Russia is the largest country in the world, extending over much of northern Eurasia and covering 11 time zones. Russia’s history began thousands of years ago with scattered nomadic tribes and invasions by Huns and Turkic Avars. Between the 7th and 5th centuries B.C., Iron Age settlements formed along the Upper Volga, Valday and Oka Rivers, while Turkic Khazars settled the Lower Volga steppes region along with Varangians and Slavs, the earliest people to be called “Rus.” In the 10th and 11th centuries A.D., this state of Kievan Rus grew and prospered, opening trade routes between European Crusaders and the Orient. Turkic invasions pushed the Slavic people north. In the 13th century, the Mongolian “Golden Horde” invaded; known as the Tatars, they killed about half the population of Russia and held sway there for some three centuries. The Novgorod Republic retained a degree of autonomy and, led by Alexander Nevsky, repelled Germanic invaders during the Crusades.
In the early 14th century, a powerful successor to Kievan Rus developed: the Grand Duchy of Moscow. It annexed rivals like Novgorod and eventually became the basis of the modern Russian state. Ivan III ("Ivan the Great") eventually threw out all invaders, became “grand duke of all the Russias,” and repelled all further attacks by Crimean Tatars and other Turkic peoples. Ivan IV ("Ivan the Terrible") ruled from 1533 to 1547, when he was crowned the first Czar. Imperial Russia continued until Russia’s involvement in World War I precipitated the Russian Revolution in 1917. This ushered in the Soviet era, a powerful regime which lasted for most of the 20th century but eventually collapsed in the early 1990s.
Russia’s literacy rate is over 99%, and its cultural contributions include literature (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn), music (folk and classical—Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich), ballet (Bolshoi, Nureyev, Baryshnikov), cinema (Battleship Potemkin) and sports (Olympic and otherwise).
There is much to see in Russia, especially in its two great cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg. Moscow, Russia’s capital, boasts some 2,500 historical and architectural monuments, 70 museums, 50 theaters, 4,500 libraries and 540 colleges and research institutions. Travelers visit Red Square, with the colorful onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, the tomb of Vladimir Lenin and the massive 120-year-old GUM department store, the nearby Kremlin, and of course the city’s world-famous Metro system. St. Petersburg provides gentler and more graceful pleasures with its romantic canals, baroque palaces and lovely avenues and squares designed along European lines. The Hermitage is not to be missed—it is both the historic Winter Palace and a world-class art museum with an extensive collection of works ranging from da Vinci and Michelangelo to Cézanne and Picasso. Travelers along the Volga can also experience the Russian countryside, with its traditional villages, lovely churches and cathedrals, and sites from the country’s fascinating history.