the 15 Soviet republics, with the Baltic republics leading the way. This reduced sphere of influence and increasingly severe economic crisis caused Gorbachov domestic strife. A reactionary coup in August 1991 further weakened his position and opened the way for his even more radical successor, Boris Yeltsin.
Power and property was slowly transferred from Soviet to Russian hands. A new Confederation of Independent States (CIS) emerged with Yeltsin as president of the newly independent Russia. Further conflict with the conservative old guard was resolved with some bloodshed and a new constitution was passed. A push-me-pull-me dynamic developed between status quo nationalist and communist groupings and the reformist parties.
The recent past (11K)
Today a persistent and dirty civil war drags on in Chechnya while Russia's domestic problems become more entrenched. The misdealings of corrupt officials, business people, financiers, police and out-and-out gangsters (known collectively as the mafia) have spread into every corner and level of society. With soaring drug abuse, a murder rate twice as high as the USA, and commerce held to ransom by the racketeers, things don't look terribly bright for Russia in the immediate future. But popular disaffection with the pace and consequences of change has not thrown up a variety of viable political leadership options: Russians narrowly voted back the indecisive, dictatorial (and sloshed) president Yeltsin in mid-1996 elections. By 1999 things were looking even shakier - rumours abounded that Yeltsin had died and that ersatz-Boris was actually a spooky lookalike (although his frequent sacking of governments was very Yeltsinesque), and the economy was getting steadily gloomier. In August 1998 the rouble was effectively floated and immediately went into freefall, and in May 1999 Yeltsin sacked Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and the rest of the government, as the lower house prepared to vote on Yeltsin's impeachment.
Free market reform has not been kind to Russia. Production and investment are in diabolical decline due to uncertainty induced by both the pace of change and the suspicions born of endemic and insidious corruption. Some 40 million people languish below the poverty line.
GDP: US$754 billion
GDP per head: US$5050
Annual growth: -4.0%
Inflation: 187%
Major industries: Oil, coal, iron ore, timber
Major trading partners: Germany, Eastern Europe
Russia's 19th-century cultural legacy is overwhelming, with outstanding achievements in the fields of literature, architecture, ballet, musical composition and performance. The St Petersburg Imperial Ballet school produced dancers Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky and choreographers Marius Petipa and Mikhail Fokine. The Ballets Ruse took Paris by storm in 1909, and later glories belonged to the Kirov and Moscow's Bolshoy companies, though a string of defections thinned their ranks. Concertos, symphonies and orchestral works have issued from household names such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky and Shostakovich.
Russia's most characteristic architectural feature is its onion-domed churches, which evolved when the wooden churches of the north were translated into brick and colourful tilework. In the world of art, religious icons, Futurism and revolutionary graphic art are instantly recognisable Russian forms. Cinema has always been an important art form and leisure pursuit, the revolutionary period best represented by Sergey Eisenstein's iconic Battleship Potyomkin and Ivan the Terrible; the recent past in the overtly symbolic work of Andrei Tarkovsky. Folk culture is remembered in the heroic stamping dances of the Georgian State Dance Company, regional embroidery and woodcarving, Russian dolls and the carved wooden houses of the east.
Traditional church architecture (9K)
Russian is the language of state business and the native tongue of over half the population. Central Asian populations speak Turkic and are Muslim. Although communism and religion were not the best of bedfellows, the Russian Orthodox Church survived and is a growing entity in today's Russia; unfortunately, the Jewish population has favoured emigration because of intransigent anti-Semitism.
Off the record
Long the butt of jokes about cabbage and more cabbage, Russian cuisine features a huge array of appetisers, including the famous beetroot and cabbage soups, followed by a huge slab of overcooked meat swimming in a rich sauce and draped with ruined vegetables. In the big cities, ethnic cuisine seems to be disappearing under the influx of international cuisine: everything from Sushi to hamburgers and pizza. Vegetarians will find the usual all-you-can-eat salad bars and sandwiches which is their usual culinary lot. Moscow and St Petersburg have heaps of western-style supermarkets where you can stock up on al-fresco foods. Kvas is a fermented rye-bread water which is only mildly alcoholic and refreshing in summer. The real stuff, vodka, can be served straight or flavoured with pepper, berries, bison grass, apple leaves, lemon or ginger and cloves.
Easter and Christmas are celebrated with midnight services, candlelight processions and flourishings of folk art. In April St Petersburg celebrates Music Spring, an international classical music festival, and the last 10 days of June feature the White Nights, a time for general merrymaking and staying up late. A film festival is held in Moscow in autumn in odd-numbered years. The Russian Winter Festival is celebrated in St Petersburg, Moscow and Novgorod from late December to early January, and includes folklore shows and vodka. The other main winter celebration is New Year, celebrated with presents, champagne and yet more vodka.
Visas: All visitors require a visa
Health risks: Diphtheria, encephalitis, hepatitis A and typhoid
Time: There are 11 time zones; Moscow is GMT/UTC plus three hours
Electricity: 220V, 50 Hz
Weights & measures: Metric (see the conversion table.)
Tourism: 7.2 million visitors
Money & Costs
Currency: Rouble
Relative costs:
- Budget meal: US$4
- Moderate restaurant meal: US$8
- Top-end restaurant meal: $US15
- Budget room: US$30
- Moderate hotel: US$50-75
- Top-end hotel: US$100 and up
If you're really frugal, avoiding plane trips, taxis, overseas phone calls and decent restaurants, as well as always looking for the very cheapest place to stay, you should be able to get by on $30 a day. If you always stay in comfortable hotels and eat in restaurants two or three times a day, you're looking at more like $85 a day. If you prefer to spend your day eating in Moscow's finest restaurants and sleeping between their crispest sheets, plan on around $350 a day.
It's best to take your money as many ways as you can. US dollars cash are the easiest to change; although carrying cash is dodgy in this increasingly dangerous environment, you're chances of changing travellers cheques are slim to non-existent. You should also be able to get a cash advance on your credit card in the big cities, but it will be difficult elsewhere.
Very few places in Russia expect you to tip. Top-end hotels and restaurants add 5% to 15% to your bill, while porters expect around $1 a bag. Shops have fixed prices, but in markets you'll be expected to bargain.
When to Go
July and August are the warmest months and the main holiday season. They're also the dampest - it might rain one day in three. So if you want to avoid the crowds and the rain, try May-June or September-October. In early autumn the leaves are turning and you can pick mushrooms and berries. Although winter is bitter, theatres open, the vodka comes out, buildings are warm and the snow is beautiful. Spring is slushy, muddy and generally horrible.
Warning
Street crime against foreigners is a problem in Russia's major cities. Muggers favour underground metro areas, overnight trains, stations, airports, markets and tourist attractions, and have been known to break into locked and occupied hotel rooms. As in all big cities, visitors should be neither too paranoid nor careless.
It may be the capital of the earth's biggest country, but it's not its biggest city. At times it looks like an administrative megalopolis from Alphaville, with monumental slabs of buildings and wide, grey roads. However, it's off these grey thoroughfares that the pre-Stalinised Moscow survives, with golden onion domes peeping through the narrow, winding inner-city streets and the glowing windows that hint at the secret interiors of a million apartment blocks. The most famous attractions include the Kremlin and Red Square.
St Basil's Cathedral in summertime (11K)
...and in winter (13K)
Russia's most European city has been dubbed the Venice of the North for its palace-lined waterways. Peter the Great's beautiful creation managed to escape the architectural incursions of Stalinism and its grandiose relics of tsarist days are virtually intact. Lying on the Gulf of Finland, and sculpted by islands and the sinuous Neva River, the city is a geometric vista of orderly elegance, with nary an onion dome in sight. Attractions include the State Hermitage Museum, Peter & Paul Fortress and the Nevsky Prospekt
Novgorod
Settled in the 9th century and for 600 years Russia's pioneering artistic and political centre, Novgorod lies at the heart of Russia's history. Lying just 190km south of St Petersburg, the city was annexed by Ivan III, razed by Ivan the Terrible and methodically trashed by the Nazis, but there's still a lot left to see.
Its Kremlin includes the Byzantine Cathedral of St Sophia, the Millennium of Russia Monument, the icon-filled Chamber of Facets and the research-based Museum of History & Art. Across from the Kremlin, Yaroslav's Court includes medieval markets, churches, arcades and palace remains. The Church of Our Saviour-at-Ilino is arguably one of Russia's most charming, with playful ornamentation and gables, and an interior boasting Byzantine frescoes.
A jaunt on the Trans-Siberian Railway is the way to see this massive country. The six-day, 9446km journey takes you from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, passing through endless forests of birch and pine, log-cabin settlements and vast steppes. Life on the rails can be boring or fascinating, depending on the nature of your travelling companions, your choice of paperback novels and the friendliness of your carriage attendant (a vital factor). The route takes you past Siberia's Lake Baikal, a waterway as big as Belgium and home to the world's only freshwater seal, and multicultural Irkutsk, the most appealing city you'll pass along the line. Ulan Ude is home to the country's seat of Buddhism, the Ivolginsk Datsan. Those who get into the rhythm of the stops and starts, and the passing parade of trees and far-flung towns, will find it an experience never to be forgotten.
Baikalsk, a Trans-Siberian Railway town (19K)
Buddhist temple near Ulan Ude (11K)
The main artery of the Russian heartland has always been the 3700km-long River Volga (Europe's longest), which slowly meanders from Yaroslavl, north of Moscow, all the way down to Volgograd, from where a tributary runs off to the Caspian Sea. The Volga-Don Ship Canal links it with the River Don, bound for the Azov Sea. Cruisers and steamships ply the Volga's waters, the most interesting section is between Volgograd and Rostov-on-Don. Towns en-route include Kazan, one of the oldest Tatar cities in Russia, which features a limestone kremlin and several mosques; and Lenin's birthplace, Ulyanovsk, replete with attendant memorabilia. Volgograd, previously known as Stalingrad, is best known for the decisive and protracted battle fought here during WW II. The city has since been built from scratch, and appropriately grim museums and monuments proliferate.
Mother Russia, Volgograd (9K)
With the Caucasus mountains as its backdrop, the Black Sea resort of Sochi is Russia's Odessa and Yalta. With its subtropical climate, warm seas and adjoining trendy resort complex of Dagomys, the resort has long attracted heads of state, foreign tourists and Russians alike. Gardens are a feature of the town, as are therapeutic establishments and the dachas (country houses) of the powerful and famous. Heading inland, there are waterfalls, hilltop views, spa towns and alpine vistas to enjoy.
You can't get much further from European Russia than this famous Pacific port and naval base. Before WW II the city was a thriving and multicultural commercial centre, but from 1958 to 1990 it was entirely closed to foreigners. Its site is often compared to that of San Francisco, because of its picturesque hills and heaps of sea views - though the battleships moored offshore somewhat detract from this comparison. The city is surrounded by the Far East Maritime Reserve and the Ussuri Nature Reserve, home to black and brown bears, Siberian boars, Ussuri tigers, the rare Amur leopard and hundreds of local and migratory birds.
Murmansk
Life isn't easy in Murmansk, located halfway between Moscow and the North Pole, 200km north of the Arctic Circle. It's surrounded by tundra, pitch black for all of December and most of January, home to Russia's nuclear-powered ice-breakers and surrounded by municipal housing blocks. The town comes alive when visitors from the northern islands flock in during the Festival of the North, held in the last week of March and featuring reindeer races and a ski marathon.
Vyborg
This Gulf of Finland port is the main town on the Helsinki-St Petersburg route. It's one of Europe's oldest cities and has an imposing medieval castle built on a rock in the bay. The place has changed hands many times, tossed from Sweden to Finland, added to Russia in 1710, lost to Finland a century later, retaken by Stalin in 1939, lost to the Finns and Germans during WW II and regained with a flourish by deporting all the Finns. Today, the town's Finnish imprint is noticeable, with buildings from all periods surviving - there's even some early 20th-century Art Nouveau beauties. Vyborg is populated by fishers, shipbuilders and timber-haulers.
Solovetsky Islands
The far-northern town of Kem is the departure point for the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. The islands' monasteries once housed Stalin's most infamous Gulag camps, and medieval Solovetsky Monastery has been used as place of imprisonment and exile since the Middle Ages. The sheltered islands experience a remarkably moderate climate, making boat trips an interesting and safe way to get around. The islands' lakes and interconnecting canal systems also offer good boating.
Adventure travel in Russia could be the next big thing. You can hook up with adventure travel groups which are based in many Russian cities and towns. Possibilities include trekking or mountaineering in the Caucasus or the Kola Peninsula; hiking or kayaking in the forests, rivers and lakes of Karelia; bicycling between Moscow and St Petersburg, cross-country and downhill skiing on the Europe's highest peak, Mt Elbrus, in the Caucasus; or even a leisurely expedition to the North Pole.
Glacial scene, Caucasus (17K)
There are daily flights to Moscow from all major European capitals and New York, as well as from Hong Kong and other Asian travel centres. There are also daily services to St Petersburg from many European capitals.
The main western rail gateways to European Russia are Helsinki, Warsaw, Prague and Budapest. There is a daily service from Paris and Amsterdam to Moscow via Berlin and Warsaw. There's also a service from Berlin to Omsk. The Trans-Siberian Railway runs from Moscow to Vladivostok, and you can get a train from there to Beijing. There are limited cruise and ferry services between Russia and Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Turkey and Georgia.
Dining car, Trans-Siberian Railway (11K)
Aeroflot has been broken up into many small airlines, leading to virtually unregulated skies and the worst regional safety record in the world. Flying within Russia is an unreliable, unpredictable and difficult business. Try to get a seat on a domestic flight that ultimately has an international destination, because these carriers are certified to meet higher standards than domestic-only services.
European Russia is crisscrossed by an extensive rail network that makes trains a viable means of getting to practically anywhere. They're cheap and comfortable and usually take a long, long time. The rail network runs on Moscow time; the only general exception is suburban train services, which stick to local time.
Russian buses are now completely open to foreigners and when going between small towns are a great way to travel. Driving in Russia isn't everybody's cup of tea but if you've got a sense of humour, don't mind some fairly rugged road conditions, a few hassles finding petrol, and getting lost now and then, it's a great way to see the country.
River transport remains important and in summer it's possible to travel long distances across Russia on passenger boats. The main passenger services ply between Moscow and St Petersburg, and between Moscow and various points on the Volga and Don, including Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, Volgograd, Astrakhan and Rostov-on-Don.
- A History of Russia by Nicholas Riasanovsky is one of the best single-volume histories of Russia, and goes up to 1992. A History of the Soviet Union by Geoffrey Hosking is a dense, analytical look at the Soviet era up to 1985.
- Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick, the Washington Post's Moscow correspondent from 1988 to 1992, won a Pulitzer Prize for its flowing account of the Gorbachov era and its end, combining analytic history with interviews with hundreds of people from all walks of life.
- Ten Days that Shook the World is a melodramatic, enthusiastic, contemporary account of the Bolsheviks' 1917 power grab by American journalist John Reed.
- Trekking in Russia & Central Asia by Frith Maier is an unrivalled guide to getting out and about in the former Soviet Union's wild places. It's full of route descriptions, maps, and useful background and planning info, focusing mainly on Siberia, Russia's Far East and Central Asia.
- Russia is a powerhouse of literature, and reading the work of a couple of Russian authors is a great way to get an insight into the country. Beginning with the 19th century, have a look at the work of poet Alexander Pushkin (Yevgeny Onegin), poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov (A Hero of Our Time), playwright and novelist Nikolai Gogol (The Government Inspector and Dead Souls), novelists Ivan Turgenev (Fathers and Sons), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov), Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace and Anna Karenina), Maxim Gorky (My Childhood and The Lower Depths), and playwright Anton Chekhov (The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya). The persecuted voices of the revolutionary period included poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, and author Boris Pasternak. Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is a tragi-comic must-read about what happens when the Devil visits Moscow. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was enough to get its author Alexander Solzhenitsyn exiled to the USA.
- More accessible, though somewhat anachronistic, Western popular fiction centred on Russia includes Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, John Le Carré's Russia House, and every other spy novel published between 1963 and 1979.
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