Russia Listen/ˈrʌʃə/ or /ˈrʊʃə/, also officially known as the Russian Federation, is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, and the U.S.
Russia’s funding Moscow is one of the largest cities on earth; other major urban centers comprise Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod.
Extending throughout the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a broad range of environments and landforms.
The East Slavs appeared as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Launched and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, the medieval country of Rus arose in the 9th century. Rus’ ultimately disintegrated into some smaller states; many of the Rus’ lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion and became tributaries of their nomadic Golden Horde in the 13th century.The Grand Duchy of Moscow gradually reunified the surrounding Russian principalities, attained independence in the Golden Horde, also came to dominate the cultural and political legacy of Kievan Rus’. From the 18th century, the nation had expanded through conquest, annexation, and mining to become the Empire, that was the third biggest empire ever, stretching from Poland on the west to Alaska on the east.
Following the Russian Revolution, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic became the largest and leading constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s first constitutionally socialist state. The Soviet Union played an important role in the Allied victory in World War II, also emerged as a famous superpower and equal to the USA during the Cold War. The Soviet era watched a number of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the world’s first human-made satellite along with the launch of the first humans in space. From the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the world’s second-largest market, a largest standing army on the planet and the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, twelve separate republics emerged in the USSR: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and also the Baltic states regained independence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; the Russian SFSR reconstituted itself as the Russian Federation and is known as the continuing legal personality and only successor state of the Soviet Union. It is regulated as a federal semi-presidential republic.
