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Russia or Russian Federation (Russian Rossiyskaya Federatsiya), independent republic in eastern Europe and northern Asia, the world�s largest country by area. Russia was once the largest and the most prominent republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or Soviet Union). In 1991 the USSR broke apart and Russia became an independent country.

The USSR had a totalitarian political system in which Communist Party leaders held political and economic power. The state owned all companies and land, and the government controlled production of goods and other aspects of the economy, a system known as a command, or planned, economy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia began transforming itself into a more democratic society with an economy based on market mechanisms and principles. Russia has made many successful changes: There have been free elections at all levels of government; private ownership of property has been legalized; and large segments of the economy are now privately owned.

The transformation is far from complete, however. In the economic sphere, privatized assets have not been allocated fairly among the population and privatization of land is still in its infancy. Russia must also deal with the large-scale environmental destruction and other problems inherited from the Soviet Union. In the political arena, a stable society based on citizen involvement in local, regional, and national affairs has yet to develop.

The transformation has affected the people of Russia in a variety of ways. Under the Soviet system, Russians became accustomed to having the government define many aspects of their lives. For many, the collapse of the USSR and the Communist ideal created an ideological void, and Russians increasingly turned to traditional and nontraditional faiths to fill that void. The post-Soviet era has also seen an overall decline in Russia�s population, despite the influx of immigrants from other parts of the former Soviet Union. Russia has the lowest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality rate of the industrialized countries. In addition, the incidence of several infectious diseases increased markedly in the post-Soviet era. The social welfare system, already constrained by inadequate funding, was greatly challenged to combat these growing problems.

In general, Russia�s climate is similar to that of Canada. Much of the land lies north of the 50th parallel of latitude and far from the moderating influences of oceans. Like Canada, although colder and with greater temperature extremes in many places, most of Russia has a harsh continental climate. Although climate, and to some degree soils, limit the country�s agricultural wealth, mineral wealth is considerable: Russia�s mineral resources are unmatched by any other country.

Russia�s borders measure more than 20,100 km (12,500 mi). On the north Russia is bounded by extensions of the Arctic Ocean: the Barents, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, and Chukchi seas. On the east the country is bounded by the Pacific Ocean and several of its extensions: the Bering Strait (which separates Russia from Alaska), the Bering Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk, and the Sea of Japan (East Sea). In the extreme southeast Russia abuts the northeastern tip of North Korea. On the south it is bounded by China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the Black Sea. On the southwest it is bounded by Ukraine, and on the west by Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, the Gulf of Finland, and Finland. In the extreme northwest, Russia is bounded by Norway. Lithuania and Poland border Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea.

Administratively, Russia includes 21 republics; 6 territories known as krays; 10 national areas called okrugs; 49 regions, or oblasts; 1 autonomous oblast; and 2 cities with federal status. The capital and largest city is Moscow.

Kurt E. Engelmann contributed the introduction to this article.

In both total area and geographic extent Russia is the largest country in the world. With an area of 17,075,200 sq km (6,592,800 sq mi), Russia constitutes more than one-ninth of the world�s land area and nearly twice the area of the United States or China. From north to south Russia extends more than 4,000 km (2,400 mi) from Arctic islands in the Barents Sea to the southern border along the Caucasus Mountains. From the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea to Big Diomede Island (Ratmanov Island) in the Bering Strait, Russia�s maximum east-west extent is almost 10,000 km (6,200 mi), a distance encompassing 11 time zones and spanning nearly half the circumference of the Earth. Russia stretches across parts of two continents, Europe and Asia, with the Ural Mountains and Ural River marking the boundary between them.

Russia�s principal islands lie in the Arctic and Pacific oceans and their extensions. Farthest north, in the Arctic Ocean, is Franz Josef Land, an archipelago consisting of about 100 small islands. The other main Arctic islands, from west to east, include the two islands of Novaya Zemlya, Vaygach Island, the group of islands called Severnaya Zemlya, the New Siberian Islands, and Wrangel Island. Between these major islands lie numerous small islands and island chains. In the Pacific Ocean are the Kuril Islands, which extend southwest in an arc from the Kamchatka Peninsula to the main islands of Japan. Russia occupies and administers all the Kuril Islands, although ownership of the southernmost islands is disputed with Japan. The Pacific also includes the large island of Sakhalin, which separates the Seas of Okhotsk and Japan.

Russia contains complex geologic structures and surface formations. Very simply, however, the landmass consists of vast plains in the west and north, and a discontinuous belt of mountains and plateaus in the south and east. The upland and mountainous regions include most of Siberia and extend to the Pacific.

Russia can be divided into several broad geographic regions. From east to west they are the Great European Plain; the Ural Mountains; the mountain systems and ranges along much of Russia�s southern border; and the lowlands and uplands of Siberia, including the West Siberian Plain, the Central Siberian Plateau, and the mountain ranges of northeastern Siberia.

Most of European Russia is part of a rolling plain that arcs across the continent into Russia, where it widens and has an average elevation of about 200 m (about 600 ft). Over millions of years the actions of streams, winds, and glaciers have deposited nearly horizontal layers of sedimentary rocks onto the plain. In some places, these same actions have eroded the softer sedimentary rocks, leaving the hard igneous and metamorphic layers exposed at the surface. The topography is generally rough in these areas of outcropping.

Some surface features owe their origins to glaciation. Among these features are several areas of glacial deposits, such as the Valday Hills, which lie between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. As the glaciers retreated during the last glacial age, which ended about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, a series of semicircular hills formed at the terminus, or edge, of the glacier. This area, known as a terminal moraine, runs east from the border with Belarus, then north of Moscow to the Arctic coast. For the most part, however, the relief of the Great European Plain is only modest. Much of the northern part of European Russia is very flat and poorly drained, with many swamps and lakes. By contrast, the southern part of European Russia contains rich soils that support most of the region�s agriculture.

The Great European Plain terminates in the east at the Ural Mountains, an old, worn-down series of mountain ranges with an average elevation of about 600 m (about 2,000 ft). The highest elevation (1,894 m/6,214 ft) is Gora Narodnaya. Despite their modest heights, the Urals are important for a wide variety of mineral deposits, including mineral fuels, iron ore, nonferrous metals, and nonmetallic minerals.

The Caucasus Mountains, located between the Black and Caspian seas, comprise two major folded mountain chains divided along their entire extent by lowlands. The northern Greater Caucasus (Bol�shoy Kavkaz) form part of Russia�s southwestern border with Georgia and Azerbaijan. Geologically complex, the mountain system is composed of granite and other crystalline rocks, with some volcanic formations. The Greater Caucasus reach a maximum elevation of 5,642 m (18,510 ft) at El�brus, an extinct volcano that is the highest peak in Europe, as well as Russia�s highest point. Other mountain ranges extend along much of the southern border of central and eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. Among them are the Altay, Sayan, Yablonovyy, and Stanovoy ranges, which merge with the far eastern mountain ranges. All the southern mountain ranges contain valuable mineral resources.

Between the Urals and the Yenisey River lies the West Siberian Plain, vast lowlands that make up perhaps the largest area of level land in the world. At its widest, the region spans about 1,800 km (about 1,100 mi), and it stretches from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the steppes of Central Asia in the south. The lowlands are extremely flat and poorly drained, with many marshes, swamps, and peat bogs. The northern and central parts contain important oil and natural gas deposits.

East of the Yenisey the land rises to form a rolling plateau that stretches to the Lena River. Elevations here average 500 to 700 m (1,600 to 2,300 ft). Throughout the region rivers have eroded the surface and in some places have formed deep canyons. The geologic structure of the plateau is complex; a basement of igneous and metamorphic rocks is topped in many places by thick sedimentary rocks and volcanic lava. The plateau is thought to contain significant deposits of black coal.

East of the Lena River the topography consists of a series of mountains and basins. Peaks in the higher ranges, such as the Verkhoyansk, Cherskiy, and Kolyma, reach maximum elevations of about 2,300 to 3,200 m (about 7,500 to 10,500 ft). Farther east the mountains are even higher and steeper, and volcanic activity is prevalent. On the Kamchatka Peninsula there are 120 volcanoes, including 23 that are active. The highest cone, Klyuchevskaya Sopka, reaches an elevation of 4,750 m (15,584 ft). The mountains continue offshore to form the Kuril Islands, which contain about 100 volcanoes, including 30 that are active.

Russia�s longest rivers are all located in Siberia. The Ob� and Irtysh rivers form Russia�s largest river system, which is also the largest in Asia and the fourth largest in the world. Together, these rivers flow 5,410 km (3,362 mi) north from western China through western Siberia to the Arctic Ocean. Several tributaries of the Ob�, including the Irtysh, flow through neighboring Kazakhstan. The Amur and its headwaters, the Onon and the Shilka, form Russia�s second longest system, with a total length of 4,416 km (2,744 mi). The Onon flows northeast from Mongolia into southern Siberia, where it joins the Ingoda to form the Shilka, which continues in a northeasterly direction. At the border with China the Shilka joins the Argun to form the Amur, which continues along the border for about 1,600 km (about 1,000 mi) before heading north to the Pacific Ocean. Among individual rivers, the Lena River is longest; it flows 4,400 km (2,700 mi) north through Siberia to the Arctic Ocean from its source near Lake Baikal. The next longest individual rivers are the Irtysh and the Ob�. The Volga, located in European Russia, is the country�s fourth longest river and the longest river in Europe. Together with its two main tributaries, the Kama and Oka rivers, it drains a large eastern portion of the Great European Plain southeast to the Caspian Sea. The fifth longest river, the Yenisey, flows north from Mongolia through central Siberia to the Arctic Ocean. Its main tributary is the Angara River, which flows from Lake Baikal, Russia�s largest freshwater lake. The Yenisey River carries more water than any other stream system in the country. In size of flow, it is followed by the Lena, Ob� Amur, and Volga rivers. All the other rivers have much smaller flows.

Many other streams and rivers are significant because they serve as transportation routes or power sources in densely populated areas, or because their waters are used for irrigation. Notable among these is the Don River, which lies in the southern portion of European Russia and drains south to the Sea of Azov. On the northern portion of the Great European Plain, the Daugava (Western Dvina) and Narva rivers flow north and west to the Baltic Sea; the Pechora, Northern Dvina, Mezen� and Onega rivers flow to the Barents Sea and the White Sea. The Terek and Kuban� rivers originate in the Greater Caucasus and are important for irrigation purposes. The Terek descends steeply from the mountains before flowing east to the Caspian Sea, while the Kuban� flows west to the Sea of Azov.

During the Soviet period the government was active in building large dams for electric power, irrigation, flood control, and navigational purposes. On some rivers a series of huge reservoirs have transformed the drainage basins. The most extensive construction has taken place on the Volga-Kama system and the Don River on the Great European Plain, and on the upper portions of the Yenisey-Angara system and Ob�-Irtysh system in Siberia. A series of dams on the Volga has significantly slowed the river and decreased the volume of water it can carry. The decline in the flow of the Kuban� and Don rivers has been even greater. As a result, the rivers retain even more of the pollutants that are discharged into their waters, and the spawning grounds of sturgeon and other fish have been greatly reduced. Many of the dams do not have properly functioning fish ladders, and as a result many fish do not make it past the dams to their spawning grounds. Inadequate or nonexistent wastewater treatment also contributes to the degradation of rivers and lakes.

Many natural lakes occur in Russia, particularly in the glaciated northwestern portion of the country. The Caspian Sea, on Russia�s southern border, is the world�s largest lake in terms of surface area. Although called a sea, it is actually a salt lake that occupies a land depression. Rivers drain into the Caspian, but the deep basin does not fill with water and overflow to the sea. Water escapes only through evaporation; over a period of time the salts that are left behind accumulate in the water, making it salty. Lake Baikal, in southern Siberia, has the largest surface area of any lake entirely within Russia, and it is the largest in the world in terms of volume; it is estimated to contain one-fifth of Earth�s fresh surface water. With a maximum depth of 1,637 m (5,371 ft), Lake Baikal is also the world�s deepest freshwater lake. Russia�s next two largest lakes in terms of surface area are Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega. Located in northwestern Russia, these freshwater lakes are the two largest lakes in Europe.

Russia has the longest continuous coastline of any country in the world. Its coastline stretches 37,650 km (23,400 mi), mostly along the Arctic and Pacific oceans; other coasts lie along the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea in the south. Because the majority of its coast lies in waters that are frozen for many months of the year, Russia has few year-round oceanic outlets. Despite these limitations, Russian shipping and fishing takes place on all the seas.

The broad zones of natural vegetation and soils correspond closely to the country�s climate zones. Summers are too cool for trees in the far north, where tundra vegetation of mosses, lichens, and low shrubs grows instead. Permafrost, or permanently frozen subsoil, is found throughout this region. The ground is frozen to great depths, and even in summer only a shallow surface layer thaws. There is a polar desert zone on several Arctic islands to the north of the tundra zone; the vegetation in this zone consists of a limited number of moss and lichen groupings scattered in patches.

Russia�s forests, located mostly in Siberia, cover more than two-fifths of the country�s total territory, and account for nearly one-fourth of the world�s total forested area. The forest zone has two distinct areas: a large, mainly coniferous forest, or taiga, lies in the north, and a much smaller area of mixed forest lies in the south.

The taiga occupies two-fifths of European Russia and extends across the Urals to cover much of Siberia. Much of the taiga also has permafrost. This vast zone is made up primarily of coniferous trees, but birch, poplar, aspen, willow, and other deciduous trees add to the diversity of the forest in some places. The taiga contains the world�s largest coniferous forest, representing about one-third of the world�s softwood timber. In the extreme northwestern part of the European region, the taiga is dominated by a variety of pines, although significant numbers of fir, birch, and other trees are also present. Eastward to the western slopes of the Urals, pines are still common, but firs predominate. Some regions, however, have stands of trees that are made up almost exclusively of birch. The taiga of the West Siberian Plain consists primarily of various species of pine, but birch is dominant along the southern fringes of the forest. Larch, a deciduous conifer, becomes dominant throughout much of the Central Siberian Plateau and the mountains of eastern Siberia.

Throughout the taiga zone, trees are generally small and widely spaced. Large areas are devoid of trees, particularly where the soil is poorly drained. In these areas marsh grasses and bushes form the vegetative cover. The taiga contains infertile, acidic soils known as ultisols, or podzols.

A mixed forest, containing both coniferous and broad-leaved deciduous trees, occupies the central portion of the Great European Plain between Saint Petersburg and the Ukrainian border. The mixed forest is dominated by coniferous evergreen trees in the north and broad-leaved trees in the south. The principal broad-leaved species are oak, beech, maple, and hornbeam. A similar forest of somewhat different species prevails along the middle Amur River valley and south along the Ussuri River valley. Gray-brown soils are found in the mixed forest zone. Less infertile than the soils of the taiga, these soils can be kept quite productive with proper farming methods and heavy fertilization.

To the south, the mixed forest transitions through a narrow zone of forest-steppe and then passes into the zone of a true steppe. The natural vegetation of a forest-steppe is grassland with scattered groves of trees. However, much of Russia�s forest-steppe has been cleared of its original cover and is now under cultivation. The forest-steppe zone averages about 150 km (about 95 mi) wide and stretches east across the middle Volga Valley and southern Ural Mountains into the southern portions of the West Siberian Plain. Isolated areas of this zone can be found in the southern basins between the mountains of eastern Siberia.

The natural vegetation of a true steppe consists of a mixture of grasses with only a few stunted trees in sheltered valleys. Like the forest-steppe, Russia�s steppe is now mostly under cultivation. It includes the area northwest of the Greater Caucasus and a strip of land that extends east across the southern Volga Valley, the southern Urals, and parts of western Siberia.

Both the forest-steppe and the steppe have fertile soils and together form a region known as the chernozem, or black-earth, belt; this is the agricultural heartland of Russia. Soils in the chernozem belt are high in humus content and have a balance of minerals that is suitable for most crops. The forest-steppe has a better moisture supply than the steppe during the growing season, and consequently it is the best agricultural area of Russia. The chestnut and brown soils of the southern steppe are not as rich in humus as the chernozems to the north, but they are high in mineral content and can be productive with adequate moisture.

Animal life is abundant and varied throughout Russia. The tundra, which spans the Arctic and northern Pacific coasts and encompasses Russia�s offshore Arctic islands, is home to polar bears, seals, walruses, arctic foxes, lemmings, reindeer, and arctic hares. Birdlife includes white partridges, snowy owls, gulls, and loons. Geese, swans, and ducks migrate into the region during summer, a time when huge swarms of mosquitoes, gnats, and other insects emerge. South of the tundra, the taiga is a habitat for elks, brown bears, lynx, sables, and a variety of forest birds, including owls and nightingales. Swamps in this zone have been stocked with muskrats from Canada. Muskrats and squirrels are now the main source of pelts trapped in the wild. The broad-leaved forests of the Great European and West Siberian plains contain boars, deer, wolves, foxes, and minks. There are also a variety of birds, snakes, lizards, and tortoises. The forests in the southern part of far eastern Russia are known for the Siberian tiger�the largest cat in the world�as well as leopards, bears, and deer. The steppe primarily contains rodents such as marmots and hamsters, but there are also a few species of hoofed animals, including antelope. The main beasts of prey are steppe polecats and Tatar foxes. Bird life includes cranes and eagles. The Caucasus region is particularly abundant in wildlife, including mountain goats, chamois, Caucasian deer, wild boars, porcupines, leopards, hyenas, jackals, squirrels, and bears. There is also a variety of game fowl, including black grouses, turkey hens, and stone partridges. Reptiles and amphibians are also numerous in the Caucasus region.

Many animal species are threatened or endangered, including the snow leopard and the Siberian tiger. A great number of threatened or endangered species are found in far eastern Russia, including Chinese egrets, red-crowned cranes, and Nordmann�s greenshanks.

Russia contains the greatest reserves of mineral resources of any country in the world. Although minerals are abundant, many are in remote areas with extreme climate conditions, which makes them expensive to extract.

Russia is especially rich in mineral fuels. The country may hold as much as one-half of the world�s potential coal reserves and may hold larger reserves of petroleum than any other nation. Coal deposits are scattered widely throughout the country; by far the largest fields lie in central and eastern Siberia, but the most developed fields are in western Siberia, the northeastern European region, the area around Moscow, and the Urals. The major petroleum deposits are in western Siberia and the Volga-Urals region. Smaller deposits are found in many other parts of the country. The principal natural gas deposits, of which Russia holds about 40 percent of the world�s reserves, are along Siberia�s Arctic coast, in the North Caucasus region, and in northwestern Russia. The primary iron-ore deposits are found south of Moscow, near the Ukrainian border in an area known as the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly; in this area, vast deposits of iron ore have caused a deviation in the Earth�s magnetic field. Smaller iron ore deposits are scattered throughout the country. The Urals contain minor deposits of manganese. Other important iron alloys�such as nickel, tungsten, cobalt, and molybdenum�occur in adequate or even abundant quantities.

Russia is also well endowed with most of the nonferrous metals. The aluminum ores Russia does have are found primarily in the Urals, northwestern European Russia, and south central Siberia. Copper, on the other hand, is abundant: Reserves are found in the Urals, the Noril�sk area near the mouth of the Yenisey River in eastern Siberia, and the Kola Peninsula. A large deposit east of Lake Baikal became commercially exploitable when the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) railroad was completed in 1989.

Lead and zinc ores are abundant in the North Caucasus, far eastern Russia, and the western edge of the Kuznetsk Basin in southern Siberia. These ores are commonly found with copper, gold, silver, and a variety of rare metals. Russia has some of the world�s largest gold reserves, primarily in Siberia and the Urals. There are mercury deposits in the far northeastern part of Russia. Large asbestos deposits exist in the central and southern Urals and in south central Siberia.

Raw materials for the manufacture of chemicals are also abundant. These include potassium and magnesium salt deposits in the Kama River district of the western Urals. Some of the world�s largest deposits of apatite (a mineral from which phosphate is derived) are in the central Kola Peninsula; other types of phosphate ores are found in other parts of the country. Common rock salt is found in the southwestern Urals and southwest of Lake Baikal. Surface deposits of salt are derived from salt lakes along the lower Volga Valley. Sulfur is found in the Urals and the middle Volga Valley. High-grade limestone, used for the production of cement, is found in many parts of the country, but particularly near Belgorod near the border with Ukraine, and in the Zhiguli Hills area of the middle Volga Valley.

Most of Russia has a harsh climate with long, cold winters and short, relatively cool summers. This is because Russia lies at high latitudes, and because high mountains along the country�s southern border block most maritime tropical air masses from penetrating Russia. During winter the moderating influence of the frozen Arctic Ocean is slight. Because most of the territory lies in a zone of westerly weather patterns, warm influences from the Pacific Ocean in the east do not reach far inland. This is particularly true in winter, when a large, cold high-pressure cell, which is centered in Mongolia, spreads over much of Siberia.

The primary marine influence comes from the Atlantic Ocean in the west, but by the time Atlantic air reaches Russia it has crossed the entire western part of Europe and undergone considerable modification. It penetrates the landmass most easily during summer, when a low-pressure system generally exists over the land. At that time warm, moist Atlantic air may push east well into central Siberia. This is the principal moisture-bearing air mass to reach Russia, and most of the territory consequently receives fairly high levels of summer precipitation. The summer precipitation is important for croplands, which need moisture during the growing season. In many areas, however, the distribution of rainfall during the summer is not advantageous. Drought often occurs in early summer, and middle and late summer may bring considerable rain and clouds that interfere with the harvest. This is particularly true in the far eastern region, where a monsoonal inflow of Pacific air occurs during middle and late summer. In northern regions, especially from Moscow northward, featureless, overcast skies are so frequent, particularly during winter, that Russians have named the phenomenon pasmurno, meaning "dull, dreary weather." During December, for instance, Moscow averages 23 days with overcast skies.

Most of the country has only light to modest precipitation, however. Across the Great European Plain, average annual precipitation decreases from more than 800 mm (32 in) in western Russia to less than 400 mm (16 in) along the Caspian Sea coast. Throughout Siberia, annual precipitation generally ranges from 500 to 800 mm (20 to 32 in), with precipitation amounts generally less than 300 mm (12 in) in northeastern Siberia. At higher elevations annual totals may reach 1,000 mm (40 in) or more, but in interior basins precipitation may total less than 300 mm (12 in).

Russia�s climate is characterized by temperature extremes. The coldest winter temperatures occur in eastern Siberia, while air from the Atlantic Ocean tempers conditions somewhat in the west. Verkhoyansk in the northeast is often called the "cold pole of the north." During January, temperatures there average -51�C (-59�F), and they have reached a low of -68�C (-90�F) in February. The same conditions that make for cold temperatures during winter�isolation from the sea and narrow valleys between mountains�produce air stagnation in summer. Furthermore, because Verkhoyansk is so far north, it experiences nearly continuous daylight hours in summer. During July temperatures in Verkhoyansk average 13�C (56�F) and have reached as high as 37�C (98�F). The city has an absolute temperature range (the difference between the coldest and hottest recorded temperatures) of 105� Celsius degrees (188� Fahrenheit degrees), by far the greatest temperature range on Earth.

Russia encompasses a number of distinct climate zones, which generally extend across the country in east-west belts. A polar desert climate exists on several of the Arctic islands, such as the northernmost portions of Novaya Zemlya and Severnaya Zemlya. Along the Arctic coast a tundra climate prevails and extends south in the far eastern region on upper mountain slopes for 100 km (60 mi) or more. To the south of this zone is a broad belt of subarctic climate that extends south to the city of Saint Petersburg and broadens east of the Urals to envelop almost all of Siberia.

Most of European Russia has a more temperate continental climate. This belt is widest in the west. It stretches from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, then tapers eastward to include a narrow strip of the southern West Siberian Plain; it is also found in the extreme southeastern portion of Russia. Temperatures in Moscow, which lies in the continental climate zone, range from -13� to -6�C (9� to 21�F) in January and from 13� to 24�C (56� to 75�F) in July. Temperatures in Vladivostok, in the southern part of far eastern Russia, range from -17� to -9�C (1� to 16�F) in January and from 15� to 20�C (59� to 69�F) in July.

A broad belt of drier steppe climate with cold winters begins along the Black Sea coast and extends northeast across the North Caucasian Plain, the lower Volga Valley, the southern Urals, and southwestern Siberia. It continues eastward in isolated mountain basins along the extreme fringes of Siberia.

Land and water resources experienced severe degradation during the Soviet period. Some areas, such as the Kuznetsk Basin on the Tom� River in southern Siberia, the industrial belt along the southern portion of the Ural Mountains, and the lower Volga River, were degraded beyond repair.

By-products of nuclear weapons production caused permanent damage near Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk in southern Siberia, and near Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains. Fallout from the 1986 explosion at Ukraine�s Chernobyl� nuclear power plant affected Russia primarily in Bryansk Oblast (see Chernobyl� Accident). Less well-known than the Chernobyl� disaster were accidents at the Mayak nuclear weapons production plant near Chelyabinsk in 1949, 1957, and 1967, which together released significantly higher emissions than Chernobyl�. The Soviet military tested nuclear weapons on the islands of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean, which was their second testing site after Semipalatinsk (now Semey), Kazakhstan. Nuclear reactors and wastes were dumped into the Barents and Kara seas of the far north, and in far eastern Siberia. Dumping of nuclear wastes in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) continued until 1993. The disposal of nuclear submarines and nuclear waste is still a problematic issue. Although a number of nuclear submarines have been decommissioned, most are still docked at Russian ports as a result of a lack of money and facilities for storing nuclear wastes.

Airborne pollutants have caused damage to vegetation in many areas of Russia. Noril�sk, located about 300 km (about 200 mi) north of the Arctic Circle, emits more sulfur dioxide from its copper, cobalt, and nickel smelters than any other area in the world. Other sources of large-scale air pollution include the nickel, cobalt, and copper smelters on the Kola Peninsula. Winds spread these contaminants across northern Europe, where the pollutants have caused widespread destruction of Scandinavian forests. Airborne pollutants have also affected large areas of forests in the Kuznetsk Basin and the southern Urals. Forests in more accessible parts of the country suffer from deforestation caused by extensive logging. Since 1991 the rate of deforestation has increased in the Ussuri region in extreme far eastern Russia because of the activities of foreign logging operations.

Pollutants released into rivers have accumulated in lakes and seas with limited water exchange, including the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the Black Sea. A toxic layer of hydrogen sulfide covers the Black Sea, due in part to organic compounds from agricultural by-products and untreated sewage. Many Russian cities are not equipped with adequate sewage treatment plants. Pollution, damming, and overfishing caused the production of fisheries in inland bodies of water to decline by four-fifths from 1948 to 1983. In some areas the decline was much higher. The commercial fish catch in the Volga River in the 1980s was one-tenth the size of the catch in the 1930s.

Soil resources have been adversely affected by mismanagement. Broad areas of land in southern Russia suffer from erosion. Wind erosion has affected the more arid areas in the North Caucasus, lower Volga River basin, and western Siberia. Airborne pollutants and chemical fertilizers have contaminated some land areas.

There is an extensive network of national reserves and parks, which has been expanded greatly since 1991. Adequate funding for personnel is lacking, however, and poaching has increased as a result. Recycling in the country is still in its infancy.

Kurt E. Engelmann contributed the Land and Resources section of this article.

Russia�s total population in 2001 was estimated at 145,470,200, making the country the sixth most populous, after China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union the number of immigrants to Russia has exceeded the number of Russians leaving the country. However, the rate of natural increase (the number of births compared to the number of deaths) has been negative since 1992. In 2001 the birth rate was 9.3 per 1,000, while the death rate was 13.8 per 1,000.

Russia is the only major industrialized country in which demographic indices are worse than in earlier years, largely because illnesses have increased as the quality and availability of health care have declined. Although it has increased slightly since 1994, male life expectancy of 62 years in 2001 is still below the 64 years in 1990; female life expectancy during the same period dropped from 74 years to 73 years. Infant mortality rose from 17.4 deaths per 1,000 births in 1990 to 20.1 per 1,000 in 2001.

The overall population density of Russia is 9 persons per sq km (22 per sq mi), but the population is unevenly distributed across the country. The population density of a particular area generally reflects the land�s agricultural potential, with localized population centers occurring at mining and industrial centers. Most of the country�s people are concentrated in the so-called fertile triangle, which has its base along the western border between the Baltic and Black seas and tapers eastward across the southern Urals into southwestern Siberia. Although the majority of the population remains concentrated in European Russia, the country experienced substantial eastward migration before 1917 and after World War II (1939-1945), especially to southern and far eastern Siberia. Such migration was strongly encouraged by the government during the Soviet period. In recent years, this migration has been reversed, with many Russian citizens leaving northern Siberia and far eastern Russia for European Russia.

Throughout much of rural European Russia, the population density averages about 25 persons per sq km (65 per sq mi). The heaviest population densities are in sprawling urbanized areas such as Moscow Oblast. On the other hand, more than one-third of the country�s territory has a population density of fewer than 1 person per sq km (3 per sq mi). This includes part of northern European Russia and huge areas of Siberia.

From 1989 to 1996 nearly half of all urban settlements declined in population, although several towns and cities increased dramatically in size during the same period, especially those associated with oil and natural gas production in western Siberia and the Volga-Urals regions. The population in several towns in the North Caucasus area increased rapidly in the 1990s as a result of the inflow of refugees from war-torn Chechnya.

During the Soviet period thousands of ethnic Russians migrated to other Soviet republics. This trend began to reverse in the mid-1970s, and since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 ethnic Russians have returned to the Russian Federation in even larger numbers. Southwestern Russia (from the North Caucasus to southwestern Siberia), Moscow, and Saint Petersburg have been the main destinations for immigrants. Foreign nationals, such as Chinese, have immigrated to far eastern Russia and large cities in European Russia in comparatively small numbers.

Russia developed a large urban population during the Soviet period, despite government attempts to limit the populations of major urban centers. Today, 77 percent of Russia�s population lives in urban areas. More than ten cities, most in European Russia, have more than 1 million inhabitants. The largest city by far is Moscow, the capital. The next largest city is Saint Petersburg, a leading port and major industrial center situated on the Gulf of Finland; it served as the national capital from 1712 to 1918. Other major cities include Novosibirsk, the largest city in Siberia; Nizhniy Novgorod, the largest city on the Volga River and a major automotive and shipbuilding center; Yekaterinburg, the largest city in the Urals; and Samara, a commercial center of the middle Volga region and the primary refining center for the Volga-Urals oil fields.

Other large cities include Omsk, western Siberia�s chief petrochemical center; Chelyabinsk, in the foothills of the Ural Mountains; Kazan�, capital of the republic of Tatarstan, located along the middle course of the Volga River; and Perm�, a major industrial center in the Kama River region to the west of the Urals. Ufa is an important petrochemical center in the southern Urals, and Rostov-na-Donu is a commercial, industrial, and transportation center in southern European Russia on the lower stretch of the Don River. Volgograd, a center of machinery production and other industrial activity, lies on the lower course of the Volga River.

Russia has one of the widest varieties of ethnic groups in the world, but ethnic Russians form the vast majority of the population. In 1991 the non-Russian population constituted only 18 percent of the total, with the largest minority, the Tatars, making up only 3.8 percent. Ukrainians (3 percent) and Chuvash (1.2 percent) are the only other minorities constituting more than 1 percent of the population. Other minorities include Belarusians, Germans, Bashkirs, and Jews (considered an ethnic group in Russia). Thirty-two ethnic groups have their own administrative territories. Thousands of people have left ethnic administrative territories in recent years. Although Birobijan (Jewish Autonomous Region) was originally created for the Jewish people of the Soviet Union, it has never been a major area of Jewish settlement; emigration in the post-Soviet area has caused its Jewish population to become even smaller.

The Russian language is the country�s official language and it is the most commonly spoken in business, government, and education. Ethnic Russians speak their native tongue almost exclusively. At the time of the 1989 census only 4.1 percent of ethnic Russians in the Soviet Union could speak one of the country�s other languages, while people belonging to most other ethnic groups were bilingual. More than 100 languages are spoken in Russia. Some of the ethnic republics have declared official regional languages, but millions of non-Russians have adopted Russian as their mother tongue. Among the most bilingual are the Ingush people, of whom 80 percent were proficient in both Ingush and Russian in 1989. The Soviet government helped many smaller ethnic groups develop their own alphabets and vocabularies. The USSR�s educational policies ensured widespread use of the Russian language, however. See also Slavic Languages; Altaic Languages; Caucasian Languages; Finno-Ugric Languages; Uralic Languages.

During most of the Soviet era religious expression was strictly discouraged and the Communist Party controlled religious institutions. In the late 1980s, however, the government began to ease its restrictions on religion, and a 1990 law granted Russians far more religious freedom. Since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, religious following has increased and there has been a resurgence of traditional religions, particularly Orthodox Christianity (see Orthodox Church).

The ancestors of today�s Russians adopted Orthodox Christianity in the 10th century. It is now the country�s primary religion. About one-fourth of the population belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church, and members are dispersed throughout the country. However, the vast majority of Orthodox believers do not attend church on a regular basis. Nonetheless, the church is widely respected by both believers and nonbelievers, who see it as a symbol of Russian heritage and culture. The state officially observes Orthodox holidays, and many politicians attend major church festivals. The church is divided, however, on its role in post-Soviet society. Conflict also exists between an anti-Semitic, highly nationalistic faction within the church and another faction that advocates a more tolerant, ecumenical approach to worldly affairs.

Muslims form the second largest religious group in Russia. They are concentrated mostly in the ethnic republics of Tartarstan and Bashkortostan in the middle Volga region, and in the republics of Chechnya, Ingushetia, Alania (North Ossetia), Kabardino-Balkaria, and Dagestan. There are also relatively small populations of Jews, Protestants, Catholics, and Buddhists. Jews and Christians are dispersed throughout the country. Buddhists live chiefly in the republics of Buryatia and Tuva on the Russian border with Mongolia and in Kalmykia on the northwest shore of the Caspian Sea.

Despite the reemergence of traditional religions, most Russians do not adhere strictly to a single belief. Instead, they combine traditional faiths with other alternative beliefs. Witchcraft and astrology are popular, especially among young people. Russians have also turned to numerous new beliefs, sects, and religious denominations. Foreign missionaries and other proselytizers have introduced a wide variety of religious beliefs and New Age philosophies (see New Age Movement).

The growing popularity of foreign religions prompted concern among Russian lawmakers. In 1997 the government revised the 1990 religious freedom law to categorize religions into those that were part of Russia's historical development and those that were not. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism were identified as Russia's only traditional religions. The law limits the activities of organizations that represent any other religious faith. These organizations must register annually with the government for a period of 15 years before they attain the higher status. During this time they cannot publish, distribute, or teach religious material, although they can engage in charitable activities.

Education in Russia advanced significantly during the Soviet period. In 1918 the Soviet government instituted free, compulsory schooling, which enabled most Russians to receive a good basic education. As a result, Russia has an extremely high literacy rate. More than 99 percent of the population over age 15 is literate.

During most of the Soviet period, the Soviet government tightly controlled the educational system. Schools emphasized skill building and indoctrination with Communist ideology, and teachers were expected not only to educate students but also to shape their personalities to the Communist ideal. Placement of teachers was controlled centrally, with new teachers assigned to teaching positions based on regional needs. All schools followed a national curriculum. Outside the schools, students were exhorted to join youth organizations sanctioned by the Communist Party. Public education was free at the elementary and secondary levels. Tuition for preschool and postsecondary institutions was nominal if it was charged at all. Private schools were prohibited. Various educational reforms were implemented during the Soviet period, most notably in the final years of the USSR. Beginning in 1985 the national curriculum was revised to allow for greater flexibility of studies under the glasnost ("openness") policies of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 1992 Russia adopted a new education law that legalized private schools and homeschooling. This law also gave educators the right to choose their own textbooks and to determine other aspects of instruction. Private publishing, which did not exist during the Soviet period, has expanded rapidly, although new textbooks are still not widely available. The responsibility to mold students to a prescribed moral and civic ideal has been largely removed from the sphere of schools.

Russia inherited a well-developed, comprehensive system of education from the Soviet period, with an extensive network of preschool, elementary, secondary, and higher educational institutions. Enrollment in preschools, which is optional, has dropped since the Soviet period, as tuition became more expensive after 1991. Free, compulsory education begins at age 6, when children enter primary school for an intensive course of study from grades one to four. Intermediate education begins with grade five and continues through grade nine. Children can then enter upper-level schools or vocational-technical programs, which include on-the-job training. The majority of students are instructed in the Russian language, and diplomas are granted only in Russian, Bashkir, and Tatar. Other non-Russian languages are taught to various degrees, usually only for the first few years of instruction.

Undergraduate training in higher educational institutions generally involves a four- or five-year course of study, after which students may enroll in a one- to three-year program of graduate training. Graduate students who successfully complete their courses of study, comprehensive examinations, and the defense of their dissertations receive candidate of science degrees, which are roughly equivalent to doctoral degrees in the United States. A higher degree, the doctor of sciences, is awarded to established scholars who have made outstanding contributions to their disciplines.

Rather than a network of many small or medium-sized schools, the Soviet government developed a smaller number of very large facilities, which are inadequate to meet Russia�s education needs. Because of a lack of space, students must attend schools in shifts in almost one-third of Russia's schools. The physical condition of the buildings, which was poor during the late Soviet period, has deteriorated further since 1991. Many schools lack heating, plumbing, and other basic necessities. Disparities in conditions have widened since 1991, as schools have become increasingly reliant on local support from public and private sponsors. Many schools have specialized, either to attract sponsors or to meet the needs of current sponsors, and reformers have sought to refocus the curriculum around the needs of students.

Since 1991 the system of higher education has undergone considerable change. Private schools, some operated by religious organizations, have opened in large numbers. Public institutions of higher education, once heavily supported by the state, have had to cover a much larger share of their operating costs. In order to attract support from potential sponsors, regional authorities upgraded more than 100 teacher-training colleges to universities or academies, which are more prestigious. As a result, new teacher-training institutes were created to ensure that Russia trains an adequate number of future educators.

The most prominent Russian universities are Moscow State University, Saint Petersburg State University, Kazan� State University, and Novosibirsk State University. Other important universities are located in Rostov-na-Donu, Nizhniy Novgorod, Tomsk, Vladivostok, and Voronezh. In addition to universities and institutes, Russia has one of the world�s foremost organizations devoted to scholarly research, the Russian Academy of Sciences. In the mid-1990s about 4.5 million students were enrolled in Russian institutions of higher education. Bribing admissions officials, which was widespread during the Soviet period, has continued since 1991.

During the Soviet period, Communist Party members were granted special privileges. A system of separate stores, cars, hotels, and resorts was reserved for the political elite. For most people, however, the difference in income and access to material goods was relatively small. Private ownership of businesses and capital (goods or monies from which future income can be derived) was illegal, so income in addition to one�s wage from the state was extremely rare and social differentiation was slight. The richest 10 percent of the population earned only four times more than the poorest 10 percent. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 the distinctions between social classes have become much more pronounced. In the mid-1990s the richest 10 percent earned approximately 15 times what the poorest 10 percent earned.

Privatization of property and businesses has been primarily in the hands of a select few. Many government and Communist Party officials have used their political power to control the privatization process and to gain shares of companies. Some people became rich through fraudulent investment opportunities. Organized crime leaders profited through extortion, drug smuggling, and other illegal activities. However, many Russians also became wealthy through innovation, invention, and other entrepreneurial activities.

The wealthy, known as the New Rich or New Russians, often live quite extravagantly. However, approximately a quarter of the population live in poverty and another 25 to 30 percent earn only slightly more than poverty wages. Many of the elderly, mostly women on fixed incomes, are poor. The remainder of Russians, about one-third of the population, have incomes that place them between these extremes and are considered middle class. Many middle-class Russians benefited in the early 1990s from the privatization of housing, which allowed them to purchase their apartments at a price far below market value. Consequently, they can spend a larger portion of their incomes on food and other goods than those who rent housing. The middle class is mostly confined to large cities, such as Moscow. In many rural areas there are few people in the middle class, and the contrasts between incomes are far greater.

The lifestyle of Russians depends to a great degree on their income levels. For Russia�s poor, life is a daily grind of survival and many people spend hours each day selling their belongings or other goods on the street. The lifestyles of wealthier people have become Westernized to a very high degree; American-style products and pastimes are popular, especially in large cities. Watching television and videotapes is a popular form of entertainment. Russian television now includes Western-style programs, such as game shows and soap operas. Reading is extremely popular, as it was during the Soviet period, but the types of literature read have changed considerably. Russian classics have lost ground to detective novels, pulp fiction, science fiction, and romance novels. Western sports that were officially discouraged during the Soviet period, such as tennis, have made noticeable inroads, especially among the upper classes. Traditional games and sports, such as chess and soccer, are also still popular. Concerts by Western music groups have become commonplace in Moscow and other large cities, and many Russian pop groups emulate Western styles, although a few groups incorporate traditional Russian musical elements.

Many urban Russians spend weekends at their dacha (summerhouse) in the countryside. The average dacha is only a simple shack and sits on a very small plot of land. Some dachas of the New Rich are multistoried dwellings with swimming pools and other expensive amenities. Most dachniki (dacha owners) have kitchen gardens on their summer plots, where they grow vegetables and fruits to supplement their diets.

Russians generally eat three meals a day. The morning meal, called zavtrak, typically includes buckwheat pancakes or kasha, porridge served with sour cream and cheese, although some Russians eat only bread and tea for breakfast. Dinner, or obed, is served in the afternoon and is the main meal of the day. It often begins with soup, such as borshch (also spelled borscht), which is made from beets and served with sour cream. It may also begin with zakuski�appetizers such as salted fish, cold meats, hard-boiled eggs, and caviar. The main course is typically made with beef, pork, or chicken. Popular dishes include pelmeni, a meat- or vegetable-filled pasta accompanied by sour cream, and bifstroganov, cubed or sliced beef in a sour cream sauce over noodles. Uzhin is the evening meal, which usually consists only of tea and zakuski, although restaurants serve larger meals. In addition to tea, coffee and seltzer are popular beverages, and vodka and beer are extremely popular alcoholic drinks.

Restaurants, which were once known for their poor service and food, have increased in number and variety. Ethnic foods from around the world are available in most large cities; Mexican and Chinese foods are especially widespread. Dining out is frequently a multicourse, full-evening affair, and many restaurants feature live music and dancing. Restaurants are generally too expensive for the average Russian to eat out more than twice a year.

Travel is very popular for those who can afford it. During the Soviet period the government strictly controlled travel, limiting destinations primarily to Eastern European states and other Communist countries. Now Turkey and Cyprus are popular destinations among the middle class, while more distant destinations have become popular among wealthy people, some of whom spend extended periods of time abroad.

The economic and social changes that have occurred since 1991 have especially impacted women and children. Marriage has declined and the divorce rate has risen, resulting in an increased number of single mothers. Women are expected to do almost all the housework, even if they also work a full-time job outside the home. Furthermore, most Russians cannot afford household appliances such as laundry machines, so everyday chores are often time consuming. Women's employment is concentrated in lower-paying jobs, and unemployment is higher among women than among men. Increasingly, employers do not support childcare; this has forced many women to remain at home and to raise their children on a reduced income.

Various social ills that did not exist or were very minor during the Soviet period are a significant problem in contemporary Russia. Illegal drug use has risen substantially in the post-Soviet period because of a lack of enforcement and increased drug availability. Drug use is increasing most rapidly among the young. Russians drink great quantities of alcohol, and the amount of alcohol consumption has increased since Soviet times. Alcohol poisoning is a leading cause of death, especially from homemade or diluted industrial sources.

Drug use is accelerating the spread of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), because the virus that causes AIDS, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is transmitted chiefly by intravenous drug users who share syringe needles. The incidence of several other infectious diseases has also increased in recent years. Tuberculosis (TB) and other treatable diseases have spread as a result of incomplete treatment of patients and a lack of recognition of the symptoms of the disease among those infected. Venereal diseases have also spread rapidly. On the positive side, the government has conducted successful campaigns against diphtheria and poliomyelitis, and these two diseases seem to be under control.

The number of homeless people has increased dramatically since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unemployment and underemployment have also reached crisis proportions. Approximately 9 percent of the workforce was unemployed in 1996, although only 3.4 percent of the workforce was officially registered with the government as being unemployed. The number of functionally unemployed persons is much greater, since employers put large numbers of employees on extended leave. Payments to workers and pensioners are frequently late, in some cases months late, which has led to numerous strikes and protests.

In 1993 the government instituted a new system of compulsory health insurance to replace the universal, state-funded health-care system inherited from the Soviet period. The program is supposed to be funded by a combination of employer and municipal support. However, budgetary difficulties, the failure of businesses to pay taxes, and corruption at all levels have caused the system to be underfunded. Nonworking citizens have suffered the most from this shortfall, since they are supported by contributions from municipalities.

Family, maternity, and unemployment benefits are available, and pensions are nominally guaranteed to women aged 55 and older and to men aged 60 and older who have worked a minimum period of time. However, payments are frequently months late, and payment amounts fail to keep pace with inflation.

Kurt E. Engelmann contributed the People and Society section to this article.

In 988  Vladimir I (see Vladimir, Saint), ruler of Rus (the ancient state that was the ancestor of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus), married a Byzantine princess and converted from paganism to the Orthodox Christianity of the Byzantine Empire. The introduction of Christianity into Rus spurred the development of the country�s fine arts. For 600 years, imported Christian forms dominated Russian painting, music, architecture, and literature. Russian artists, however, applied their unique vision and dramatically altered the imported forms. Especially in painting, the blending of foreign influences with native genius produced some of the world�s most beautiful icons. In the early 15th century Andrey Rublyov, the greatest of Moscow's artists, painted icons that surpassed those of his Byzantine collaborators in quality and brilliance.

Foreign invasions during the Time of Troubles (1598-1613) and the Westernizing policies of Peter the Great around the turn of the 18th century exposed Russia�s artists to new secular influences. As a result, the focus of the Russian artistic experience shifted to Western Europe. Art forms that had been forbidden by the medieval Russian Orthodox Church�such as portraiture, instrumental music, and dramatic productions�entered the mainstream of the nation's cultural life. By the mid-18th century Russians were producing ballets, operas, chamber music, baroque architecture, and novels.

As they had done with Byzantine influences in the Middle Ages (in Russia, 9th century to early 16th century), the Russians borrowed art forms from the West, assimilated them, and raised them to unique levels of brilliance and achievement. Saint Petersburg, the Russian capital founded by Peter the Great in the early 18th century, provided dramatic evidence of this process. The city became Russia's "window on the West." Buildings that followed the style of 18th-century Saint Petersburg architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli and his 19th-century successor Carlo Rossi spread across the Russian Empire. By 1850 the art and architecture of Saint Petersburg had become the model that all of Russia tried to follow. The new vision blended all the artistic influences of Russia's past and present with those of ancient Greece and Rome.

In the 19th century the Russian genius for blending foreign and native art forms produced the romantic poetry of Aleksandr Pushkin; the realist novels of Nikolay Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy; and the brilliant operas and ballets of Mikhail Glinka, Aleksandr Borodin, Peter Tchaikovsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and Modest Mussorgsky. Under the directorship of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, the Moscow Art Theater performed the bittersweet plays of Anton Chekhov and the realist works of Maksim Gorky, including his best-known play, The Lower Depths (1902; translated 1912).

The 20th century ushered in the beginnings of an avant-garde movement. From 1900 to 1917 Russia�s arts included the symbolist poetry of Aleksandr Blok, Andrey Bely, and Zinaida Gippius; the revolutionary musical scores of Aleksandr Scriabin and Igor Stravinsky; the neoprimitive paintings of Natalia Goncharova, Wassily Kandinsky, and Mikhail Larionov; and the stunning ballet productions of Sergey Diaghilev featuring dancers Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Ida Rubinstein.

The revolutionary creations of Russia's avant-garde, especially the constructivist designs of Vladimir Tatlin and Konstantin Melnikov (see Constructivism), continued during the first years of the Soviet era. However, these soon withered under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin�s rigid dictates. For many years the Soviet government used the stale precepts of socialist realism to censor the arts, including the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak; the novels and plays of Mikhail Bulgakov; and the musical compositions of Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergey Prokofiev.

From the 1930s to the 1970s various artists challenged the restraints of socialist realism, including such independent literary giants as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Boris Pasternak; composers Sergey Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich; poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Joseph Brodsky; theatrical director Yury Lyubimov; and filmmakers Sergey Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Andrey Tarkovsky. Others, such as novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, saw no other way but to make peace with the system that demanded conformity above all else. Some artists, including poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergey Yesenin, committed suicide.

In the 1980s émigré artists who had fled the Soviet Union and dissident artists who had remained in Russia began to influence what would become the cultural mainstream of post-Soviet Russia. The works of many artists became widely available in Russia only in the 1980s, including the émigré paintings of Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky; the novels of Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, and Mikhail Bulgakov; the nonconformist poetry of Anna Akhmatova; and the modernist sculpture of Ernst Neizvestny.

Like so many other aspects of Russian culture and society, the arts have been in a state of flux since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Russian artists have struggled to blend their artistic heritage with the modern foreign influences to which they were denied access for so long. The Soviet leadership had considered the works of Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, Brodsky, and many others so subversive that people who read them could be sent to labor camps. These and other works are now widely available in Russia. Solzhenitsyn, who was driven from the USSR in 1974, returned to live in Russia in 1994. New writers, such as Tatyana Tolstaya, are beginning to make their mark, but it is too early to tell which of their works will endure and which will fade in the decades that lie ahead.

During the Soviet period it was institutions more than individuals that shaped the arts in Russia. Consequently, museums, libraries, and theaters played a major part in the country�s artistic life. They continue to be important in post-Soviet Russia. The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow rank among the greatest museums in the world. Other institutions, such as the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, also have important collections.

Russia�s major theaters date from imperial times and continue to thrive. The most important theaters are in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Moscow is the home of the Bolshoi Theater, which is the home of the Bolshoi Ballet, and the Moscow Art Theater. The Maryinsky Theater and the Pushkin Theater are in Saint Petersburg.

Of the thousands of libraries in Russia, the largest is the Russian State Library (formerly the Lenin Library). It contains more than 30 million volumes in more than 250 languages, one of the largest collections in the world. Nearly as large is the collection of the Russian National Library (formerly the M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin Library) in Saint Petersburg.

W. Bruce Lincoln contributed the Arts in Russia section to this article.

The Soviet Union had a planned socialist economy, in which the central government controlled everything from production planning and prices to distribution. The Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe had planned economies as well. After the breakup of the USSR, Russian reformers were confronted with the daunting task of building a modern capitalist economy while simultaneously striving to create a democratic state based on effective laws and reliable administrative structures. The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 disrupted the close economic relations Russia had previously enjoyed with neighboring Communist states and other Soviet republics. Political turmoil and uncertainty inside the Russian government also contributed to the country�s economic woes. Compared with most of the former planned economies of Eastern Europe, Russia experienced an unusually severe and protracted drop in officially reported economic output.

By 1998 the traditional emphasis on heavy industry, especially military output, had shifted sharply toward consumer needs and services, and a few signs indicated that the economy had begun to grow for the first time in nearly a decade. Russia�s vast natural resources and highly educated workforce also enhanced the prospects for a successful transition to capitalism. However, certain governmental and market institutions necessary to generate long-term investment and entrepreneurship had not yet been firmly established, leading some experts to predict that steady economic growth would be impossible for Russia to sustain.

According to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), Russia�s gross domestic product (GDP) in 1999 totaled $401.4 billion. Services accounted for 56 percent of the GDP, while industry, which includes manufacturing, mining, electricity generation, and construction, accounted for 38 percent. The agricultural sector, including forestry and fishing, contributed 7 percent.

Under the Soviet system of central planning established in the late 1920s, basic decisions concerning the relative priority of various economic sectors, the location of new enterprises, and investment in capital equipment had been made for more than 60 years without regard to the true economic costs. This long-standing misallocation of resources was built into the physical structure of Russia�s post-Soviet economy. Furthermore, the long-term slowdown in Soviet economic growth had become much more pronounced in the second half of the 1980s under Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Preoccupied with introducing radical political reforms and sweeping changes in Soviet foreign policy, Gorbachev lacked a coherent plan for reforming the economy, and his economic initiatives deepened the economic crisis. At the end of 1991, when Boris Yeltsin gained undisputed control of Russia, the Russian government�s annual budget deficit equaled as much as 25 percent of the country�s GDP. Russia�s foreign currency reserves had been exhausted, and its economic relations with other former Communist countries had been severely disrupted. These were highly unfavorable conditions for the introduction of market reforms.

Confronted with this crisis, leading reformers in the Russian government championed a policy of rapid economic reform sometimes known as "shock therapy." Shock therapy was an attempt to achieve four objectives at the same time: (1) liberalization, or the abolition of government control over economic activities such as production, price setting, and distribution; (2) financial stabilization, or the imposition of deep cuts in government spending and firm limits on the growth of the national money supply; (3) privatization, or the transfer of most government-owned enterprises to the ownership of individuals and private companies; and (4) internationalization, or the opening of the economy to foreign trade and investment.

Proclaimed with great fanfare by Yeltsin near the start of 1992, shock therapy proved exceedingly difficult to implement in Russia. The new economic program quickly became the object of intense political struggles inside the executive branch, the legislature, and society at large. In January 1992 the Yeltsin government freed most prices, although it maintained controls on the prices of certain basic consumer goods and key economic inputs such as energy. Simultaneously, the government attempted to slash the budget subsidies traditionally paid to unprofitable enterprises and tried to curb the growth of the money supply. The bitter debate over the advisability of these steps soon became entangled with the broader constitutional struggle over the proper division of power between the executive and legislative branches. The deadlock over economic policy contributed to Yeltsin�s September 1993 decision to dissolve the parliament and, in the face of violent resistance, to launch a military attack on the parliament building in early October. His victory in this clash gave government reformers a new opportunity to advance their agenda. Their efforts were impeded, however, by the setbacks suffered by the reformist parties in the December 1993 parliamentary elections. In general, the pace of economic reform in post-Soviet Russia has fluctuated according to shifts in the balance of political forces.

One key object of the struggle between radical reformers and their critics has been the state budget. Political conflicts have centered on the amount of government spending on items such as defense, health and education, and especially subsidies to industry and agriculture. With backing from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), reformers forced through massive cuts in government spending at a time when the whole economy was contracting rapidly. The cuts in spending reduced the budget deficit. According to the Russian government�s accounting procedures, the combined deficit of the federal and regional governments declined from 17.7 percent of the GDP in 1992 to 8.4 percent in 1994 and to 2.1 percent in 1996. Outside calculations based on international accounting procedures also indicated a decline. However, they showed the deficit declining from a higher starting point and falling to between 6.3 and 8.8 percent of the GDP in 1996.

Another object of struggle between radical reformers and their critics has been the Central Bank of Russia (CBR). At the end of the Soviet period, Russia moved to establish a two-tiered banking system of the type common in developed capitalist countries. Under a typical two-tiered system, the government�s central bank regulates the national money supply and the lending policies of commercial banks in order to protect the value of the currency and the soundness of the financial system; the commercial banks in turn lend to business enterprises and other borrowers. At first, however, the CBR did not behave as most central banks do in the West. Hampered by a lack of modern banking expertise and led by a chairperson who opposed shock therapy, the CBR extended vast credits to inefficient enterprises, as well as to other former Soviet republics, and presided over a rapid expansion of the money supply. This fueled runaway inflation, which reached an annual rate of more than 1,500 percent for 1992 and 875 percent for 1993. By 1995, however, Yeltsin�s strengthened political position, a frightening plunge of the Russian currency�s value in foreign-exchange markets, and the installation of a new CBR chairman led to more restrictive budgetary and monetary policies that produced substantial progress toward financial stabilization. Official figures indicate that the annual average inflation rate fell to 197 percent in 1995, 48 percent in 1996, and 11 percent in 1997. The foreign exchange rate for the Russian currency, the ruble, also began to stabilize.

Although these trends are encouraging, other serious problems remain. Particularly serious are the steady decline in government revenues and the negative effects of the tax system, which includes more than 200 known taxes and which government officials often apply in a predatory fashion without regard to enterprises' actual income. In the 1990s the government budget was plagued by a rapid increase in unpaid taxes, which quadrupled in real terms (adjusting for the effects of inflation) between 1993 and 1997, and by an increase in outright tax evasion. As a result, the federal government�s revenues declined from 16.6 percent of the GDP in 1992 to 9.5 percent in 1996. In response, the Yeltsin government made further cuts in the annual budget, temporarily sequestered budget expenditures already approved by the parliament, and sold short-term bonds to raise additional money. Selling bonds is not a lasting solution, however, because the government must pay very high interest on the bonds and must soon repay or refinance the principal (the amount still owed on the original loan). In 1996 this interest accounted for about 30 percent of federal expenditures, or nearly 6 percent of the GDP. The following year government reformers mounted an aggressive campaign to pass a new tax code intended to streamline the tax system, elicit greater compliance from taxpayers, and increase federal revenues. The effort failed.

The fall in Russian national output since 1990 has been dramatic but difficult to measure. The statistical system inherited from the Soviet era was geared to monitoring output in the state sector and is poorly suited to tracking the economic activities of private enterprises. Moreover, in contrast to the socialist system, which rewarded enterprise directors for meeting high production targets, the burdensome post-Soviet tax system gives managers a strong motive to understate their production or to conceal it entirely in the "shadow" economy that is not reported in official accounting ledgers. Initial government reports indicated that by 1994 Russia�s GDP had fallen to slightly more than half the level of output in 1989, a steeper drop than the capitalist nations experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, other data, such as figures on energy consumption, which did not fall as sharply as the official GDP, convinced most economists that the actual decline was less severe than the one reported�perhaps one-third, rather than one-half, of the GDP. In 1997 the Russian government estimated that output from the shadow economy was equivalent to an additional 23 to 25 percent of the official GDP, and some specialists estimated that the additional output was even larger.

In addition to encouraging the start-up of new private businesses, the Yeltsin government instituted a huge privatization program designed to transfer control of state-owned enterprises and other facilities into the hands of private individuals and groups. Russian officials consider an enterprise privatized when 65 percent of its shares are no longer government-owned. This still leaves a large economic role for the state, but the organizational change has been enormous nevertheless. In the first wave of privatization, controlling packets of shares in large and medium-size enterprises were typically sold to the employees and managers of these enterprises at low prices. On average, an additional 20 percent of the enterprise shares were allocated through auctions based on privatization vouchers. The government provided these vouchers at a negligible charge to all Russian citizens, who then used them to bid in voucher-only auctions for enterprise shares or sold them to other people. The first wave of privatization proceeded rapidly; by mid-1994, enterprises employing more than 80 percent of the industrial workforce had been privatized. A second privatization wave, designed to bolster government revenues through cash sales of especially lucrative state enterprises, began slowly in 1995 and 1996, but accelerated in 1997. Privatization of small-scale enterprises has gone farthest; about 90 percent of retail trade, public catering, and consumer services are now privately owned. In contrast, the effective privatization of agricultural land has been stymied by Communist and nationalist parties in the parliament and by managers of the former state and collective farms.

The economic significance of privatization generated considerable disagreement among outside observers. Mass privatization gave enterprise directors and many workers a stake in the dismantling of the Communist system, and effective private ownership is essential for the revitalization of the national economy. However, many analysts believe that by itself this massive transfer of ownership will not significantly improve the way that enterprises are managed. The privatization program put effective control of a large proportion of the enterprises in the hands of insiders�enterprise employees and, to a much larger extent, enterprise managers. According to a 1996 survey, about 65 percent of privatized large- and medium-sized enterprises are controlled by insiders. Only 20 percent are controlled by private outside owners, and only three-tenths of the enterprises in this group are controlled by a single outside owner with the power to force a fundamental restructuring of the enterprise in the interest of heightened efficiency.

As a rule, inside owners have been reluctant to restructure their enterprises. Slashing employment poses the risk of provoking the workers, who commonly own more shares of the enterprise than the managers, although they have not actively exercised their ownership rights. For similar reasons, managers have hesitated to involve outside investors, fearing that the investors' strategy for increasing the efficiency of an enterprise might include firing its current management. Enterprise restructuring has also been hampered by a shortage of investment capital, the reliance of many enterprises on supply relationships and informal government ties that persist from the Soviet era, and the absence of a serious threat of bankruptcy. Although one government estimate indicated that 35 percent of all Russian enterprises were insolvent in 1996, by mid-1997 fewer than 0.2 percent of these enterprises had been declared legally bankrupt. Thus far, most of the financial-industrial conglomerates that have become prominent economic players since the mid-1990s seem more concerned about protecting their member enterprises from market forces than about restructuring them to meet the demands of market competition.

The basic unit of currency in Russia is the ruble, consisting of 100 kopeks. The role of currency in the Russian economy has become more important since the dismantling of the planned socialist economy and the breakup of the USSR. Under the Soviet system, money lacked the significance that it has in market economies. In a free-market system, banks and investors have a profit incentive to lend or invest their money in ways that will put it to the most productive use. Likewise, firms have a profit incentive to allocate their money to produce goods and services the public wants, using the most efficient means of production. The governments of free-market countries influence their economies mainly through decisions about the amount of government spending and the size of the money supply. Money did not play this role in the USSR; it was primarily a medium of accounting rather than a measure of market value, and it had little effect on the operation of the economy. The government directed the production and distribution of goods and services through administrative plans, which set detailed targets defined largely in terms of physical units of output. The success of enterprises depended on fulfilling those administrative plans, not on earning profits in a competitive market. Similarly, the government sought to limit the impact of money and markets on the USSR�s international economic relations. It prohibited circulation of the ruble abroad, set an artificially high exchange rate relative to foreign currencies, and, whenever possible, compelled foreigners doing business in the USSR to exchange their currency for rubles at the artificial rate. When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced economic reforms as part of perestroika ("restructuring") in the late 1980s, neglect of monetary and budget issues was one of the main reasons the economic initiatives failed.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia introduced radical economic reforms that required the construction of a completely new system of money, banking, and finance. Under President Boris Yeltsin, the Russian government reduced its controls over the economy and gradually revamped the country�s financial system. In the banking sector, the government transformed the CBR into a Western-style central bank and encouraged the development of a second tier of commercial banks. During the turbulent economic conditions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, numerous commercial banks were spun off from huge, specialized state banks that were part of the old planning system. Meanwhile, hundreds of much smaller banks were established after the Soviet government legalized the creation of banking cooperatives in 1988. The small banks became vehicles through which state enterprise managers and other officials fraudulently converted the assets of state organizations into their own property. Early in the reform period the CBR fostered the growth of commercial banks by lending them money at an interest rate far below the rate of inflation. Commercial banks could then lend this money to others at exceptionally lucrative rates; consequently, the number of commercial banks soared to about 2,600 by mid-1995. Many of these banks were frail, however, and within two years the CBR introduced more rational monetary policies that forced about one-third of them to close.

In the late 1990s the banking system remained small and weak. The volume of commercial lending relative to the size of the national economy was very low compared with advanced industrial countries. The CBR estimates that only 35 percent of all commercial banks are financially sound and that 30 percent are in serious financial difficulty. Many banks are burdened with bad loans and lack the experience to assess the creditworthiness of prospective borrowers. The problem is compounded by weak legal protection of banks against delinquent borrowers. As a result, many banks have avoided making long-term private-sector loans that could boost investment and productivity. In early 1997 more than one-third of the credits granted by commercial banks were to the government, and medium- and long-term loans to business enterprises accounted for less than 10 percent of their lending to nonfinancial institutions.

Russia's emerging market in stocks and bonds, or securities, shows similar weaknesses. Relative to the national economy, the securities market is quite small, and the vast majority of the traded securities are government treasury bills and bonds rather than the bonds and shares of private companies. Securities exchanges are located in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Novosibirsk.

The Russian government introduced major changes in the Russian currency. Initially, Russia and most other former Soviet republics continued to use the old Soviet ruble as their unit of currency. In 1993 the Russian government introduced a new ruble banknote to replace the Soviet ruble inside Russia and declared that Soviet rubles would no longer be accepted as payment for Russian exports. This sudden change, which left most other former Soviet republics holding large quantities of the old rubles, separated Russia's monetary system from the monetary systems of these other countries and gave the Russian government the capacity to control the size of the national money supply.

The Yeltsin government also introduced major exchange-rate reforms. In mid-1992 it made the ruble freely convertible on transactions involving foreign trade in goods and services. From the artificial rate of 1.7 rubles per U.S.$1 maintained by the Soviet government in 1991, the value of the ruble plummeted to 415 per U.S.$1 at the end of 1992. By spring of 1995, the ruble exceeded 5,000 per U.S.$1. In mid-1996 the CBR inaugurated a policy of buying or selling currency to preserve a reasonably stable exchange rate. If the exchange rate fell too quickly, for example, the CBR would buy rubles to stop the decline. The policy was later revised to allow a gradual, predictable depreciation of the ruble that would compensate for the effects of domestic inflation. These innovations helped stabilize the ruble's purchasing power in foreign markets and made participation in foreign trade and commerce less risky for Russian and foreign organizations. To simplify financial dealings Russia redenominated the ruble in 1998 and introduced new banknotes that were worth 1,000 times as much as those of the previous banknotes. Early in 1998 the exchange rate for the newly denominated ruble was 6.40 per U.S.$1.

The economic reforms have strongly affected the labor force. According to official government reports, the number of employed people declined from 75.3 million in 1990 to 68.5 million in 1994, and the distribution of the workforce among the various economic sectors also changed markedly. Industry, for example, employed about 42 percent of the workforce in 1990, but only about 35 percent in 1994. During the same period the proportion of workers in retail trade and distribution rose from about 8 percent to about 10 percent, and the proportion in agriculture and forestry grew from about 13 percent to about 15 percent. In 1995 about 8 percent of the workforce was employed in transportation and communications, and about 20 percent in other services such as education, health care, and scientific research. The growth of business services such as advertising, accounting, and consulting has been especially rapid.

Russia�s economic decline has made unemployment a serious problem, although in some sectors skilled workers are still able to leave old jobs and find new ones. According to the International Labor Organization, the overall unemployment rate averaged 9.3 percent in 1996, and some regions had considerably higher levels of joblessness. However, accurate calculation of the real unemployment level is extremely difficult. The government�s complex and poorly funded system of unemployment insurance discourages people from registering for benefits. Moreover, employees who are counted among the full-time workers may actually work only part time or not at all. Even if they are not receiving wages, they often prefer to remain on the official rolls in order to obtain work benefits such as housing and social insurance, which are still controlled largely by enterprise managers rather than by local governments.

The changes in living standards have been dramatic, although they are hard to measure accurately. By one reckoning, average real wages have dropped to about 70 percent of the level in the mid-1980s. In 1995 the average reported income, measured in terms of comparable purchasing power in the United States, was about $5,500. Moreover, government administrators and commercial enterprise managers have frequently delayed paying wages, claiming that they lacked the necessary funds. Real incomes have not declined as much as reported wages because some workers earn unreported income in second jobs or in the shadow economy, and a considerable number of individuals who have started new businesses have benefited from the economic reforms. Nonetheless, for many people the negative effect of the reforms has been severe, and the government�s social safety net remains underdeveloped. During 1992 the proportion of the population with reported incomes below the official poverty line soared to 34 percent, although this proportion fell to 23 percent in the first half of 1996.

Despite a surge in strikes at the close of the Soviet era and the worsening of living conditions, Soviet-style labor unions remain deeply entrenched. Unlike the Soviet Communist Party, these unions survived the collapse of the USSR with their leadership, apparatus, and material resources intact. As organizational affiliates of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FITU), they have kept a preponderant position among the Russian workforce. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the FITU unions retained several important prerogatives, including control over social security funds, the authority to make automatic deductions of union dues from workers' paychecks, and the right to veto management proposals to lay off workers. In the fall of 1993 Yeltsin, angered by FITU�s support for the opposition during his violent clash with the parliament, moved to transfer control of the social insurance system from the trade unions to the executive branch of the government. However, it is unclear whether this change has been broadly implemented. Moreover, in some cases the government has preferred to work with the FITU unions rather than with new unions more determined to defend workers' interests. Although published membership figures are unreliable, FITU unions claim 50 million members, or roughly 70 percent of the total workforce. Outside sources put the number of members considerably lower, around 40 million. They also note that the powerful Metallurgical Industry Workers� Union broke away from the FITU in 1992 to pursue a more assertive policy in cooperation with the new unions that have formed since the late 1980s.

The most prominent of the new unions are those representing air-traffic controllers, airline pilots, railroad engineers, and dockworkers. Those unions joined with the influential Independent Trade Union of Miners, a breakaway union of coal workers set up in the late 1980s, to form a coordinating council to challenge the influence of the FITU. However, the entrenched position of the older unions and the inability to effect fundamental improvements in living standards through union action have impeded the ability of the new unions to gain large memberships or establish coherent national organizations. Even in the coal industry, more workers belong to the FITU affiliate than to the new miners� union. The combined membership of the new unions is an estimated 3 million and has increased only marginally since the early 1990s.

The impoverishment of workers at the bottom of the economic pyramid contrasts with the growth of a new class of people who have amassed extraordinary wealth. These people have become rich by exploiting both legitimate business opportunities and opportunities for graft and favoritism presented by the economic transition. The most notable members of this group are the heads of Russia's largest banks, who are playing an increasingly prominent role in the economy and in politics. Frightened by the possibility of a Communist victory in the presidential elections of 1996, they contributed a large amount of money, perhaps as much as $500 million, to support Yeltsin's come-from-behind win. During the mid-1990s some of these banks were deeply involved in managing auctions of extremely valuable state properties. The auctions were marred by flagrant insider dealing that shortchanged the government treasury and contributed to widespread public disillusionment with privatization.

For much of the Soviet era, central planners attempted to make the USSR economically self-sufficient. They assigned top priority to heavy industries such as machine building, metalworking, and mining because they regarded these sectors as the key to industrial growth and military power. Russia inherited about 60 percent of Soviet production facilities, and manufacturing has remained a significant sector of the Russian economy. The country�s manufacturing capacity is located principally in western Russia and the Ural Mountains region. Extractive industries, such as mining and oil and gas production, are more widely dispersed, with major facilities located in Siberia.

The goods produced by Russia�s manufacturing enterprises are highly diversified. The machine building sector makes products ranging from computers and precision tools to railroad locomotives, automobiles, agricultural machinery, space vehicles, and military weapons. Similarly, the metallurgical industry produces a wide range of specialty steels and nonferrous metals, and the chemical sector produces an array of industrial chemicals and chemical fertilizers. Some of these manufacturing branches, such as the aerospace industry and certain types of defense production, are technologically advanced, but the overall level of technology in the manufacturing sector is far below the levels of other highly industrialized countries. Soviet planners traditionally attached little importance to the production of consumer goods. Consequently the technological level of manufacturing processes and products is particularly low in the light-industrial plants that Russia inherited from the USSR.

Economic reforms have caused a drastic slowdown in industrial production. From 1990 to 1996 Russia�s overall industrial output declined by a reported 55 percent, although individual industries had mixed performances. For example, the decline in the metallurgical sector was not as severe: Nonferrous metallurgical output declined 47 percent and ferrous metallurgy fell 42 percent. This was largely because Russian metallurgical enterprises competed successfully in foreign markets. The machine-building industry, on the other hand, performed worse than average. By the mid-1990s machine-building output had fallen 63 percent from the 1990 level, partly because the domestic demand for machinery declined but also because foreign engineering firms were strong competitors in both the domestic and international markets. Output in the chemical and petrochemical industry fell nearly as fast as in machine building.

Light industry has performed particularly poorly. From 1990 to 1996 light industry�s output plunged by a reported 87 percent. The drop was due partly to weak domestic demand for consumer goods and the disruption of Russian trade with the Central Asian states and Azerbaijan, which previously supplied the raw cotton utilized by Russian textile and clothing manufacturers. It was also caused by a surge of consumer-goods imports from countries outside the former Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. In 1996 imports accounted for approximately 90 percent of the shoes, 80 percent of the color televisions, and almost all the video recorders purchased in Russia.

Mining is a major sector of the Russian economy and provides a significant share of the country�s exports. Russia leads the world in the mining of nickel and ranks second in the production of aluminum. Nickel ores are extracted primarily in eastern Siberia, although sizable deposits are also located in the Kola Peninsula near Murmansk. Aluminum bauxite deposits are located mainly in the Urals and northwest European Russia near Saint Petersburg; other deposits are found in western and far eastern Siberia.

Russia ranks among the world's top five producers of gold, silver, and diamonds. Gold is mined in the Urals, western Siberia, and the Lena River valley of eastern Siberia. Most diamonds are extracted in the republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in northeastern Siberia, and nearly all the output is exported. Silver is mined in the far eastern region of Siberia, and also as a coproduct at gold mines in the Urals and western Siberia.

Russia is also among the top five producers of lead, copper, and uranium ores. Lead is mined in European Russia and western Siberia, copper in the southern Urals, and uranium in eastern Siberia. Russia is also an important producer of iron and zinc ores. Most iron extraction takes place in the Kursk region of western Russia, while zinc is mined in Siberia. Russia also has vast reserves of petroleum, coal, and natural gas.

The level of technology in the various branches of the mining industry is uneven. Production technology and labor productivity in coal mining are extremely low by international standards. Compared with most nonmining sectors, an unusually high proportion of coal-mining enterprises are in critical financial condition. Many enterprises were built to mine low-grade ores that are not commercially profitable under market conditions.

Russia has extensive reserves of natural gas, coal, and petroleum. Coal accounted for most Soviet energy production until the late 1950s, when a gradual shift to oil and gas began. Today Russia is the world's largest producer of natural gas and ranks third in the production of oil. Steam-driven power plants fueled by coal, oil, or natural gas supplied 68 percent of Russia�s electricity in 1996. Hydroelectric power plants provided 19 percent, and nuclear power plants supplied 13 percent.

From 1990 to 1996 Russian energy production declined less than the output of most other economic sectors. Russia�s total industrial output declined 55 percent, but overall fuel production fell just 26 percent. Together with other minerals, energy products have been crucial earners of foreign exchange, accounting for approximately 50 percent of total Russian exports during the 1990s.

Russia�s principal oil and gas fields lie in western Siberia, which accounts for about two-thirds of total oil production and more than four-fifths of total gas production. Fields in the Volga-Urals region account for about one-quarter of total oil production and less than one-tenth of gas output. Key regions of coal production include western Siberia, which produces about three-quarters of the country's coal, and the Kuznetsk Basin in the Volga-Urals region. Most coal output is mined in Siberian fields along the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Important hydroelectric power plants are located on the major rivers of European Russia, notably the Volga and the Don, although the largest plants are on the great rivers of Siberia, particularly the Yenisey and the Angara. Electricity is also generated by 29 nuclear power plants, which are located primarily in European Russia. After the Chernobyl� nuclear reactor accident in Ukraine in 1986, Soviet officials abandoned ambitious plans for a rapid expansion of nuclear power, but in 1992 the Russian government reversed the decision and announced plans to substantially increase nuclear energy production. However, lack of funds hindered implementation of these new plans.

The technology used in the energy sector lags well behind Western levels. Wasteful extraction techniques applied during the Soviet period led to premature declines in output from many oil fields, and Russian oil refineries, built primarily in the 1940s and 1950s, are not designed to produce the most sophisticated fuels and lubricants. Leaks in the oil pipeline distribution system reportedly consume 5 to 7 percent of total oil production and have contributed to major environmental damage. Similarly, the aging gas pipeline system is susceptible to costly breakdowns and major accidents. More than half the country's operating nuclear reactors were originally constructed according to the same design that was used at Chernobyl�.

Despite Russia's huge size and extraordinary natural resources, it has a shortage of agricultural land. Only about 8 percent of its territory is cultivated. Most of this farmland lies in the so-called fertile triangle. This region runs along the country�s western border stretching from the Baltic to the Black seas; its two sides taper eastward to the southern Ural mountains, where it narrows to a strip about 400 km (about 250 mi) wide that extends across the southwestern fringes of Siberia. East of the Altay Mountains, agriculture is found only in isolated mountain basins along the southern edge of Siberia. Without human modification, areas outside the fertile triangle are unsuitable for crops. To the north, the growing season is too short without the aid of greenhouses. To the south, the dry climate is an obstacle; Soviet planners tried to overcome this problem by building extensive irrigation works along the Kuban� and other southern rivers. The country�s major grain crops are wheat, barley, oats, and rye. Other important crops are potatoes, sugar beets, and sunflower seeds.

Russia�s attempts to reform the weak agriculture sector have been ineffective. State-owned farms and collective farms became a powerful lobby in the late Soviet period. They continued to press for massive subsidies after the Soviet breakup and resisted any significant restructuring of farm management. From 1991 to 1996 direct federal subsidies to the farm sector were reduced substantially, but considerable subsidies to agriculture appear to persist in the form of loan write-offs and payments from regional governments. Although the Yeltsin government took formal steps to facilitate the privatization of land, powerful political opposition prevented privatization on a significant scale.

Many of the state and collective farms have been nominally reorganized as producers� cooperatives, which are collectively owned and operated by groups of farmers, or as joint-stock companies, in which various owners get a share of the profits proportionate to their stock holdings. However, the effect on the farm organizations� economic behavior has been minimal, and political resistance at the national and local levels has made the sale of land to private individuals extremely difficult. In 1996 individual peasants controlled only about 5 percent of total farmland. Russia lacks a land code that outlines legal procedures for land sales and a central registry that can certify land titles; as a result, a genuine land market has not appeared. Few sales have occurred, and land prices have remained depressed.

Since 1990, agricultural production has fallen substantially, although not as dramatically as industrial output. From 1990 to 1996 the production of grains fell 36 percent as a result of bad weather and changes in relative prices that made fertilizer and agricultural machines too expensive for some farms. Meat production fell more steeply, by 48 percent, and the size of livestock herds also declined sharply. Like grain output, meat production was influenced by bad weather; it was also influenced by consumers, who compensated for their loss of purchasing power by buying less expensive foods. Among Russia�s small wealthy population, many shoppers preferred imported foods, which in the mid-1990s amounted to as much as 35 percent of all the food consumed in Russia.

Russia is a major producer of lumber and wood products. Most timber production comes from conifers, mainly pine, fir, and larch. The principal commercial hardwood tree is birch. The primary areas of timber production are northwestern European Russia, the central Ural Mountains, southern Siberia in the vicinity of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and southeastern Siberia. During the Soviet era the most accessible and valuable stands of timber in European Russia were heavily harvested. Because of the lack of adequate forest management, these stands were depleted, and less valuable tree species have become dominant in many areas that were once prime forestland. As a result, logging has gradually moved eastward; Siberia produced one-third of the country's sawn lumber in the early 1990s, compared with one-quarter of the total in 1970. Major unexploited forests remain in less accessible areas of Siberia and northern European Russia. Large-scale harvesting of these forests has not occurred because they contain a high proportion of larch, which is difficult and expensive to process, and because of their remoteness. Technological improvements and changes in the world timber market could make the logging of these forests more economically attractive.

The forestry industry has been heavily affected by the depressed economy. From 1990 to 1996 the production of timber and cellulose plunged by a reported 66 percent, and the proportion of enterprises operating at a loss in 1996 was greater than in any other economic sector. Russian timber production was particularly disrupted by the collapse of markets in Eastern Europe and the other former Soviet republics. The industry, especially its Siberian component, was also depressed by the sharp increases in domestic transportation costs that followed the liberalization of prices in the early 1990s. As a result of these factors, the industry was unable to increase its exports, which averaged less than 5 percent of total Russian exports between 1992 and 1996.

Russia's fishing industry is one of the largest in the world. Despite a steep fall in output after 1990, by the mid-1990s the industry still ranked fourth in fish production, accounting for almost one-quarter of world output of fresh and frozen fish and approximately one-third of canned fish. Historically, Russian fishing was concentrated on bordering seas and inland lakes and rivers, but in the Soviet era a major effort was made to expand the industry's reach. Soviet fleets began to operate in most areas of the world's oceans, and inland fish farming was developed in ponds and rural irrigation reservoirs.

Marine fisheries account for the major part of the Russian catch. About 25 percent of the catch comes from the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans. Much of the Atlantic fishing fleet is based at ports on the Baltic Sea, particularly Kaliningrad and Saint Petersburg. Murmansk and Arkhangel�sk are the most important fishing ports on the western Arctic coast. The principal commercial species taken in the Baltic Sea is herring. The main species taken from the Atlantic are cod, herring, and mackerel.

Another 60 percent of the Russian catch is taken from the Pacific Ocean and its marginal seas, including the Bering Sea. Vladivostok is the largest fishing port and fish-processing center of the far eastern region; many smaller fishing ports are scattered along the mainland coast as well as on Sakhalin Island. The Sea of Okhotsk is one of the richest fishing grounds, known especially for its salmon and for Kamchatka crab. Other species taken in the Pacific include herring, flounder, smelt, mackerel, and cod, as well as marine mammals such as walrus and seal.

Inland fishing accounts for 10 to 15 percent of the total catch. About three-fifths of the inland catch comes from the saltwater Azov, Black, and Caspian seas; the remainder comes from freshwater lakes and rivers. The principal inland fishing ports include Taganrog on the Sea of Azov and Astrakhan� on the Volga River near the Caspian. One of the best-known commercial species in inland waters is the Caspian sturgeon, which is a major source of the world's caviar.

Because Soviet economic planners defined economic progress in terms of physical production, they severely neglected the development of many services. Trends since the early 1990s have begun to reduce this imbalance. Whereas the production of products declined more than 50 percent from 1990 to 1996, services declined by only about 22 percent, and the overall prices of services have increased about twice as fast as the prices of goods. Moreover, between 1991 and 1996 employment in business-related services such as banking, finance, and insurance grew by 86 percent, although from a very low base. In the same period employment in retail trade, catering, and distribution grew by about 18 percent.

On the other hand, many services that are heavily dependent on government funding experienced declines. Employment in scientific research, for example, plunged about 45 percent from 1991 to 1996, while employment in transportation and communications declined about 9 percent. Employment in health and education grew slightly, despite severe cuts in government funding for these activities. Some of these changes had beneficial side effects; for example, the contraction of scientific research pushed many technically skilled persons into the business sector. However, the deterioration of public education and public health care has had major social costs, and it has sharpened the inequalities between the rich and the poor.

For most of the Communist era the Soviet government was suspicious of foreign tourism, especially travel from the USSR to the capitalist countries of the West. However, the government encouraged foreign tourists to visit the USSR because tourism in Russia provided a significant source of foreign exchange and could sometimes serve political aims. At the height of tourism, the annual number of foreign visitors to the USSR totaled about 7 million people, with slightly more than half coming from the countries of Eastern Europe. Although significant, this flow of tourists and tourism revenue was far smaller than comparable flows to the United States and the major Western European countries. The Soviet government also endorsed the idea of domestic tourism, and each year millions of Soviet citizens visited parts of the country remote from their own homes, especially the capital city of Moscow.

Post-Soviet Russia has numerous attractions that draw foreign visitors. Primary cultural attractions include the old imperial retreats near Saint Petersburg, the Old Town of Novgorod, the Golden Ring of medieval towns surrounding Moscow, and many museums, galleries, theaters, and architectural points of interest in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Resorts on the Black Sea are popular with both foreign and domestic tourists, as are cruises along the Volga River. Lake Baikal, the deepest freshwater lake in the world and the home of many unique animal and plant species, draws numerous visitors each year.

Foreign travel to Russia plunged after the collapse of the USSR but rebounded sharply in the mid-1990s. The number of foreign visitors was 18.5 million in 1999. Despite the recent construction of Western-owned hotels in major cities, the infrastructure of the tourist industry remains underdeveloped, and this is likely to prevent the expansion of foreign tourism to the levels enjoyed by some Western countries. Nevertheless, the present volume of tourism is a significant source of foreign exchange at a time of national economic hardship.

Russia�s transportation network has been shaped by the country�s vast size and its Soviet history. Soviet planners were preoccupied with expanding heavy industry, so the Soviet government considered transportation a necessary but less productive economic activity. It therefore designed transportation facilities to move large amounts of goods and people at low cost and generally sacrificed consumer convenience. The transportation system is densest in European Russia, where industry and population are concentrated. Overall, however, Russia�s transportation system is much less dense than those of most advanced industrial states.

Railroads dominate the transportation system. In the mid-1990s Russia ranked second internationally in terms of the length of its public rail network, which totaled 86,000 km (53,400 mi). After 1990 shock therapy cut the volume of railroad freight by nearly half, but at mid-decade the railroads still carried more than three-quarters of the country�s total freight. The heaviest traffic on a single rail line occurs on the western Siberian section of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, where trains occasionally run as frequently as once every three minutes. To relieve some of this pressure, parallel lines were built during the Soviet era in western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. In the late 1970s and the 1980s the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), a major line located north of and parallel to the Trans-Siberian Railroad, was built across eastern Siberia to the Pacific coast. Unlike some other means of transportation, Russia�s railroad system has not been privatized.

Railroads also account for nearly half of all passenger travel, although buses have begun carrying an increased share of commuter passengers and airplanes have absorbed a large proportion of long-distance travel. The Soviet government neglected automotive transportation because of the high cost of constructing and maintaining roads and because of the high operating cost of transporting goods by truck. With about 571,000 km (354,628 mi) of public and private roads, Russia ranked sixth internationally in terms of the size of its road system, even though it is by far the largest country in the world. Although automobile ownership has increased since 1990, by 1997 there were still only 120 vehicles for every 1,000 inhabitants, and many members of the middle class who want cars cannot afford them because bank credit is unavailable. There are no Western-style freeways; only 76 percent of the roads are paved, and only about 60 percent of rural villages can be reached by a paved road. Not surprisingly, trucking accounts for less than 5 percent of total freight shipped.

In some regions of Russia, inland waterways are a major means of transportation. The most important waterway is the Volga River, which carries more than half of Russia�s river traffic. Moscow is connected to the Volga system through the Moscow Canal, which runs north to the Volga River. In remote areas of Siberia rivers are often the only means of transportation available. However, most Siberian rivers, such as the Ob�, the Yenisey, and the Lena, flow north to the Arctic Ocean, thus limiting their utility in a region where east-west links are required. The eastward-flowing Amur River is the chief navigable river of the far eastern region.

In the Soviet era, Aeroflot, the state airline, was the exclusive provider of domestic civilian air transportation. Aeroflot continues to operate, but it no longer has a monopoly on domestic air transportation. It now faces serious competition from two other large airline companies: the semiprivate Vnukovo Airlines and the private Transaero company. Russia has about 300 registered airlines, many of them extremely small. In the 1980s the national volume of airline passenger travel expanded by a remarkable 1,500 percent. From 1990 to 1994 steep increases in ticket prices and the discontinuation of flights to less populous areas reduced total air passenger miles by more than one-half, but the airlines still accounted for about one-eighth of the total of all types of passenger travel.

The merchant navy is an important transportation link with many foreign countries. The principal civilian seaports in Russia include Novorossiysk on the Black Sea; Saint Petersburg and Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea; Nakhodka, Vostochnyy, Vladivostok, and Vanino on the Pacific coast; and Murmansk and Arkhangel�sk on the Arctic coast. In 2000 the fleet, which included 4,755 Russian-owned vessels of 100 gross tons or more, ranked among the world�s 15 largest merchant navies.

Russia's extensive network of natural gas and oil pipelines is another important part of its transportation system. The network includes about 200,000 km (about 124,000 mi) of pipe, with approximately one-third devoted to oil products and two-thirds to natural gas. As a whole, the system was operating at only about 60 percent of capacity in the mid-1990s, but most outlets to export markets were operating at maximum capacity. Most of the system�s lines run from east to west. Oil pipelines connect producing fields in western Siberia and the Volga-Urals region with consuming areas in European Russia and countries to the west. Pipelines pump natural gas from western Siberia, northern European Russia, and the North Caucasus to the large European market. Several pipelines also connect Russia to gas and oil fields, as well as consumers, in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states. Domestic pipelines run south and east from western Siberia as far as Irkutsk.

The Soviet regime was strongly committed to mass education and propaganda. It therefore supported a vast increase in publishing, the expansion of radio broadcasting, and, beginning about 1960, the extensive growth of television. The regime developed the telephone network far more selectively, and in the 1970s and early 1980s it restricted the production and distribution of personal computers. The government favored technologies that would allow it to communicate more effectively with Soviet citizens, but it distrusted technologies that would facilitate citizens� direct communication with one another or the outside world. Consequently, it carefully controlled the development of the communications system and surrounded the system with censors.

In the mid-1980s the communications sector underwent major changes that ultimately freed the media from Soviet-style control but also subjected the media to new pressures. Gorbachev�s glasnost campaign, which encouraged public discussion of politically sensitive issues, produced an enormous upsurge in the circulation of reformist journals and newspapers. The circulation of conservative publications, on the other hand, declined sharply. By 1990 three reformist newspapers had become the largest in the USSR, with a combined circulation of approximately 65 million copies. An unsuccessful coup attempt in the fall of 1991 and Yeltsin�s clash with the Russian parliament in 1993 were both followed by the temporary closure of some newspapers. Despite these important setbacks, the freedom of the media from direct government interference grew dramatically.

However, Russia�s financial collapse after the breakup of the USSR raised new challenges for the media. As subsidies were slashed and inflation drove up publishing costs, many publications lost legions of readers soured by skyrocketing subscription and newsstand prices. By 1994 Russia�s three largest newspapers had suffered a combined circulation loss of about 55 million copies. Intellectuals and many professionals continued to rely on the print media, and the regional press grew as some important matters began to be decided at that level. Overall, though, the role of publications declined. The collapse of circulation left most newspapers, including those that had been privatized, dependent on government subsidies for 30 to 40 percent of their operating budgets.

Meanwhile, in the television sector, the impact of glasnost was also felt. Viewership climbed dramatically in the late 1980s as reform-minded broadcast executives focused programming on the burning issues of the day. A few political events drew so many daytime viewers that the country experienced a substantial decline in weekly economic output. Competition among broadcasters first became significant in the late Soviet period with the creation of a Russian television station in 1991. The new station, which supported Yeltsin, challenged the primacy of the Soviet state network, which favored Gorbachev. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian government further expanded the independence of the media from state control but retained some limits.

In the mid-1990s the media began to reflect the growing influence of Russia�s new financial elite. Two new television networks were founded as private companies, and one state network became semiprivate through the sale of 49 percent of its shares to investors. In each case, the network soon came under the strong influence of a powerful banker-entrepreneur, and critics charged that the bankers were improperly shaping the content of public broadcasts. Likewise, by mid-1997 many print media were owned, at least in part, by bank-led financial-industrial groups, and a few high-profile cases demonstrated the capacity of these conglomerates to override editors� preferences on especially sensitive topics, particularly those concerning charges of business corruption. Perhaps the two most important tests of the media�s impartiality were the warfare that erupted between the Russian army and Chechen insurgents in 1994, and Russia�s 1996 presidential elections. In Chechnya, the media demonstrated impartiality by disseminating critical reports at odds with the Yeltsin government's official line. By contrast, the coverage of the presidential campaign was tilted strongly toward Yeltsin and against the Communist contender, calling the media�s credentials as impartial observers into serious question. Nonetheless, the media have become far more open and diverse than at any time during the Soviet era.

The telephone system also has changed since the dissolution of the USSR. The Russian government privatized a portion of the shares in the national telephone company and a national telecommunications holding company, and more than 90 separate regional telephone companies have come into existence. However, the effects of these organizational changes on telephone service have generally been modest. In 1999 Russia had only 210 telephones per 1,000 persons, a level of telephone saturation three to five times lower than the levels in advanced Western countries. The Russian telecommunications sector has ambitious plans to upgrade the quality of its service and is receiving technical assistance from foreign telecommunications companies. However, the future scope of such cooperation remains uncertain.

After the breakup of the USSR, reformers in the Yeltsin government sought to integrate Russia into the global economy and to obtain outside financial assistance for market reforms. Having assumed all the USSR�s foreign debts with virtually no international reserves, Russia held annual meetings with its foreign creditors to reschedule the debt payments that it could not make. Before 1995 Russia paid only a small percentage of the payments due under the original loan agreements. In early 1996 Russia reached a long-term repayment agreement with a group of government creditors known as the Paris Club, and in 1997 it concluded a long-term agreement with a group of commercial-bank creditors known as the London Club.

In the mid-1990s Russia began receiving substantial financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). New IMF credits amounted to $1.5 billion in 1994, $5.5 billion in 1995, and $2.9 billion in 1996, with more due in future years. In addition, in March 1996 the United States and Germany lent Yeltsin�s government a total of $2.4 billion, which some observers believed was intended to help Yeltsin�s presidential reelection campaign by easing the domestic economic situation.

Russia�s foreign-trade approach and trade patterns have changed dramatically since the collapse of Communism. After the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the USSR conducted most of its foreign trade with other Communist countries and tried to make the bloc of Communist countries in Eastern Europe and Asia economically independent of the West. Beginning in the 1960s the Soviet leadership sought more Western technology and grain to compensate for the shortcomings of the USSR�s planned economy, but in the 1980s the other members of the Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) still accounted for almost two-thirds of Soviet foreign trade. Like other Soviet economic activities, foreign trade was centrally planned and administered.

After the breakup of the USSR, these patterns changed. Russia�s foreign trade volume declined sharply. In 1992 the volume of Russian exports to areas outside the former USSR was less than two-thirds of the 1988 level, while the volume of imports was less than half of the 1988 level. Trade also shifted quickly toward the West. By the mid-1990s developed Western countries accounted for about three-fifths of Russia's total trade with countries outside the former USSR, while former COMECON countries accounted for only about one-tenth of the total. Trade with the other former Soviet republics also dropped sharply, affected both by the turmoil of the Soviet breakup and by increases in the prices of Russian exports, particularly energy. According to Western estimates, the share of Russia�s trade with its old "inner empire" of former Soviet republics and the old "outer empire" of former COMECON members now amounts to no more than one-quarter of Russia�s total trade. Individually, however, some former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine and Belarus, remain major trading partners. Germany, which accounts for about 13 percent of Russia's trade outside the former USSR, has become Russia�s leading trading partner, followed by the United States and Italy. In November 1998 Russia became a member of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) organization.

Bolstered by pressure from the IMF that helped override entrenched domestic resistance, Russian government reformers abolished export quotas and export licenses in early 1995. By mid-1996 export duties on certain key goods were also abolished. Government management of foreign trade persists only in the realm of arms exports and defense-related equipment. From 1991 to 1996 Russia consistently maintained a positive balance of trade. In 1996 the official surplus of exports over imports amounted to 5 percent of the country�s GDP. In proportional terms, this was one of the largest trade surpluses in the world. However, attempts to determine Russia's true trade balance are complicated by unrecorded trade flows. Trade conducted by Russians traveling back and forth to countries such as Turkey, for example, is estimated to boost actual imports by about one-third. Outright smuggling across unpatrolled borders and the illegal transfer of Russian assets abroad also affect the real trade balance.

Foreign investment in Russia has been concentrated primarily in the purchase of government treasury bills and bonds. Foreign direct investment (FDI)�that is, foreign ownership and management of companies in Russia�remains quite limited. In per capita terms, total FDI is only about half as large in Russia as in Poland, and a great deal smaller than in Hungary. Foreign bidders were generally excluded from the first phases of enterprise privatization, and in some sectors, such as banking and energy, ceilings continue to limit the proportion of foreign ownership to a small percentage of the total shares. In 1996 about a quarter of all new FDI went into the food production sector; finance and retail trade and catering accounted for another quarter of the total. Direct investment in the energy sector has been very limited. In regional terms, a highly disproportionate share of foreign investment has flowed to Moscow.

This modest influx of foreign capital contrasts with the large volume of domestic capital that is leaving Russia in the form of "capital flight." In the mid-1990s this outflow of capital totaled about $50 billion by some estimates. The financiers, traders, and ordinary citizens who send capital out of the country are motivated by the same calculations and skepticism that have kept foreigners from investing in Russia on a large scale. Exports of such capital are commonly achieved by false billing for foreign imports or by other illegal means. The scale of capital flight suggests the depth of the domestic obstacles that must be overcome to elicit large-scale investment in Russia; it also suggests the scope of economic progress that is likely to occur if this task is achieved.

Bruce Parrott contributed the Economy section of this article.

The Russian Federation became an independent state in December 1991 as a result of the collapse of the USSR. During the Communist era the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) was the largest of the USSR�s 15 republics. The present Russian Federation occupies the same territory as the former RSFSR. Since independence, Russia has adopted a new constitution and system of government.

Russia is a federal and presidential republic governed under a constitution that took effect in 1993, replacing the 1978 constitution of the RSFSR. The central government is composed of three independent branches: the executive (the president and prime minister), legislative (the Federal Assembly), and judicial. The government is responsible to the president, and the executive branch is considerably more powerful than the other two branches. The constitution is largely the creation of Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who dominated Russian politics from independence until his retirement from politics in 1999. Yeltsin was elected the RSFSR�s first president by popular vote in June 1991, and he retained this position in Russia after the Soviet Union dissolved later that year. In June 1996 he was reelected to a second four-year term, but he resigned the presidency in December 1999.

To some extent presidential decrees can take the place of laws, thereby evading legislative scrutiny. Furthermore, the legislature has only limited rights to investigate government activity. Nevertheless, the legislature can reject the budget, draft legislation, publicize government errors and malpractice, and, at the price of its own dissolution and new parliamentary elections, bring down the government by repeated votes of no confidence.

During the Soviet period, power was concentrated in Communist Party institutions and was highly centralized. Federal institutions, located in Moscow, were much more powerful than the regional institutions of the 15 republics. Although Russians dominated the central party and government institutions, the RSFSR�s own institutions were even weaker and less autonomous than those of the other 14 republics. Unlike the other Soviet republics, Russia did not have its own separate Communist Party, security police (KGB), or Academy of Sciences for most of the Communist era. Although Russia did have its own government (Council of Ministers) and legislature (Supreme Soviet), these institutions did not exercise their full constitutional powers.

The RSFSR�s 1978 constitution only became significant when the Soviet Union collapsed. The constitution gave the legislative branch supremacy over the executive branch. However, the legislators� lack of political experience made government extremely difficult. As a result, increasing power was granted to the newly established state presidency, sometimes on a temporary basis. In 1992 and 1993, when President Yeltsin and the legislature clashed over policy, the absence of clear and realistic constitutional demarcation between executive and legislative power became a major problem.

A new constitution, ratified by referendum in December 1993, solved this difficulty. Although it greatly increased the power of the presidency, it also established basic democratic guidelines, such as fixed terms of office, electoral procedures, and universal suffrage for all citizens aged 18 or older. In principle, the constitution also guarantees civil rights and the rule of law. Yeltsin�s opponents regarded the constitution as illegitimate, and they disputed whether a majority of voters had in fact endorsed it in the referendum. After a few years, however, hostility to the constitution decreased somewhat.

Power is concentrated in the executive branch, which is headed by a president. He or she is directly elected by the people to a four-year term and cannot serve more than two consecutive terms. The president serves as the commander in chief of the armed forces and chairs the Security Council, which is the central decision-making body for matters of defense. With the defense minister, the president has control over Russia�s nuclear weapons. The president appoints the prime minister, who is second in command. The appointment is subject to ratification by the State Duma, the lower house of parliament; if the State Duma rejects the candidate for prime minister three times, the president can dissolve the legislature and call for new elections. The president has the right to dissolve the legislature under certain other conditions as well. In the event of the president�s death or permanent incapacitation, the prime minister temporarily takes on the president�s duties, but new presidential elections must be held within three months.

The Federal Assembly is Russia�s bicameral national legislature. It is composed of an upper house, called the Council of the Federation, and a lower house, the State Duma. The Council of the Federation has 178 members�two representatives from each of the 89 administrative units that make up the Russian Federation. The local executive and legislative heads of each unit serve as the representatives for their unit.

The State Duma has 450 members. Voters elect half of the Duma members by casting a vote for a specific party listed on the ballot; these 225 seats are divided among the qualifying parties by proportional representation. The other 225 Duma members are elected individually from electoral districts throughout the country. Each of Russia�s 89 constituent units has at least one electoral district; some densely populated units have more than one. In the December 1995 legislative elections, each party on the ballot needed at least 5 percent of the vote in order to gain representation in the State Duma. Prior to the 1995 elections, legislators served two-year terms; in 1995 they began serving four-year terms, as mandated by the constitution.

The highest judicial body is the Constitutional Court, composed of 19 judges who are appointed by the president and approved by the Council of the Federation. The Constitutional Court�s mandate is to rule on the constitutionality of legislative and executive actions. In the early 1990s the Constitutional Court tried unsuccessfully to mediate the conflict between the legislature and the president. With the adoption of the 1993 constitution, the Constitutional Court�s powers were reduced and its membership was changed.

Below the Constitutional Court are the Supreme Court and the Supreme Arbitration Court. The Supreme Court rules on civil, criminal, and administrative law, and the Supreme Arbitration Court handles economic suits. As with the Constitutional Court, judges for these high courts are appointed by the president and approved by the upper house of the legislature. The 1978 constitution had established life terms for judges, but the 1993 constitution changed appointments of high court judges to 12-year terms. By law, all judges in Russia are independent and cannot be removed from office. Although the judiciary has been freed from the direct political control that existed in the Communist era, it remains financially weak. They are also very vulnerable to threats and pressures from the criminal world and from officials who are in league with organized crime.

Since the late 1980s Russia has changed from a single-party, totalitarian state led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to a chaotic, factious, multiparty democracy. The CPSU has been replaced by hundreds of political groups, factions, movements, and parties that span a wide political spectrum, from monarchists to communists. The parties range in size from a few members to more than half a million members. Some of the smaller political groups have lasted only a brief time. Alliances between groups are generally unstable, and coalitions shift frequently. Individual personalities influence political formations to a large degree, and the political agendas of many parties are vague and poorly documented.

Russia�s political parties can be divided into four general categories: communist parties; Russian nationalist parties; reformist, or promarket democratic parties; and centrist and special interest parties. In early 1996 the major groups were the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, led by Gennady Zyuganov, which emerged from the legislative elections of December 1995 with the largest representation in parliament; the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky; more moderate Russian nationalists who demand law and order and support retired general Aleksandr Lebed; and the Agrarian Party, which is dominated by supporters of the collective farms system inherited from the Soviet era. The leading parties of the reformist category were Yabloko and Russia�s Democratic Choice. Parties with centrist or special-interest platforms included Our Home is Russia (also considered a reformist party), led by former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin; the Women of Russia Party; the Social Democratic Peoples� Party; and the New Regional Policy.

In the legislative elections that were held in December 1999, the Communists again emerged as the largest party, winning roughly one-quarter of the votes. The centrist Unity bloc, which supported the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, finished second. Another centrist group, Fatherland-All Russia, which represented an alliance of former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov and Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, came in third. Zhirinovsky's ultranationalists lost heavily, only just gaining sufficient votes to have seats in the Duma at all. Overall, the result of the election was to strengthen the center in Russian politics at the expense of both the far right and the far left.

Russia is divided into 89 administrative units: 21 republics, 6 territories known as krays, 10 autonomous national areas called okrugs, 49 oblasts (regions), 1 autonomous region, and the cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, which have federal status. The republics are Adygea, Alania (North Ossetia), Altay, Bashkortostan, Buryatia, Chechnya, Chuvashia, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, Karachay-Cherkessia, Karelia, Khakassia, Komi, Mari El, Mordovia, Sakha (Yakutia), Tatarstan, Tuva, and Udmurtia. The krays are Altay Territory, Khabarovsk Territory, Krasnodar Territory, Krasnoyarsk Territory, Primorye Territory (Maritime Territory), and Stavropol� Territory. The autonomous okrugs, which lie within oblasts or krays and are under their jurisdiction, are Aga, Chukotka, Evenkia, Khantia-Mansia, Koryakia, Nenetsia, Permyakia, Taymyria, Ust�-Orda, and Yamalia. The autonomous region is the Jewish Autonomous Region. The divisions vary considerably in size: The republic of Sakha has a total area of more than 3 million sq km (1 million sq mi), while Ingushetia, the smallest unit (excluding Moscow and Saint Petersburg), has an area of only about 4,300 sq km (about 1,660 sq mi).

The republics, okrugs, and autonomous region are direct successors to ethnic units established during the Soviet period, with the exception of Chechnya and Ingushetia, which were combined as a single Chechen-Ingush autonomous republic. The Soviet government established the ethnic units to appease native, non-Russian nationalities, but political and economic factors caused migration into and out of the regions. Russians now make up the majority of the population in most areas.

The titles of the ethnic units have also changed considerably. During much of the Soviet period, Russia contained 16 autonomous republics, 5 autonomous oblasts, and 10 autonomous okrugs. In late 1990 the term autonomous was dropped from the names of the republics, and in July 1991 four of the five autonomous oblasts became republics. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast was the only autonomous oblast not elevated to the rank of a republic. Since 1990 the names of some of the units have been changed from Russian names to their names in the languages of the indigenous peoples.

The 1993 constitution grants the republics a greater degree of autonomy than the other administrative areas. The republics have special rights, such as the right to adopt their own anthems, flags, and limited constitutions. In general, republics pay fewer taxes to the central government, which has caused great indignation among the leaders of the oblasts and krays. All of the republics and some of the other administrative units have separate treaties with the central government. Therefore, the extent to which an administrative unit controls its own economic resources, receives subsidies, and retains locally raised taxes differs from area to area. Political and economic realities also influence an area�s relationship with the federal government. Powerful regional leaders are sometimes able to secure favorable deals from the central government. Regions that have important economic resources also sometimes receive special treatment. Moscow, under its exceptionally powerful mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, has frequently secured exemption from rules that the federal government has imposed on other regions.

In general, the power of administrative area leaders has increased greatly since the collapse of the USSR. They can no longer be dismissed by the central executive authorities as they could during the Soviet period. By late 1997 all local chief executive officers were democratically elected and therefore had independent sources of power and legitimacy. Furthermore, because they served as their area representatives in the Council of the Federation, all had a direct role in the central government. They also controlled considerable wealth and resources in alliance with local economic interests.

The relationship between the central government and the administrative units remains a source of conflict and uncertainty. Until this relationship is stabilized and clarified, it will be impossible to establish an effective fiscal and legal system that is uniform throughout Russia. This makes economic recovery difficult. On the other hand, the threat that the ethnically based republics might secede and cause the Russian Federation to disintegrate has decreased since 1991. Only Chechnya insisted on independence, and in 2000 it lay in ruins under military occupation after a devastating war with the central government.

The USSR was a military superpower with a massive nuclear arsenal and millions of troops; in the 1980s the armed forces had more than 5 million members. Immediately after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the armed forces came under the military command of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), an organization comprising most of the former Soviet republics. In May 1992 Russia created its own military structure in response to the formation of separate armies by several CIS states, notably Ukraine. The CIS military command continued to function for another year, although its power was greatly reduced. It was finally abolished in June 1993 and most of its functions were transferred to the Russian military command. Under the new Russian military structure, an executive body known as the Security Council formulates defense policy. The Russian president appoints and dismisses members of the council and dominates its proceedings.

In 1999 Russia had 1 million troops in the army, navy, air force, air defense force, and strategic rocket force (which controls the country�s nuclear weapons). Paramilitary forces, including border troops, numbered an additional 220,000. However, Russia�s conventional forces were generally unprepared for combat. The disastrous performance of the army during the 1995 and 1996 campaign in Chechnya revealed immense deficiencies in command, logistics, training, and morale. Until these problems are solved, Russia will not regain its position as a world military power.

According to Russian law, men 18 years of age and older must serve two years in the armed forces, but massive exemptions and evasion greatly reduce the recruitment pool. There has been considerable debate about shifting to an all-volunteer force, which in theory would be more efficient and less unpopular. Volunteer forces are usually more expensive, however, because better pay and conditions are needed to entice people to join. Russia�s budgetary constraints make the creation of volunteer armed forces unthinkable in the near future. The defense establishment is beset by a host of problems, including grossly inadequate revenues, corruption, recruitment shortfalls, inadequate housing, and aging equipment.

Since the collapse of the USSR all nuclear weapons of the former Soviet forces have been concentrated in Russia. Some have been destroyed, but most remain intact. Western governments have expressed concern over the safety of these weapons and the sale of weapons to unfriendly nations or terrorist movements. The USSR had established agreements with Western nations to limit armaments, and Russia inherited both the START I and the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) agreements. The START II treaty is an additional agreement between the United States and Russia to significantly reduce nuclear arms. START II has been signed, but has not yet been ratified by Russia. In the early and mid-1990s there was significant decline in the export of Russian arms and military advisers to developing countries, but arms exports had begun to rise by the late 1990s. The increase reflected a desire for commercial gain, however, rather than a strategy to gain political influence in support of a global struggle against the United States, as had been the case during the Soviet era.

In the Soviet era the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti; Russian for "State Security Committee") and its predecessors were large and powerful organizations. The KGB�s role included intelligence work abroad, counterespionage, and the repression of domestic dissent. The KGB also provided the top Soviet leadership with information about public moods and international developments that could not be gained from the USSR�s censored press. KGB officers were members of the Soviet elite and were often very intelligent and well educated. In 1991 public outcry erupted after the agency participated in a failed coup, and President Yeltsin subsequently split the agency into five bodies. The main heirs to the KGB are the FSB (Federal Security Services), which concentrates on domestic affairs, and the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service), which inherited the KGB�s foreign agents and activities. Although the major successor agencies are still large bodies with pervasive influence, Russians are now far freer to express their opinions and engage in independent political activity than they were under the KGB in the Soviet Union.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia assumed the USSR�s place in the United Nations (UN). Consequently, Russia also gained a permanent position on the United Nations Security Council, the UN organ responsible for maintaining international peace and security. Also in 1991 Russia became a founding member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which includes most of the former Soviet republics. The Russians initially hoped that the CIS would coordinate shared military, foreign policy, and economic goals of member states, but by the mid-1990s the republics had abandoned the common currency and the CIS had abolished its joint military command. Russia is also a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); Partnership for Peace, a program intended to strengthen relations between countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and central and Eastern European countries; and the Council of Europe (CE).

After World War II (1939-1945) the Cold War dominated Soviet foreign policy. All issues were seen from the perspective of a global ideological and political struggle with the United States and its allies. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, who led the country from 1985 to 1991, the USSR sought to end the Cold War. Relations with the West improved dramatically.

After independence in 1991 Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev and President Yeltsin at first maintained a strongly pro-American foreign policy. Yeltsin and Kozyrev initially had a relaxed attitude toward the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which had been the main military alliance of Western nations during the Cold War.

Domestic pressure prompted a foreign policy shift. In particular, strong support for the ultranationalist candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky in the December 1993 parliamentary elections convinced the government that the public demanded a more nationalistic, less pro-Western approach to foreign policy. As a result, Russia resumed sales of arms and civil nuclear technology to developing countries, including Iran, which elicited disapproval from the United States. More importantly, Russia began expressing loud support for Russians in the "near abroad" (as Russians call the outlying areas of the former USSR) and strong opposition to NATO expansion, and was at odds with NATO countries over how to resolve the ethnic turmoil in the former Yugoslavia. NATO�s support for Muslims and Croats drew disapproval from Russia, which had historical ties to the competing ethnic Serbs.

Much of this shift in policy was more a question of rhetoric than one of practice, however. By 1997 Russia�s support for Russian-speaking secessionists in the Trans-Dniester region of Moldova had become more moderate. The Russian government never encouraged Russian secessionists in Crimea; their strength in 1993 and 1994 threatened both political stability in Ukraine and Ukraine�s territorial integrity. In 1997 Russia signed a friendship treaty with Ukraine, settling the long-standing dispute over the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and confirming its recognition of Ukraine�s postindependence borders.

There were multiple reasons for Russia�s restraint. The country was conscious of its economic and military weakness, and it was also aware of the potential for conflict within the former USSR if national borders were challenged or ethnic conflicts encouraged. Furthermore, Yeltsin recognized that Russia needed to integrate itself into the world economy and Western-dominated institutions, such as the World Trade Organization, if it was to regain economic prosperity and effective global influence. Russia�s long-running dispute with Japan over the Kuril Islands also reduced the country�s room to maneuver in international affairs.

In 1999 Russia�s relations with Western nations suddenly worsened as NATO admitted the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, thus expanding into central and eastern Europe, and also attacked Yugoslavia to compel the Yugoslav government to halt military operations against Albanian separatists in that country�s Kosovo province. Russia denounced NATO as aggressive and expansionist and drew closer to China. However, Russian policymakers understood their own country�s weakness and its need to attract Western investment. The government�s rhetoric at times reflected the increasingly nationalist mood in Russian society, but its foreign policy remained cautious. Russia�s leaders were, in fact, anxious to maintain good relations with the Western powers.

Dominic Lieven contributed the Government section to this article.

In the 14th and 15th centuries a powerful Russian state began to grow around Moscow. It gradually expanded west and southwest toward the Dnieper River, north to the Arctic Ocean, and east to the Ural Mountains. By the 18th century Russia had gained full control over a number of major rivers, giving it access to the Baltic and Black seas. These conquests had a huge impact on the country�s trade and economic development. The Russian Empire continued to grow. At its greatest extent, in 1914 before World War I (1914-1918), the empire included more than 20 million sq km (8 million sq mi), nearly one-sixth of the land area of the Earth.

The empire�s heartland centered on Moscow and was the original homeland of the Great Russians, the chief ethnic component of the Russian Empire. To the east of the empire lay Siberia, which by 1914 had an overwhelmingly Russian population. The western borderlands were home to Ukrainians and Belarusians; the empire considered these Orthodox Slavs to be merely branches of the Russian people who spoke somewhat strange, regional dialects. In the northwest were Finland and the Baltic provinces (now Latvia and Estonia); their Protestant populations were very different from the Russians, both culturally and linguistically. Most of Poland, along with Lithuania, was acquired in the late 18th century. Transcaucasia, with its partly Muslim population, was absorbed in the early 19th century; most of Central Asia, almost entirely Muslim, was absorbed a generation later.

The Russian Empire fell in 1917. Most of its territory was inherited by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or Soviet Union), a Communist state that existed until 1991. When the USSR collapsed, the Russian Federation became its principal successor state.

Russian history has been strongly influenced by the country�s natural environment. European Russia�s relatively flat terrain and dense network of navigable rivers facilitated communications, economic development, and political unity across the region.

The frozen swamplands and dense forests of northern European Russia were unsuitable for agriculture, as they are today; however, fur pelts from the region's enormous animal population were important Russian exports that were crucial to the state treasury until the 18th century. All the medieval Russian settlements were located in a central zone of European Russia, an area with thick forests and some agricultural land. Most of the area had relatively poor soils. Therefore, this zone could not sustain a very large population until industrial development began in the 19th and 20th centuries. The region�s forests offered security to the neighboring agricultural settlements, which were periodically raided by the tribes of fierce nomadic horsemen that dominated the vast grasslands to the south.

For more than 1,000 years before 1600 these warring horsemen were more formidable soldiers than the armies of the settled agricultural communities were. It was only with the creation of a modern, disciplined army, equipped with muskets and artillery, that the Russians were able to turn the tables on the nomads. With the new army, Russians colonized the steppe and united the entire vast plain between the Baltic and Black seas. Russia�s modern identity as a powerful military state with a large population did not emerge until this process was completed in the 18th century. Indeed, even as late as the mid-18th century Russia�s population was smaller than that of France.

During the pre-Christian era the vast territory that became Russia was sparsely inhabited by tribal peoples, many of whom were described by ancient Greek and Roman writers. The largely unknown north, a region of extensive forests, was inhabited by tribes later known collectively as Slavs. These Slavs were the ancestors of the modern Russian people. Far more important to the ancient Greeks and Romans were southern peoples in Scythia, an indeterminate region that included the greater part of southeastern Europe and Central Asia. Portions of this region were occupied by a succession of horse-riding nomadic peoples, including, chronologically, the Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians. In these early times, Greek traders and colonists established many trading posts and settlements, particularly along the north coast of the Black Sea and in Crimea.

Large stretches of open plain facilitated the immigration of outside peoples. Such migrations resulted in successive invasions, the establishment of settlements, and the assimilation of people who spoke different languages. Thus, in the early centuries of the Christian era, Germanic Goths displaced the Asian peoples of Scythia and established an Ostrogothic (eastern Goth) kingdom on the Black Sea. In the 4th century nomadic Huns invaded from Asia and conquered the Ostrogoths. The Huns held the territory constituting present-day Ukraine and most of present-day Moldova until their defeat in Western Europe in the mid-5th century. Later came the Mongolian Avars, followed by the nomadic Asian Magyars, and then the Turkic Khazars, who remained influential until about the mid-10th century.

Meanwhile, during this long period of successive invasions, the Slavic tribes in the area northeast of the Carpathian Mountains had begun a series of migratory movements. As these migrations took place, the western tribes in the region eventually evolved as the Moravians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks; the southern tribes as the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and a Slavic people who were conquered by but soon assimilated the Turkic Bulgars; and the eastern tribes as a people who later gave rise to the modern Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. The East Slavs became renowned traders. The systems of rivers and waterways extending through the territory from the Valday Hills facilitated the establishment of Slav trading posts, notably the cities of Kyiv (Kiev), which is the present-day capital of Ukraine, and Novgorod, directly north of Kyiv. Along these waterways the Slavs transported goods between the Baltic and Black seas.

In the 9th century Scandinavian Vikings invaded and settled a number of regions in northern Europe, from Russia in the east to Ireland in the west. From these eastward-moving Scandinavians, called Varangians or Rus, came the name Rossiya, or Russia, meaning "land of the Rus." (Scholars debate the origin of the word Rus, which also may have been derived from ruotsi, the Finnish name for the Swedes, or from Rukhs-As, the name of an Alanic tribe in southern Russia.)

Scandinavian princes from the house of Ryurik organized the East Slavs into a single state. According to tradition recorded in the Primary Chronicle, the chief East Slavic source of much of early Russian history, internal dissension and feuds among the East Slavs around Novgorod became so violent that the people voluntarily chose a Scandinavian chief, Ryurik, to rule over them in AD 862. In fact, Ryurik is a semimythical figure and his precise relationship with subsequent princely rulers of Rus is debated.

In 882 Kyiv and Novgorod were united as the state of Kievan Rus under a single ruler from the house of Ryurik. The East Slavs were pagans who worshiped the Earth�s natural forces. By the early 10th century, however, Kievan Rus had established close commercial and cultural ties with the Byzantine Empire, the center of Orthodox Christianity. In 980 Vladimir I (whose name is spelled Volodymyr in Ukrainian) became ruler; eight years later he converted to Orthodox Christianity and made Orthodoxy (see Orthodox Church) the official religion of Kievan Rus. The Slavic church had considerable autonomy, and services were held in a Slavic liturgical language known as Old Church Slavonic rather than in the Greek language of the Byzantine Empire. In matters of doctrine, however, the church obeyed the rulings of the patriarch of Constantinople in the Byzantine capital. Monasteries and churches were built in Byzantine style, and Byzantine culture became the predominant influence in fields such as art, architecture, and music. Vladimir�s choice of Orthodox Christianity, rather than the Latin church (Roman Catholicism) or Islam, had an important influence on the future of Russia. Orthodoxy played a crucial role in shaping the values and the separate identity of the East Slavs. As Christians, they belonged unequivocally to Europe rather than to one of the other great regional civilizations of the world. As Orthodox, particularly after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, they were powerful but peripheral members of the European Christian community.

Kievan Rus achieved its greatest power and splendor under Yaroslav the Wise in the 11th century. Yaroslav made Kyiv a great city and built magnificent buildings, including the notable Cathedral of Saint Sophia (also known as the Hagia Sophia of Kyiv). Yaroslav did much to develop Rus education and culture. He also compiled the first Russian law code, the so-called Russkaya Pravda (Russian Justice).

After Yaroslav�s death in 1054, Kievan Rus declined. The state�s prosperity was highly dependent on its control of the major trade routes between northern Europe and the Byzantine Empire and the Middle East. In the 11th and 12th centuries the Turkic Polovtsy (Cuman) tribe conquered and dominated the southeastern steppe, threatening the Kievan Rus trade routes. Matters worsened after the Crusaders sacked Constantinople (present-day İstanbul) in 1204. The huge but sparsely populated lands between the Baltic and Black seas were difficult to hold together as a single state. Furthermore, because Kievan Rus territories were divided among a ruler�s heirs, political power became fragmented and constant battles ensued between the various branches of the princely house.

Yaroslav�s grandson, Vladimir II Monomakh, made the final attempt to unite Kievan Rus, but after his death in 1125 the fragmentation continued. Other Kievan Rus principalities challenged Kyiv�s supremacy, particularly Galicia and Volhynia to the west; Chernigov, Novgorod-Severskiy, and Vladimir-Suzdal� to the northwest; Polotsk and Smolensk to the north; and Novgorod, by far the largest, in the far north.

Novgorod rose to a dominant position as a flourishing commercial state. In the 13th century the city became the site of a major factory of the Hanseatic League, a commercial confederation of European city-states. Kyiv also lost its importance as the great national and cultural center as Suzdal�, Vladimir, and ultimately Moscow, surpassed it. The East Slavic lands became a loose federation of small principalities, held together by common language, religion, traditions, and customs. Although ruled by members of the house of Ryurik, these principalities were often at war with one another. Plundering along the frontiers also caused difficulties. In the west the Poles, Lithuanians, and Teutonic Knights encroached on East Slavic territory; the Polovtsy repeatedly raided the south. While all these posed significant threats to Kievan Rus, in the 13th century an even greater danger came from East Asia.

In 1223 the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan invaded the southeast. The Polovtsy sent for help from the Russian princes, who came to their aid against this common, greater foe. In the Battle of the Kalka River (now Kal�mius River), the Polovtsy-Russian coalition was routed. After his victory, however, the Mongol khan recalled his armies to Asia and they retreated as rapidly as they had come. For 14 years, the Mongols made no move in the direction of Russia. Then, in 1237, Genghis Khan�s grandson Batu Khan led an army back to eastern Russia. On their northward march, Batu�s forces captured and destroyed most of the major cities in the Vladimir-Suzdal� region.

The difficult terrain of the forests and swamps south of Novgorod halted the Mongol sweep, and Batu Khan was forced to change the direction of his march, moving to the southwest. Kyiv desperately tried to defend itself, but the city was destroyed by Batu�s army in 1240. The invaders came to be generally known in Russia as the Tatars, after the Turkic-speaking people who comprised a prominent part of the Mongol forces. The Mongols ravaged Poland and Hungary and progressed as far east as Moravia. In 1242 Batu established his capital at Sarai on the lower Volga (near modern Volgograd) and founded the khanate known as the Golden Horde, which was virtually independent of the Mongol Empire.

In addition to the havoc it created in Russia at the time, the Mongol invasion had a long-term influence on later Russian history. Mongol rule increased Russia�s isolation from Europe, and Tatar customs, laws, and government also had an influence on Russia. During the Mongol era the East Slavs evolved into three distinct groups. One group, culturally influenced by the Poles and Lithuanians, eventually became known as White Russians, or Belorussians (Belarusians). A second group, formed of the Slavic population from Kyiv and adjacent areas, became known as Little Russians (Malorussians) and later as Ukrainians. Those who lived in the northeast became known as the Great Russians.

Although the Mongols did not attack Novgorod, northwestern Russia was menaced by invaders from the west during the same time period. The Swedes descended from the Baltic and sought to penetrate the territories of Novgorod. In 1240 a Swedish army landed on the banks of the Neva River, and Prince Alexander of Novgorod led a Russian army to meet them. The prince so completely defeated the Swedes that he became known as Alexander Nevsky, meaning "Alexander of the Neva." Two years later the Teutonic Knights, a religious military order of Germans, advanced from the west. Alexander led his troops to meet the Germans, crossing the frozen Lake Peipus, and routed them. Faced with continuing danger in the west and unwilling to risk Tatar invasion from the south, Alexander adopted a policy of loyal submission to the Golden Horde and conciliation with the khan. In accordance with Tatar wishes, Alexander journeyed to Sarai to secure permission to rule from the khan. The Tatars made Alexander ruler of Kyiv, Vladimir, and Novgorod. Most of the other Russian princes followed Alexander�s example, paying tribute and considering themselves vassals of the khan.

The town of Moscow, in the principality of Vladimir, occupied a favorable geographical position in the center of Russia and on the principal trade routes. In 1263 Alexander Nevsky gave Moscow to his youngest son, Daniel. Moscow, also known as Muscovy, was made a separate principality in 1301. Daniel was first in a line of powerful Muscovite princes, astute rulers who worked closely with the khans. As Mongol favorites they gradually extended their lands by annexing surrounding territories, retaining the city of Moscow as their capital. In 1328 the khan named Daniel�s son, Ivan I, grand prince of Muscovy. During Ivan�s reign the head of the Russian church, then called the metropolitan, moved from the town of Vladimir to Moscow. With the sanction of the church, the Muscovite grand princes began to organize a new Russian state with themselves as rulers.

Meanwhile, internal dissension rocked the Golden Horde. In the mid-14th century, a series of ineffectual rulers gained control of the khanate and the turmoil weakened their ability to collect tribute from the Russian princes. During the reign of Grand Prince Dmitry (1359-1389), Mamay Khan launched a military expedition to collect unpaid taxes. Dmitry and his army defeated Mamay�s troops in 1380 at the Battle of Kulikovo, although Mamay�s successor sacked Moscow two years later.

Not until the reign of Ivan III Vasilyevich (1462-1505), or Ivan the Great, did Muscovy throw off all control by the Golden Horde and establish itself as the dominant power in northern Russia. In 1478 Muscovy annexed Novgorod, with its huge territories and lucrative fur trade. Two years later Muscovy stopped paying tribute to the Golden Horde, which ultimately disintegrated into a number of separate, weaker khanates. Tver�, Muscovy�s traditional regional rival, was finally absorbed in 1485. After the collapse of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the Russian rulers began calling themselves tsars, a term Russians had previously used to describe the Byzantine emperor and the Tatar khan. However, the term tsar did not become the official title of the Russian ruler until the 16th century.

Muscovy�s increasing power and its position as the last surviving Orthodox state broadened its rulers� horizons and ambitions. Internally, the power of the tsar grew at the expense of the boyars (Russian nobles). The great increase in the state�s territory encouraged the development of a small but effective Muscovite bureaucracy that was loyal to the tsars alone. The tsars confiscated privately held lands in the conquered principalities and gave these estates to calvarymen who pledged continual military service in return. In the 16th century the streltsy, a regular infantry corps armed with firearms, was formed. The tsars now had an army of their own and were no longer dependent on the military forces raised by the boyars.

These practices continued during the reign of Ivan IV Vasilyevich, also known as Ivan the Terrible, who became grand prince of Muscovy in 1533. Ivan conquered and absorbed the Tatar khanates of Kazan� and Astrakhan� in the 1550s. During his reign Russia also began the conquest of Siberia, originally conducted by Yermak, a Cossack adventurer. Russia also established commercial contacts with England through the perilous White Sea trade route. Ivan IV imported foreign technical and professional experts, a practice continued by subsequent Russian monarchs. However, the tsar�s attempt to seize Livonia and establish Russian control over part of the Baltic coastline failed in the face of Polish and Swedish resistance, and also seriously overstrained Russian resources. Furthermore, Ivan IV became mentally unstable; his increasingly maniacal domestic policies resulted in the murder of part of the aristocratic elite and the devastation of a number of regions. During Ivan�s reign the Crimean Tatars began to make destructive raids into Russian territory in search of slaves, for whom there was an insatiable market in the Middle East. All of these factors worsened the acute economic crisis that Ivan IV bequeathed to his heirs upon his death in 1584.

Ivan�s son, Fyodor I, was sickly and feeble-minded, and his brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, dominated the court during Fyodor�s reign. Fyodor died without an heir in 1598, and the Assembly of the Land (zemsky sobor)�a council that represented the aristocracy, chief towns, and the church�met to choose his successor. The assembly settled on Boris Godunov.

Boris Godunov never firmly established his legitimate hold on power, partly because he was suspected of murdering Dmitry Ivanovich, Fyodor�s younger brother and last male blood relative. Furthermore, Boris was unpopular among the members of the aristocracy, who resented his power, and among the peasantry, who were heavily taxed and whose mobility he had severely restricted.

The institution of serfdom (a system in which an agricultural worker is bound to the land and the landowner) had gradually begun to take hold in Russia during the 16th century. For some time the impoverished conditions of the peasants had induced many to seek refuge in the vast steppes to the south. Independent communities of people who became known as Cossacks developed and grew near the major rivers of the steppes. Some of the Cossacks were farmers, but many were also warriors. Discontent increased as a result of a severe famine that began in 1601. In 1604 False Dmitry, a pretender claiming to be Ivan IV�s son and the rightful heir to the throne, invaded Russia with Polish troops. False Dmitry�s advance on Moscow received the overwhelming support of the peasants and Cossacks in the western provinces. Boris died unexpectedly in April 1605, and in June False Dmitry took Moscow. He was a conscientious and able ruler, but he displeased the boyars, who had hoped for a revival of their power. They revolted, murdered False Dmitry, and elevated the boyar Vasily Shuysky to the throne. This move was opposed by the Cossacks and rebellious peasants, who chafed under oppressive serf laws and feared the severity of boyar rule. They rose in southern Russia and joined another pretender, the second False Dmitry, who was already advancing on Moscow. At the same time, Zygmunt III, king of Poland, invaded from the west. After a long period of fighting and intrigue, Vasily was deposed in 1610, and the throne was left vacant. Some boyars advanced the candidacy of Władysław, the son of Zygmunt, and a Polish army entered Moscow. The entire country then fell into a state of anarchy. In 1612 an army raised by Kuzma Minin and led by Prince Dmitry Mikhailovich Pozharsky drove out the Poles.

The Time of Troubles, as this turbulent period became known, was subsequently seen as proof of Russia�s need for a powerful monarchy whose legitimacy and authority were accepted by all the Russian people. In the absence of an autocratic tsar, Russia appeared doomed to anarchy and to dismemberment by powerful neighbors.

In 1613 the Assembly of the Land elected Michael Romanov tsar. Michael was the son of the patriarch of Moscow and a great-nephew of Ivan IV�s wife. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia until 1917, when a revolution ended imperial rule in Russia.

During the three centuries of Romanov rule, the dominant thread was the state�s determination that Russia become and remain a great European power. Since Central and Western Europe were economically and culturally more advanced than Russia, this policy demanded great ingenuity from the rulers and even greater sacrifice and suffering from the population. The law code of 1649 effectively divided the society into ranks and occupational classes from which neither the individual nor his or her descendants could move. Previous laws prohibiting the movement of peasants from estates were extended to include movement from cities and towns. Thus, the law code froze not only social status but also residency. By the mid-18th century the state had succeeded in making Russia militarily and economically powerful, but at the cost of imposing a harsh form of serfdom and despotic rule.

In the early 19th century, French emperor Napoleon I invaded Russia and was defeated. Russia was then widely viewed, both at home and abroad, as continental Europe�s most powerful empire. Other European countries subsequently became more powerful, however, as their economies underwent the vast changes of the Industrial Revolution, which began in England and took a number of generations to spread across Europe. The Industrial Revolution did not reach Russia until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Crimean War (1853-1856), in which Russia was defeated by France and Britain, showed that industrialized countries could equip, arm, transport, and pay for much more formidable armies and fleets than largely agricultural countries such as Russia. After the war the Romanov regime was forced to rapidly modernize the economy in order to ensure the country�s security and its position among the Great Powers, which also included Austria, Britain, France, and Prussia. At the beginning of World War I in 1914, Russia�s economy was more industrialized and its people were more urbanized and literate than they had been before the Crimean War. Still, Russia was well behind Germany and Britain. In addition, rapid modernization created acute conflicts between classes and nationalities. The strains of World War I caused internal conflicts and brought down the Romanov dynasty in 1917.

The tsarist state in the 17th century was not very different from what it had been under the 16th-century Ryurikids. The monarch ruled in alliance with the leading aristocratic families, but his power was enhanced by the steady growth of the (still small) bureaucracy and the minor provincial landowning nobles. The tightening of serfdom and of the state�s control over the frontier Cossack communities led to a number of peasant and Cossack rebellions, of which the most famous was that of Stenka Razin in 1670.

During the reign of Michael�s son Alexis (1645-1676), Russia became involved in the struggle between Cossacks living in present-day Ukraine and that region�s Polish rulers. The Cossacks, supported by Ukrainians, revolted against the Poles, but they requested Russia�s aid to sustain their success. In 1654 Alexis extended his help in return for a Cossack pledge of loyalty, which immediately led to war between Russia and Poland. The war was settled in 1667 by a treaty that split Ukraine into two parts, divided by the Dnieper River. Poland retained the land west of the river, and Russia gained the land to the east and Kyiv. Western influences entered Russia partly through Ukraine but encountered fierce resistance, especially in the religious sphere. In the 1650s Nikon, the patriarch of Moscow, initiated a series of liturgical reforms that caused a major schism in the Russian Orthodox Church. The loss of the so-called Old Believers�those members of the church who rejected the reforms�did long-term damage to the Orthodox Church�s vitality, to its ability to remain independent of the state, and to its hold on the peasantry.

The reign of Peter I (1682-1725), third son of Alexis, was a turning point in Russian history. At the end of the 17th century, Russia was a backward land that stood outside the political affairs of Europe. Superstition, distrust of foreigners, and conservatism characterized most of the society. The economy was based on primitive agriculture and the military organization was sorely out of date. Peter carried forward the Westernizing policies of his father, but in a much more radical and uncompromising manner. He remodeled the armed forces and bureaucracy along European lines, and imposed new taxes that dramatically increased the state�s revenues. He also fostered the military and metallurgical industries, whose main center became the Urals region.

Peter�s policy of territorial expansion resulted in almost constant war. He created Russia�s first navy, which took an Ottoman fortress on the Sea of Azov in 1696. Peter then turned his attention to Sweden. Early in the Great Northern War (1700-1721) between Sweden and a coalition of Russia, Poland, and Denmark, Peter conquered the northeastern coast of the Baltic Sea from Sweden, and in 1703 began building a new capital city, which he called Saint Petersburg, on the Baltic coast. The war, which officially ended with the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, established Russia as the dominant power in the Baltic region. After the war Peter took the title emperor, marking the official inauguration of the Russian Empire, and for his military accomplishments he became known as Peter the Great.

Both technological and cultural Westernization advanced quickly under Peter, but the mass of the population paid heavily for his incessant demands for soldiers and taxes. When Peter died in 1725 Russia was more respected and feared in Europe than ever before. The Russian army�s excellent performance against Prussia in the Seven Years� War (1756-1763) and its resounding victories over the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish Wars of the 18th century resulted in Russia�s acceptance as an equal by the other leading European powers.

Under Catherine II (1762-1796), known in the West as Catherine the Great, Russia annexed 468,000 sq km (180,000 sq mi) from Poland, which disintegrated as Austria and Prussia also took Polish land. Still more significant were the gains of southern Ukrainian territories, which would become the center of Russian agriculture and heavy industry in the 19th century. Although the state�s pressure on the population relaxed somewhat after Peter�s death, serfdom continued, as did peasant resentment. In 1773 Yemelyan Pugachev led a Cossack rebellion against the monarchy that also developed into a revolt against serf owners. Romanov troops crushed the revolt in 1774, and Catherine strengthened the oppressive serf laws. She encouraged the spread of Western culture and values among the Russian elite, although as a result of the French Revolution (1789-1799), which resulted in the overthrow of the monarchy in France, she became more suspicious of public opinion in the last years of her reign. This set the pattern for much of the 19th century, which was marked by increasing conflict between the Romanov state and sections of the educated classes who demanded Western-style freedoms and rights.

Catherine II died in 1796 and was succeeded by her son, Paul I. His increasingly despotic and unbalanced policies prompted court nobles to conspire against him, and he was murdered in 1801. Paul�s eldest son, Alexander I, then ascended to the throne and ruled until 1825. Under Alexander, Russia achieved unprecedented prestige and glory as a result of its victory over Napoleon�s invading army in 1812 and subsequent military victories in Germany and France. Russian rule was extended to much of Transcaucasia, Finland, and further regions of Poland. After the patriotic euphoria caused by the victory over Napoleon, part of the nobility increasingly resented Alexander�s failure to live up to his reputation as a reformer. Upon Alexander�s death in 1825, a group of military officers who became known as the Decembrists launched a coup to prevent Alexander�s brother Nicholas I from ascending to the throne. The Decembrists wanted a constitutional monarchy led by Alexander�s other brother, Constantine. They sought to increase civil and political rights and to end serfdom and the brutal mistreatment of the peasantry.

In the end the Decembrists were easily suppressed, but the revolt had threatened Nicholas�s life and the empire�s stability. Furthermore, Polish nationalists expelled the Russian imperial authorities from Poland in 1830, although Russian troops regained Warsaw in 1831. In 1848 a wave of nationalist revolutions swept across Europe. These events persuaded Nicholas that the threat of revolution in both Europe and Russia was real. In foreign policy Nicholas responded by entering into a conservative alliance with Austria and Prussia. This alliance was intended to ensure peace and stability among the European powers and to ensure the suppression of any revolts that might occur. In 1849 Russian troops helped the Austrian emperor repress the rebellion of his Hungarian subjects.

Domestically, Nicholas�s answer to revolution was to create a state security police, the gendarmerie, and to tighten censorship. The emperor imposed stifling controls over Russian universities and cultural life, alienating part of the younger generation from the state. Nicholas�s reign also witnessed the great growth of the bureaucracy, whose incompetence and frequent corruption were immortalized by novelist Nikolay Gogol in such works as The Inspector General (1836). Nevertheless, Nicholas�s regime did have some achievements to its credit. The quality and size of the educational system increased greatly, as did the number of cultured, public-spirited, would-be reformers among the younger generation of the bureaucracy and the landowning class. When Nicholas I�s regime was discredited by defeat in the Crimean War, these men were able to lead a program of radical reforms under the emperor�s successor, Alexander II, who reigned from 1855 to 1881.

The Crimean War occurred partly because of Nicholas I�s miscalculations, but also because the French and British were looking for opportunities to weaken Russia, whose position in Europe and the Middle East seemed dangerously strong. In the wake of defeat, Alexander II abolished serfdom, introduced a Western-style legal system, created elected local government institutions (zemstvos), eased censorship, and radically modernized the army and the communications system. His reforms did not, however, create stability or consensus in Russia. Both the peasants and the landowning nobles believed that the land rightfully belonged to them and were dissatisfied by the emancipation settlement that had ended serfdom. Many young upper- and middle-class Russians felt that Alexander�s reforms had not gone far enough to improve the peasant�s lot, to bring Russia up to Western levels of prosperity and freedom, or to allow Russians the right to express their political opinions and to participate in government. A terrorist movement emerged in the 1870s, and the campaign of assassination of senior officials culminated in Alexander II�s murder in 1881.

The increasing terrorism and social conflict in the empire�s last decades strengthened the emperors� conviction that the empire would disintegrate into anarchy without a resolute authoritarian regime. They believed that Russia was too poor and too divided by class and ethnic differences for any form of democracy to work. In the last weeks of Alexander II�s reign, he was persuaded to introduce modest constitutional reforms that would have allowed a very limited degree of public participation in government. His son Alexander III, however, abandoned the reforms and embarked on a policy of repression when he became emperor after his father�s assassination. Alexander III curtailed the rights of the zemstvos and the universities. Civil freedoms were further infringed by emergency decrees that allowed anyone suspected of political opposition to be exiled by administrative order without recourse to the courts.

Traditionally the imperial regime had been relatively tolerant of non-Russian cultures, languages, and religions. Much of the empire�s aristocracy was of non-Russian origin, spoke French by choice, and was not Orthodox in religion. In the second half of the 19th century, and in particular under Alexander III, the regime began emphasizing its Russianness. Increasing constraints were placed on non-Russian languages and cultures. Schools began teaching exclusively in Russian, administrative bodies could use only Russian, and publication in some languages was forbidden. To a degree these limitations followed trends evident elsewhere in Europe. The policy of Russification was also a response to fears that the multiethnic empire would disintegrate unless its population was drawn more closely together in culture and language. Whatever its motives, however, the policy of Russification caused great indignation among many non-Russians. The Jews were treated especially poorly: They were forced to live in certain areas, were not permitted to enter specific professions, and sometimes fell victim to murderous attacks by local Slavic mobs (see Pogrom).

Many conflicts that boiled beneath the surface during Alexander III�s reign exploded under his son, Nicholas II, who ascended to the throne in 1894. Harsh conditions in industrial factories created mass support for the revolutionary socialist movement. Furthermore, from 1855 to 1914 the rural population more than doubled, increasing pressure on the land and peasant hostility to the landowners. Non-Russians were embittered by continued Russification. Most sectors of society were united by dislike of the imperial regime and by the demand for civil and political rights. In 1904 the government blundered into an unnecessary war with Japan over spheres of control in Korea and Manchuria. Russia�s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War the following year exposed its weakness, and the opposition to the regime seized its chance.

In January 1905 striking workers peaceably demonstrated for reforms in Saint Petersburg. As they marched to the Winter Palace, government troops fired on them, killing and wounding hundreds. The event, known as Bloody Sunday, ignited the revolt known as the Russian Revolution of 1905. In October, faced with a general strike and hoping to restore peace and stability, Nicholas II unwillingly conceded major constitutional reform, including freedom of speech and the creation of a popularly elected assembly, or Duma. However, the unrest continued as revolutionaries demanded even greater freedoms. Terrified by the growing danger of social revolution, Russia�s property-owning elite rallied to the regime. The key to the emperor�s survival was the army�s loyalty: The army crushed a revolutionary insurrection in December and eventually restored order in the towns and countryside.

When the First Duma met from May to July 1906, its main demands were for a government responsible to a democratically elected parliament and for the expropriation of noble estates. These demands were unacceptable to the government, which dissolved the Duma. The Second Duma, elected in 1907, was even more radical than the first; it too was dissolved within a few months. Nicholas then illegally changed the electoral laws to favor the election of those with more conservative interests, such as landowners and industrialists, and the government found it much easier to deal with the Duma. Although significant reforms were achieved between 1907 and 1914, particularly land reforms advanced by Prime Minister Pyotr A. Stolypin, tension between the government and the Duma remained high.

The Russian government did not want war in 1914 but felt that the only alternative was acceptance of German domination of Europe. Upper- and middle-class Russians rallied around the regime�s war effort. Peasants and workers were much less enthusiastic. Germany was Europe�s leading military and industrial power, and Austria and the Ottoman Empire were its allies in the war. Consequently, Russia was forced to fight on three fronts and was isolated from its French and British war partners. Under these circumstances the Russian war effort was impressive. Having won a number of major battles in 1916, the army was far from defeated when the Russian Revolution of 1917 broke out in February. The home front collapsed under the strains of war, partly for economic reasons but primarily because the already existing public distrust of the regime was deepened by tales of inefficiency, corruption, and even treason in high places. Many of these tales were nonsense or grossly exaggerated, such as the belief that a semiliterate mystic, Grigory Rasputin, had great political influence within the government. What mattered, however, was that the rumors were believed.

In February (March in the Western, or New Style, calendar) 1917 violent strikes broke out in Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg had been renamed in 1914). The Petrograd garrison mutinied and the Duma leaders took power. Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, marking the end of imperial rule, and he and his family were imprisoned and later murdered. As conservative defenders of the empire had long predicted, the monarchy�s fall was quickly followed by the empire�s disintegration. Power passed first to the provisional government established by the Duma, and then, after the October Revolution of 1917 (November in the New Style calendar), to the Soviet government of the Bolsheviks (later known as Communists). The tumultuous period was marked by extreme socialist revolution, civil war, and the destruction or emigration of much of the upper and middle classes. See Russian Civil War.

The Communists won the civil war in 1921. In 1922 they established a new state called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or Soviet Union), of which Russia was the largest constituent republic. For information on the history of the USSR, see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: History of the Soviet Union.

The USSR collapsed in 1991 and Russia again became an independent nation. The newly independent country faced a time of exceptional economic and political crisis that necessitated tough decisions and painful policies. Conflict quickly erupted between Russian president Boris Yeltsin and the legislature. These battles were partly a struggle for power and the perks of office, but they also revolved around economic policy and issues of Russian nationalism and national pride.

The Soviet Union was a superpower and possessed a very different social and economic system from that in the West. This appealed to the pride of many Russians and helped erase a traditional sense of inferiority to the West. In 1991, quite suddenly and unexpectedly for most Russians, the USSR ceased to exist and Russia lost much of its international power and status. In the 1990s Russia was forced to ask the West for economic assistance and investment. The pro-American foreign policy of President Yeltsin and his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, quickly found considerable opposition. The opposition increased when Russia did not receive the massive Western financial assistance that many Russians had naively expected.

American determination to incorporate many former Soviet satellite states into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) angered the Russian political elite. Because NATO�s essential purpose had been to serve as an anti-Soviet alliance, the political elite felt it was insulting when the former satellites were invited to join. They also resented being excluded from the dominant military and political bloc in Europe, which seemed intent on extending its membership right up to Russia�s borders. Under Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, Russia became more critical of United States policies and began to rebuild political ties to China and some of its old allies in the Middle East. Even as Russia fostered these ties, the Russian government recognized its own weakness and its need for positive relations with the West. This knowledge prevented Russia from going too far for fear of isolating itself from Western nations. In the Soviet era international isolation and the attempt to develop a powerful self-sufficient economy had failed disastrously. Yeltsin�s regime understood this and was committed to full participation in the world economy and international trade. These things could only be achieved on the West�s terms.

Ethnic Russians were particularly sore that the collapse of the USSR left 25 million Russians living in areas that were now foreign countries. Of these 25 million, 11 million lived in Ukraine, almost 6 million in Kazakhstan, and most of the rest in other parts of Central Asia and the Baltic republics. In some areas, most notably Crimea and northern Kazakhstan, Russians made up large majorities. This created the dangerous potential for border conflicts and secessionist movements. Some conflicts have erupted in the outlying areas of the former Soviet Union, particularly in the Caucasus region, Tajikistan, and Moldova. However, extremely few Russians have been killed in ethnic conflicts and the Russian state has accepted its post-Soviet borders.

In 1992 and 1993 Yeltsin�s opponents in the legislature, led by the legislature�s chairman, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoy, denounced the government�s failure to support Russians in the "Near Abroad," as Russians call the outlying areas of the former USSR. In particular, they demanded that Russia support the secessionist movements in the Trans-Dniester region of Moldova and in the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. They condemned the refusal of the Latvian and Estonian governments to grant automatic citizenship to Russians who were permanent residents in these republics. This opposition forced Yeltsin to modify his policy somewhat. As a result Russia delayed agreement with Ukraine over arrangements for the former Soviet Black Sea Fleet (which was to be divided between Ukraine and Russia) and increased support for the Russian-speaking movement in the Trans-Dniester region. On the crucial issues, however, Yeltsin remained firm. Russian troops were withdrawn from the Baltic republics in 1993 and 1994. No encouragement was given to the Crimean secessionists, and in 1997 agreement was finally reached over the Black Sea Fleet and its base at Sevastopol�, Ukraine. The accord granted Russia a 20-year lease to a separate bay for its portion of the fleet at Sevastopol�. That same year a Russo-Ukrainian friendship treaty was signed. The underlying reason for the government�s restrained policy was its awareness that challenging the post-Soviet borders would likely lead to instability and war, which would doom chances of economic recovery and ensure international isolation. Such challenges would also be deeply unpopular with the bulk of the Russian people, whose overriding wish was for peace and prosperity, and who were exhausted by decades of forced sacrifice in the Soviet era in the name of the state�s military power and international prestige.

Ethnic Russians make up a little more than four-fifths of the present population of the Russian Federation. Having just witnessed the disintegration of the USSR as a result in part of non-Russian nationalism, Russian elites were understandably fearful that similar developments could take place in non-Russian areas of their own republic. Initially these fears appeared to be substantiated by calls for far-reaching autonomy, and sometimes even full independence, from some of the non-Russians. In almost all cases, however, these demands were satisfied by concessions over regional autonomy and tax privileges. Even the initially extreme demands of the Volga Tatars (a Muslim people conquered by Russia in the mid-16th century) were resolved in 1994.

By 1994 the only region still demanding independence was Chechnya, in the northeastern Caucasus. The Chechens had a long history of bitter anti-Russian feeling. They had fought ferociously for decades in the 19th century against the Russian invasion of their territory, and they had revolted against the new Soviet regime in 1920. Accusing them of collaborating with the Germans in World War II (1939-1945), Soviet leader Joseph Stalin deported the entire Chechen people to Central Asia, and many lives were lost. Under Stalin�s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, the Chechens were allowed to return to their homeland, but their traditional anti-Russian feeling was enflamed by the treatment they had received from the Soviet regime.

When the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991, power in Chechnya fell into the hands of extreme Chechen nationalists, who chose Dzhokhar Dudayev as their leader. Under Dudayev, Chechnya not only drove out Russian garrisons and rejected any control by Moscow, but also acted as a base from which criminal elements carried out kidnappings and other outrages on Russian soil. Dudayev�s opponents in Chechnya unsuccessfully tried to displace him by a rebellion; they were backed in their efforts by the Russian government. When the rebellion failed, in December 1994 the Russian government sent troops to Chechyna in an attempt to reassert its control there. This decision proved disastrous.

The demoralized and poorly trained Russian army proved incapable of suppressing determined Chechen opposition either in the Chechen capital of Groznyy or in the countryside. As humiliating defeats and growing casualties made the war more and more unpopular in Russia, Yeltsin�s government sought a way out of the conflict. A Russian rocket attack killed Dudayev in April 1996, but the Chechens persisted. In August 1996 Yeltsin�s national security adviser, Aleksandr Lebed, brokered a peace agreement with Chechen leaders. In May 1997 a peace treaty was signed that recognized Chechnya�s de facto independence but postponed any final constitutional settlement until 2001. Meanwhile, conflicts in and around Chechnya between rival factions and nationalities, such as the Ingush and Ossetians, continued to destabilize the North Caucasus region.

In August 1999 hundreds of Islamic guerrillas crossed into Dagestan from Chechnya and occupied several villages, triggering Russian air and artillery attacks. Then a deadly wave of terrorist bombings struck several Russian cities, including Moscow, in August and September 1999. Russian leaders accused Islamic terrorists from Chechnya of organizing the attacks.

On September 23 Russian warplanes began a campaign of air strikes against targets in Chechnya, bombing oil derricks and industrial targets near Groznyy and suspected rebel bases throughout the republic. In October, Russian ground forces entered Chechnya with the goal of capturing Groznyy. The air strikes intensified in November as Russian troops moved across Chechnya toward the capital, and Russian forces surrounded the city in early December. Despite heavy bombing and artillery fire, rebels entrenched in fortified buildings managed to hold Groznyy for many weeks, waging a fierce street-by-street battle with advancing Russian troops. By the time the fighting ended in early February 2000, Groznyy was reduced to ruins. The Russian troops and warplanes pursued the rebels into the high mountains of southern Chechnya and attempted to wipe them out there. Although Russian forces occupied most of Chechnya, the republic was not fully pacified and the probability of continuing guerrilla war and terrorism remained.

Among the most pressing problems for the new government, however, was the economy. In December 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian economy was in a terrible state. Foreign reserves had been exhausted, impeding the country�s ability to import goods, and economic output had been in decline since the 1970s. Yeltsin�s response was to launch the so-called shock therapy program of Prime Minister Yegor Gaydar. This entailed freeing prices in order to lure goods back into the shops, removing legal barriers to private trade and manufacture, and allowing foreign imports into the Russian market to break the power of local monopolies. The immediate results of this policy included extremely high levels of inflation and the near bankruptcy of much of Russian industry. Subsequently, a program of privatization was pushed through in 1994 under Anatoly Chubais, the deputy prime minister in charge of the Ministry of Privatization. Although in most cases the existing management acquired ownership of the factories they had previously administered, large private banks emerged and began to compete for control of the economy.

By the late 1990s the economic reforms had achieved considerable successes. The old, inefficient system of centralized state planning had been dismantled and a capitalist economy was being created. Nevertheless, the process was far from complete, and the Russian population paid a very high price. Most of the industry inherited from Soviet times used out-of-date technology, employed excessive numbers of workers, and was located with no thought to distance from suppliers and markets. Managers and workers trained in the Soviet era found it difficult to adapt to capitalist imperatives of profitability, marketing, and shareholders� power. Inflation depressed incomes and wiped out savings at a time when whole sectors of the economy, and even whole cities, were faced with the prospect of unemployment resulting from the massive closing of factories.

Matters were made much worse by the Russian government�s inability to carry out the most basic functions of any state, namely the preservation of order and the collection of taxes. The emergence of small businesses, considered necessary for a capitalist economy, was made difficult by rampant criminal activity, corrupt officials, and arbitrary and exorbitant taxes. The tax system was so erratic and inefficient that the revenues needed to sustain the armed forces and basic welfare services were not collected. Medical services collapsed and life expectancy, particularly of males, fell dramatically. Meanwhile, a number of well-placed individuals made vast fortunes by turning assets previously owned by the state into their private property. Unable to collect revenues sufficient to fund even its most basic requirements, the state was forced to borrow more and more on domestic and international markets.

Since independence Russia�s political scene has been unstable and conflict-ridden as well. In December 1992 the author of shock therapy, Yegor Gaydar, was forced out of office by opposition in the legislature. His successor, Viktor Chernomyrdin, was the former head of the natural-gas industry of the Soviet Union; this increased his acceptance by key conservatives. Chernomyrdin pursued basically the same policies as Gaydar but made more concessions to powerful economic and political interests. Nevertheless, no lasting compromise could be achieved between Yeltsin and his supporters on the one hand, and the legislature on the other. In the absence of clear constitutional provisions to delineate powers and resolve conflicts between executive and legislature, the issue was settled by force in October 1993. When Yeltsin dissolved the parliament in September, armed opposition leaders and conservative deputies occupied the parliament building and refused to disband. Troops loyal to Yeltsin stormed the building and arrested the opposition leaders, leaving more than 100 dead.

Yeltsin subsequently drew up a new constitution, which was accepted by the electorate in a December 1993 referendum. Under the new constitution the president�s powers were greatly enhanced at the legislature�s expense; this enabled Yeltsin to accelerate his program of economic reform and to mount his invasion of Chechnya despite parliamentary opposition. Both the December 1993 and December 1995 elections gave Yeltsin�s opponents, the Communists and the Russian nationalists, the majority of seats in the legislature. In the more crucial 1996 presidential election, however, Yeltsin defeated his Communist opponent, Gennady Zyuganov, a former senior Soviet bureaucrat. Yeltsin�s victory was helped by his alliance with financial interests that controlled the media. Zyuganov�s party was stronger on nostalgia for Soviet days than on realistic answers to Russia�s current problems. In choosing Yeltsin the electorate showed its continued dislike for much of the former Communist era, its disbelief that old times could be restored, and its preference for the stability and continuity that Yeltsin represented.

In March 1998 Yeltsin unexpectedly dismissed Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and the rest of his cabinet. Yeltsin then appointed Sergey Kiriyenko, a young reformist with limited central government experience, as prime minister. Russia�s failing economy continued its steep decline, and in mid-1998 Yeltsin dismissed Kiriyenko and attempted to reinstate Chernomyrdin. Parliament rejected Chernomyrdin�s return as prime minister, approving Yeltsin�s compromise choice, foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov, in September. Primakov acquired significant power beginning in October 1998 after a series of illnesses left Yeltsin unable to handle many of his duties. In December 1998 Yeltsin and Belarusian president Alyaksandr Lukashenka signed an accord for the two countries to merge their currencies and banking systems by the end of 1999. In May 1999 Yeltsin dismissed Primakov, criticizing him for failing to revive Russia's economy. Many observers said Yeltsin objected to Primakov's growing popularity. A week later, Russia's parliament approved Yeltsin's choice for Primakov's successor, interior minister and Yeltsin loyalist Sergey Stepashin.

Stepashin did not last long. In August, Yeltsin dismissed him, along with the rest of the cabinet, and named Vladimir Putin, the head of Russia's domestic intelligence service, as Stepashin's replacement. Yeltsin stated that he wanted Putin to succeed him as president when Yeltsin�s term ended in July 2000. To some observers the selection and endorsement of Putin, a loyal Yeltsin ally, signaled an attempt by Yeltsin to ensure his succession by a friendly replacement. Putin�s determination to crush the rebels in Chechnya earned him broad popular support.

Yeltsin resigned unexpectedly on December 31, 1999, and named Putin acting president. Yeltsin said he was stepping down to make room for a younger generation of political leaders. The timing of Yeltsin's resignation, which came six months before his second term formally ended, appeared designed to boost Putin's chances of winning an early presidential election. The decision to resign may also have been linked to Yeltsin�s poor health. In the presidential election, held in March 2000, Putin was elected to a full term as president, winning almost 53 percent of the vote.

At the start of the 21st century any restoration of the Communist order of Soviet times appeared unlikely. The new property-owning elite were too powerful to be displaced, and the Russian state was far too weak to reassert the control over economy and society that was the key feature of Soviet times. Economic recovery and political stability depended above all on the creation of effective fiscal and legal systems, neither of which seemed likely in the immediate future. On the other hand, some regions were beginning to prosper. The major political development of the late 1990s was the growing devolution of power to democratically elected provincial governors. This was generally a welcome change in a country where historically too much has depended on central government and the individuals who dominate it.