Russia, known as the Russian Federation, is a country that extends across Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Being the largest country in the world with an equivalent to one ninth of the planet's land area. Its capital is the Federal City of Moscow.
Russia spans 11 time zones and is the ninth most populous country.
The history of Russia has its origins with the Eastern Slavs and led by a warrior class of Vikings, mainly in Kievan Rus, where Orthodox Christianity was adopted from the Byzantine Empire.
Russia has always had power. First with the Russian Tsardom of Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible) until the founding of the Russian Empire by Peter the Great in 1721, who moved the capital and founded Saint Petersburg in 1703. It had Russian expansion under Catherine II (Catherine the Great) and its fall with the abdication of Nicholas II, the last of the Romanov Dynasty.
After the Bolshevik Revolution in February 1917, Saint Petersburg was called Petrograd (Петроград) (1914-24) and Leningrad (Ленинград) (1924-91). In March 1918 the capital was moved to Moscow.
Russia was the dominant country of the Soviet Union, the first and largest constitutionally established socialist country, a period of great growth and industrialization. After the bureaucratization of the state by Stalin, it played an important role during the Second World War. Later, the Cold War and the space race would put the capabilities of the socialist planned economy to the limit.
In 1991 it was decided to dissolve the USSR and the Russian Federation was born.
The Red Square, its architecture, the cathedrals, its great history, strange characters like the mystic Rasputin, great leaders like Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky during the Soviet era, intellectuals like Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoyevsky, musicians like Tchaikovsky, its importance for cinema, the space race with Gagarin as an icon, the ballet, its great cities, its great wealth, cultural and demographic diversity, make Russia a place with a lot to learn and discover.
