Russia Geography Profile 2012

The Russian Federation stretches across much of the north of the super-continent of Eurasia. Because of its size, Russia displays both monotony and diversity. As with its topography, its climates, vegetation, and soils span vast distances. From north to south the East European Plain is clad sequentially in tundra, coniferous forest (taiga), mixed and broad-leaf forests, grassland (steppe), and semi-desert (fringing the Caspian Sea) as the changes in vegetation reflect the changes in climate. Siberia supports a similar sequence but is taiga. The country contains 40 UNESCO Biosphere reserves.

Global position and boundaries

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 17.1 million square kilometers include one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area. 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 Dnieper River and the Ural Mountains, that the Russian Empire took shape.

Russia's girth is impressive by any measure. From west to east, the country stretches from Kaliningrad (the exclave separated by the 1991 secession of Lithuania from the then-Soviet Union) to Ratmanov Island (one of the Diomede Islands) in the Bering Strait. This distance is roughly equivalent to the distance from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Nome, Alaska. From north to south, the country ranges from the northern tip of the Arctic islands of Franz Josef Land to the southern tip of the Republic of Dagestan on the Caspian Sea, spanning about 4,500 kilometers of extremely varied, often inhospitable terrain.

Extending for 57,792 kilometers, the Russian border is the world's longest, a source of substantial concern for national security in the post-Soviet era. Along the 20,139-kilometer land frontier, Russia has boundaries with fourteen countries—eight of which did not exist as countries until the early 1990s. These "new neighbors" are Kazakhstan in Asia, and, in Europe, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. The remaining bordering countries are North Korea, China, Mongolia, Poland, Norway, and Finland. And, at the far northeastern extremity, only eighty-six kilometers of the Bering Strait separate Russia from a fifteenth neighbor—the United States.

Approximately 2/3 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 currents that are somewhat warmer than would be expected at that latitude, due to the effects 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.

Administrative and territorial divisions

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 2006, there were eighty-eight administrative territorial divisions (called federal subjects): twenty-one republics, seven krais (territories), forty-eight oblasts (provinces), one autonomous oblast, and nine autonomous okrugs. The cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg also have federal status.

The republics include a wide variety of peoples, including northern Europeans, Tatars, Caucasus peoples, and indigenous Siberians. The largest federal subjects are in Siberia. Located in east-central Siberia, the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) is the largest federal subject in the country (and the largest country subdivision in the world), twice the size of Alaska. Second in size is Krasnoyarsk Krai, located southwest of Sakha in Siberia. Kaliningrad Oblast is the smallest oblast, and it is the only noncontiguous part of Russia. The two most populous federal subjects, Moscow Oblast (with Moscow) and Krasnodar Krai, are in European Russia.

Topography and drainage

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.