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Stretching 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. The mighty Volga, Europe's longest river, flows from northern Russia into the Caspian Sea. Bleak, behemoth Siberia encompasses more than half the territory but is home to less than 20 percent of the population. Vastly outnumbering indigenous Siberians, Russians began arriving after Cossacks invaded the Tatar khanate of Sibir in 1581. Along with criminals-and, until recently, political dissidents in prison camps-Siberian workers toil at prying natural gas, oil, coal, gold, and diamonds from the frozen earth. Commodities such as fur and timber also earn coveted foreign currency. The Baikal-Amur Mainline Railroad, begun in the 1930s, was finished in 1989.

The history of Russia reaches back more than a thousand years. A Russian principality, ruled from Kiev, emerged in 911. In 988 Kievan Prince Vladimir adopted Byzantine Christianity 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). He and his successors unified fragmented lands and began taking the region that is today Siberia.

Russia looked westward after 1698, when Peter the Great returned from his travels in Europe. Conquering territory along the Baltic Sea, he built his landlocked realm a port capital, St. Petersburg (known from 1924 until 1991 as Leningrad), and established Russia's first navy. Peter's successors acquired new regions, such as Georgia and the Caucasus Mountains, 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 set off a power struggle won by Joseph Stalin, who ruthlessly collectivized Soviet agriculture, replacing peasant farms with large state-run enterprises. A series of five-year plans developed heavy industry. In the 1940s Stalin moved the Soviet boundary westward by annexing Moldavia and western Ukraine; he outraged the world by coercing the three Baltic states-Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania-into requesting annexation.

Stalin's labor camps and purges of perceived enemies, combined with the starvation that accompanied farm collectivization, 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.

Conservative hardliners mounted a doomed coup in August 1991. Populist leader Boris Yeltsin-now the president of the Russian Federation-rallied the people, and the power shifted away from Gorbachev. In December 1991 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 under the tsars and for 75 years under communism, 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. 

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Text source: National Geographic Atlas of the World, Seventh Edition, 1999