A geography of russia and its neighbors pdf

Russia is a federation of 86 republics, provinces, territories, and districts, all controlled by the government in Moscow. The head of state is a president elected by the people. The economy is based on a vast supply of natural resources, including oil, coal, iron ore, gold, and aluminum. The earliest human settlements in Russia arose around A.

These settlers mixed with Slavs from the west and built a fortress that would eventually become the Ukrainian city of Kiev. Kiev evolved into an empire that ruled most of European Russia for years, then broke up into Ukraine, Belarus, and Muscovy. Muscovy's capital, Moscow, remained a small trading post until the 13th century, when Mongol invasions in the south drove people to settle in Moscow. In , Peter the Great became tsar at the age of ten and for 42 years worked to make Russia more modern and more European.

In , Russians unhappy with their government overthrew the tsar and formed an elected government. Just a few months later though, a communist group called the Bolsheviks seized power. The U. These tensions led to the Cold War, which ended in when the Soviet Union broke up. All rights reserved. Personality Quizzes. Funny Fill-In. Amazing Animals. Weird But True! The Soviet and Russian environmental record has been generally dismal.

Seven decades of Soviet rule left irradiated landscapes and marine ecosystems, a desiccated inland sea, befouled rivers, and toxic urban air as reminders of the consequences of seeking industrialization at any price. Russia and the other Soviet republics responded to the pressures of the long and costly Cold War by developing a defense-oriented, production-obsessed economy amid ecological devastation.

Without a genuine environmental movement until its final years, the Soviet Union left in its wake an environmental catastrophe that will take decades and perhaps trillions of dollars to repair even partially. During the Soviet period, natural and geopolitical phenomena shaped the characteristics of Russia's population.

In that period, wars, epidemics, famines, and state-sanctioned mass killings claimed millions of victims. Before the s, each decade brought to the population of the former Russian Republic some form of cataclysmic demographic event.

Demographers have calculated that a total of Stalin in office in the s, and World War II. Although those events ended more than fifty years ago, such disasters have had significant long-term effects. In age-groups above forty-five, women greatly outnumber men.

In the s, demographers and policy makers are concerned about alarming trends such as a plummeting birthrate, increasing mortality among able-bodied males, and declining life expectancy.

Another demographic concern is the millions of Russians remaining in the other newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union, called by policy makers the "near abroad. Russian authorities fear that social and ethnic upheaval in those states could trigger the mass migration of Russians into the federation, which is ill equipped to integrate such numbers into its economy and society.

By the early s, Russia had already become the destination of greatly increased numbers of immigrants. In the population of the Russian Federation was estimated at slightly less than million. Whereas Russians had accounted for only about 50 percent of the Soviet Union's population, in Russia they are a clear majority of 82 percent of the population in what remains a distinctively multicultural, multinational state.

Russia's topography includes the world's deepest lake and Europe's highest mountain and longest river. The topography and climate, however, resemble those of the northernmost portion of the North American continent. The northern forests and the plains bordering them to the south find their closest counterparts in the Yukon Territory and in the wide swath of land extending across most of Canada.

The terrain, climate, and settlement patterns of Siberia are similar to those of Alaska and Canada. Located in the northern and middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, most of Russia is much closer to the North Pole than to the equator.

Individual country comparisons are of little value in gauging Russia's enormous size slightly less than twice that of the United States and diversity. The country's Its European portion, which occupies a substantial part of continental Europe, is home to most of Russia's industrial and agricultural activity. It was here, roughly between the Dnepr River and the Ural Mountains, that the Russian Empire took shape after the principality of Muscovy gradually expanded eastward to reach the Pacific Ocean in the seventeenth century see Expansion and Westernization, ch.

Russia extends about 9, kilometers from westernmost Kaliningrad Oblast, the now-isolated region cut off from the rest of Russia by the independence of Belarus, Latvia, and Lithuania, to Ratmanova Island Big Diomede Island in the Bering Strait. This distance is roughly equivalent to the distance from Edinburgh, Scotland, east to Nome, Alaska.

Between the northern tip of the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya to the southern tip of the Republic of Dagestan on the Caspian Sea is about 3, kilometers of extremely varied, often inhospitable terrain. Extending for 57, kilometers, the Russian border is the world's longest--and, in the post-Soviet era, a source of substantial concern for national security.

Along the 20,kilometer land frontier, Russia has boundaries with fourteen countries. And, at the far northeastern extremity, eighty-six kilometers of the Bering Strait separate Russia from a fifteenth neighbor--the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the frontier is bounded by water. Virtually all of the lengthy northern coast is well above the Arctic Circle; except for the port of Murmansk, which receives the warm currents of the Gulf Stream, that coast is locked in ice much of the year.

Thirteen seas and parts of three oceans--the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific--wash Russian shores. With a few changes of status, most of the Soviet-era administrative and territorial divisions of the Russian Republic were retained in constituting the Russian Federation.

In there were eighty-nine administrative territorial divisions: twenty-one republics, six territories kraya ; sing. The cities of Moscow and St.

Petersburg have separate status at the oblast level. Population size and location have been the determinants for a region's designation among those categories. The smallest political division is the rayon pl. The republics include a wide variety of peoples, including northern Europeans, Tatars, Caucasus peoples, and indigenous Siberians. The largest administrative territorial divisions are in Siberia. Located in east-central Siberia, the Republic of Sakha, formerly known as Yakutia, is the largest administrative division in the federation, twice the size of Alaska.

Second in size is Krasnoyarsk Territory, which is southwest of Sakha in Siberia. Kaliningrad Oblast, which is somewhat larger than Connecticut, is the smallest oblast, and it is the only noncontiguous part of Russia. The two most populous administrative territorial divisions, Moscow Oblast and Krasnodar Territory, are in European Russia. Geographers traditionally divide the vast territory of Russia into five natural zones: the tundra zone; the taiga, or forest, zone; the steppe, or plains, zone; the arid zone; and the mountain zone.

Most of Russia consists of two plains the East European Plain and the West Siberian Plain , two lowlands the North Siberian and the Kolyma, in far northeastern Siberia , two plateaus the Central Siberian Plateau and the Lena Plateau to its east , and a series of mountainous areas mainly concentrated in the extreme northeast or extending intermittently along the southern border.

Because the terrain and vegetation are relatively uniform in each of the natural zones, Russia presents an illusion of uniformity.

Nevertheless, Russian territory contains all the major vegetation zones of the world except a tropical rain forest. About 10 percent of Russia is tundra, or treeless, marshy plain. The tundra is Russia's northernmost zone, stretching from the Finnish border in the west to the Bering Strait in the east, then running south along the Pacific coast to the northern Kamchatka Peninsula. The zone is known for its herds of wild reindeer, for so-called white nights dusk at midnight, dawn shortly thereafter in summer, and for days of total darkness in winter.

The long, harsh winters and lack of sunshine allow only mosses, lichens, and dwarf willows and shrubs to sprout low above the barren permafrost see Glossary. Although several powerful Siberian rivers traverse this zone as they flow northward to the Arctic Ocean, partial and intermittent thawing hamper drainage of the numerous lakes, ponds, and swamps of the tundra. Frost weathering is the most important physical process here, gradually shaping a landscape that was severely modified by glaciation in the last ice age.

Less than 1 percent of Russia's population lives in this zone. The fishing and port industries of the northwestern Kola Peninsula and the huge oil and gas fields of northwestern Siberia are the largest employers in the tundra. Print Create Flyer Share. View larger. Hardcover February 17, Paperback February 17, Professors: free copies available for adoption consideration Download an e-book copy now or order a print copy.

A uthoritative yet accessible, the definitive undergraduate text on Russian geography and culture has now been thoroughly revised with the latest data and hot topics, such as the political crisis in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol.

Thematic chapters provide up-to-date coverage of Russia's physical, political, cultural, and economic geography. Regional chapters focus on the country's major regions and the other 14 former Soviet republics.