Geography

Russia is a country located in Europe and in North Asia. The European part of the country includes the territories to the west of the Ural Mountains. Russia is the largest country in the world in terms of area, but is unfavourably located in relation to major sea lanes of the world. Despite its size, much of the country lacks proper soils and climates (either too cold or too dry) for agriculture. Russia's topology includes Europe's highest mountain, its longest river, and the world's deepest lake. The topography and climate resemble those of the northernmost portion of the North American continent. The northern forests and the plains bordering them to the south find their closest counterparts in the Yukon Territory and in the wide swath of land extending across most of Canada. The terrain, climate and settlement patterns of Siberia are similar to those of Alaska and Canada.

Spatial Extent

The two most widely separated points in Russia are about 8,000 km (5,000 mi) apart along a geodesic (i.e. shortest line between two points on the Earth's surface). These points are: the boundary with Poland on a 60-km-long (40-mi-long) spit of land separating the Gulf of Gdansk from the Vistula Lagoon; and the farthest southeast of the Kurile Islands, a few miles off Hokkaido Island, Japan.

The points which are furthest separated in longitude are 6,600 km (4,100 mi) apart along a geodesic. These points are: in the West, the same spit; in the East, the Big Diomede Island (Ostrov Ratmanova).

The Russian Federation spans eleven time zones.

Borders

The most practical way to describe Russia is as a main part (a large contiguous portion with its off-shore islands) and an exclave, Kaliningrad, (at the southeast corner of the Baltic Sea). The main part's borders and coasts (starting in the far northwest and proceeding counter-clockwise) are:

• borders with Norway and Finland
• a short coast on the Baltic Sea, facing eight other countries on its shores from Finland to Estonia and including the port of St. Petersburg
• borders with Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine
• a coast on the Black Sea, facing five other countries on its shores from Ukraine to Georgia
• borders with Georgia and Azerbaijan
• a coast on the Caspian Sea, facing four other countries on its shores from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan
• borders with Kazakhstan, China (western), Mongolia, China (eastern), and North Korea
• an extensive coastline that provides access to all the maritime nations of the world, and stretches:
  • from the North Pacific Ocean including
    • the Sea of Japan (where the west shore of Russia's Sakhalin lies)
    • the Sea of Okhotsk (where the east shore of Sakhalin and its Kurile Islands lie)
    • the Bering Sea
  • through the Bering Strait (where its minor island of Big Diomede is separated by only a few miles from Little Diomede, a part of the US state of Alaska)
  • to the Arctic Ocean, including
    • the Chukchi Sea (where the south and east shores of its Wrangel Island lie)
    • the East Siberian Sea (where its west shore, and the east shores of its New Siberian Islands lie)
    • the Laptev Sea (where their west shores lie)
    • the Kara Sea (where the east shore of its Novaya Zemlya lies)
    • the Barents Sea (where their west shore, the south shores of its Franz-Josef Land the port of Murmansk and important naval facilities lie, and where the White Sea reaches far inland)

The exclave, constituted by the Kaliningrad Oblast, shares borders with Poland to its south and Lithuania to its north and east. It has a northwest coast on the Baltic Sea.

The Baltic and Black Sea coasts of Russia have less direct and more constrained access to the high seas than its Pacific and Arctic ones, but both are nevertheless important for that purpose. The Baltic gives immediate access to the nine other countries sharing its shores, and between the main part of Russia and its Kaliningrad Oblast exclave. Via the straits that lie within Denmark, and between it and Sweden, the Baltic connects to the North Sea and the oceans to its west and north. The Black Sea gives immediate access to the five other countries sharing its shores, and via the Dardanelles and Marmora straits adjacent to Istanbul, Turkey, to the Mediterranean Sea with its many countries and its access, via the Suez Canal and the Straits of Gibraltar, to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The salt waters of the Caspian Sea, the world's largest lake, provide no access to the high seas.

Topography

Geographers traditionally divide the vast territory of Russia into five natural zones:

• the tundra zone
• the taiga, or forest, zone
• the steppe, or plains, zone
• the arid zone
• the mountain zone

Most of Russia consists of two plains (the East European Plain and the West Siberian Plain), two lowlands (the North Siberian and the Kolyma, in far northeastern Siberia), two plateaus (the Central Siberian Plateau and the Lena Plateau to its east), and a series of mountainous areas mainly concentrated in the extreme northeast or extending intermittently along the southern border.

Tundra Zone

About 10% of Russia is tundra-a treeless, marshy plain. The tundra is Russia's northernmost zone, stretching from the Finnish border in the west to the Bering Strait in the east, then running south along the Pacific coast to the northern Kamchatka Peninsula. The zone is known for its herds of wild reindeer, for so-called white nights (dusk at midnight, dawn shortly thereafter) in summer, and for days of total darkness in winter. The long, harsh winters and lack of sunshine allow only mosses, lichens, and dwarf willows and shrubs to sprout low above the barren permafrost. Although several powerful Siberian rivers traverse this zone as they flow northward to the Arctic Ocean, partial and intermittent thawing hamper drainage of the numerous lakes, ponds, and swamps of the tundra. Frost weathering is the most important physical process here, gradually shaping a landscape that was severely modified by glaciation in the last ice age. Less than 1% of Russia's population lives in this zone. The fishing and port industries of the northwestern Kola Peninsula and the huge oil and gas fields of northwestern Siberia are the largest employers in the tundra. With a population of 180,000, the industrial frontier city of Norilsk is second in population to Murmansk among Russia's settlements above the Arctic Circle.

Taiga (Forest) Zone

The taiga, which is the world's largest forest region, contains mostly coniferous spruce, fir, pine and larch. This is the largest natural zone of Russia, an area about the size of the United States. In the northeastern portion of this belt, long and severe winters frequently bring the world's coldest temperatures for inhabited areas. The taiga zone extends in a broad band across the middle latitudes, stretching from the Finnish border in the west to the Verkhoyansk Range in northeastern Siberia and as far south as the southern shores of Lake Baikal. Isolated sections of taiga also exist along mountain ranges such as the southern part of the Urals and in the Amur River valley bordering China in the Far East. About 33% of Russia's population lives in this zone, which, together with a band of mixed forest to its south, includes most of the European part of Russia and the ancestral lands of the earliest Slavic settlers.

The mixed and deciduous forest belt is triangular, widest along the western border and narrower towards the Ural Mountains. The main trees are oak and spruce, but many other growths of vegetation such as ash, aspen, birch, hornbeam, maple and pine reside there. Separating the taiga from the wooded steppe is a narrow belt of birch and aspen woodland located east of the Urals as far as the Altay mountains. Much of the forested zone has been cleared for agriculture, especially in European Russia. Wildlife is more scarce as a result of this, but the roe deer, wolf, fox, and squirrel are very common.

The Plains (Steppe) Zone

The steppe has long been depicted as the typical Russian landscape. It is a broad band of treeless, grassy plains, interrupted by mountain ranges, extending from Hungary across Ukraine, southern Russia, and Kazakhstan before ending in Manchuria. Most of the Soviet Union's steppe zone was located in the Ukrainian and Kazakh republics; the much smaller Russian steppe is located mainly between those nations, extending southward between the Black and Caspian Seas before blending into the increasingly desiccated territory of the Republic of Kalmykia. In a country of extremes, the steppe zone provides the most favourable conditions for human settlement and agriculture because of its moderate temperatures and normally adequate levels of sunshine and moisture. Even here, however, agricultural yields are sometimes adversely affected by unpredictable levels of precipitation and occasional catastrophic droughts.

The East European Plain encompasses most of European Russia. The West Siberian Plain, which is the world's largest, extends east from the Urals to the Yenisei River.

Mountain Ranges

Russia's mountain ranges are located principally along its continental divide (the Ural Mountains), along the southwestern border (the Caucasus), along the border with Mongolia (the eastern and western Sayan Mountains and the western extremity of the Altay Mountains), and in eastern Siberia (a complex system of ranges in the northeastern corner of the country and forming the spine of the Kamchatka Peninsula, and lesser mountains extending along the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan). Russia has nine major mountain ranges. In general, the eastern half of the country is much more mountainous than the western half, the interior of which is dominated by low plains. The traditional dividing line between the east and the west is the Yenisei River valley. In delineating the western edge of the Central Siberian Plateau from the West Siberian Plain, the Yenisey runs from near the Mongolian border northward into the Arctic Ocean west of the Taymyr Peninsula.

Caucasus Mountains

Truly alpine terrain appears in the southern mountain ranges. Between the Black and Caspian seas, the Caucasus Mountains rise to impressive heights, forming a boundary between Europe and Asia. One of the peaks, Mount Elbrus, is the highest point in Europe, at 5,642 metres. The geological structure of the Caucasus extends to the northwest as the Crimean and Carpathian Mountains and southeastward into Central Asia as the Tian Shan and Pamirs. The Caucasus Mountains create an imposing natural barrier between Russia and its neighbours to the southwest, Georgia and Azerbaijan.

Ural Mountains

The Ural Mountains are the most famous of the country's mountain ranges because they form the natural boundary between Europe and Asia; the range extends about 2,100 kilometres from the Arctic Ocean to the northern border of Kazakhstan. In terms of elevation, however, the Urals are far from impressive, and they do not serve as a formidable natural barrier. Several low passes provide major transportation routes through the Urals eastward from Europe. The highest peak, Mount Narodnaya, is only 1,894 metres. Yet, while they are not imposing to the eye, the Urals do contain valuable deposits of minerals.

West Siberian Plain

To the east of the Urals is the West Siberian Plain, which covers more than 2.5 million square kilometres, stretching about 1,900 kilometres from west to east and about 2,400 kilometres from north to south. With more than half its territory below 500 metres in elevation, the plain contains some of the world's largest swamps and floodplains. Most of the plain's population lives in the drier section south of 55° north latitude.

Central Siberian Plateau

The region directly east of the West Siberian Plain is the Central Siberian Plateau, which extends eastward from the Yenisei River valley to the Lena River valley. The region is divided into several plateaus, with elevations ranging between 320 and 740 metres; the highest elevation is about 1,800 metres, in the northern Putoran Mountains. The plain is bounded on the south by the Baikal Mountains system and on the north by the North Siberian Lowland, an extension of the West Siberian Plain extending into the Taymyr Peninsula on the Arctic Ocean.

Northeast Siberia and Kamchatka

Northeastern Siberia, north of the Stanovoy Range, is an extremely mountainous region. The long Kamchatka Peninsula, which juts southward into the Sea of Okhotsk, includes many volcanic peaks, some of which still are active. The highest is the 4,750-meter Klyuchevskaya Sopka, the highest point in the Russian Far East. The volcanic chain continues from the southern tip of Kamchatka southward through the Kuril Islands chain and into Japan. Kamchatka also is one of Russia's two centres of seismic activity (the other is the Caucasus). In 1995, a major earthquake largely destroyed the oil-processing town of Neftegorsk.

Sayan and Stanovoy Mountains

In the mountain system west of Lake Baikal in south-central Siberia, the highest elevations are 3,300 metres in the Western Sayan, 3,200 metres in the Eastern Sayan, and 4,500 metres at Belukha Mountain in the Altay Mountains. The Eastern Sayan reach nearly to the southern shore of Lake Baikal; at the lake, there is an elevation difference of more than 4,500 metres between the nearest mountain, 2,840 metres high, and the deepest part of the lake, which is 1,700 metres below sea level. The mountain systems east of Lake Baikal are lower, forming a complex of minor ranges and valleys that reaches from the lake to the Pacific coast. The maximum height of the Stanovoy Range, which runs west to east from northern Lake Baikal to the Sea of Okhotsk, is 2,550 metres. To the south of that range is southeastern Siberia, whose mountains reach 800 metres. Across the Strait of Tartary from that region is Sakhalin Island, where the highest elevation is about 1,700 metres.

Drainage

Russia is a water-rich country. The earliest settlements in the country sprang up along the rivers, where most of the urban population continues to live. The Volga, Europe's longest river, is by far Russia's most important commercial waterway. Four of the country's thirteen largest cities are located on its banks: Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Kazan, and Volgograd. The Kama River, which flows west from the southern Urals to join the Volga in the Republic of Tatarstan, is a second key European water system whose banks are densely populated.

Russia has thousands of rivers and inland bodies of water, providing it with one of the world's largest surface-water resources. However, most of Russia's rivers and streams belong to the Arctic drainage basin, which lies mainly in Siberia but also includes part of European Russia. Altogether, 84% of Russia's surface water is located east of the Urals in rivers flowing through sparsely populated territory and into the Arctic and Pacific oceans. In contrast, areas with the highest concentrations of population, and therefore the highest demand for water supplies, tend to have the warmest climates and highest rates of evaporation. As a result, densely populated areas such as the Don and Kuban River basins north of the Caucasus have barely adequate (or in some cases inadequate) water resources.

Rivers

Forty of Russia's rivers longer than 1,000 kilometres are east of the Urals, including the three major rivers that drain Siberia as they flow northward to the Arctic Ocean: the Irtysh-Ob system (totalling 5,380 kilometres), the Yenisei (4,000 kilometres), and the Lena (3,630 kilometres). The basins of those river systems cover about eight million square kilometres, discharging nearly 50,000 cubic metres of water per second into the Arctic Ocean. The northward flow of these rivers means that source areas thaw before the areas downstream, creating vast swamps such as the 48,000-square-kilometer Vasyugan Swamp in the centre of the West Siberian Plain. The same is true of other river systems, including the Pechora and the Northern Dvina in Europe and the Kolyma and the Indigirka in Siberia. Approximately 10% of Russian territory is classified as swampland.

A number of other rivers drain Siberia from eastern mountain ranges into the Pacific Ocean. The Amur River and its main tributary, the Ussuri, form a long stretch of the winding boundary between Russia and China. The Amur system drains most of southeastern Siberia. Three basins drain European Russia. The Dnieper, which flows mainly through Belarus and Ukraine, has its headwaters in the hills west of Moscow. The 1,860-kilometer Don originates in the Central Russian Upland south of Moscow and then flows into the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea at Rostov-on-Don. The Volga is the third and by far the largest of the European systems, rising in the Valdai Hills west of Moscow and meandering southeastward for 3,510 kilometres before emptying into the Caspian Sea. Altogether, the Volga system drains about 1.4 million square kilometres. Linked by several canals, European Russia's rivers long have been a vital transportation system; the Volga system still carries two-thirds of Russia's inland water traffic.

Lakes and Reservoirs

Russia's inland bodies of water are chiefly a legacy of extensive glaciation. In European Russia, the largest lakes are Ladoga and Onega northeast of St. Petersburg, Lake Peipus on the Estonian border, and the Rybinsk Reservoir north of Moscow. Smaller man-made reservoirs, 160 to 320 kilometres long, are on the Don, the Kama, and the Volga rivers. Many large reservoirs also have been constructed on the Siberian rivers; the Bratsk Reservoir northwest of Lake Baikal is one of the world's largest.

The most prominent of Russia's bodies of fresh water is Lake Baikal, the world's deepest and most capacious freshwater lake. Lake Baikal alone holds 85% of the freshwater resources of the lakes in Russia and 20% of the world's total. It extends 632 kilometres in length and 59 kilometres across at its widest point. Its maximum depth is 1,713 metres. Numerous smaller lakes dot the northern regions of the European and Siberian plains. The largest of these are lakes Belozero, Topozero, Vygozero, and Ilmen in the European northwest and Lake Chany in southwestern Siberia.