Vissarion Belinsky
Fedor Dostoevsky
Michael Lomonosov
Dmitrii Mendeleev
Nicholas Lobachevsky
Ivan Pavlov
Maxim Gorky and Theodore Chaliapin
Nicholas Gogol
Anton Chekov
Nicholas Chernyshevsky
Michael Lermontov
Alexander Pushkin
Boris Pasternak
Alexander Herzen
Dmitrii Shostakovich
Waslaw Nijinsky
Anna Akhmatova
Modest Musorgsky
Peter Tchaikovsky
Ernest Ansermet, Serge Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, and Serge Prokofiev
Leaders of the communist world in Moscow, 1986
Gorbachev and Yeltsin at the Extraordinary Congress of People's Deputies
Part I: INTRODUCTI ON
1
Russia! what a marvelous phenomenon on the world scene! Russia - a distance of ten thousand versts * in length on a straight line from the virtually central European river, across all of Asia and the Eastern Ocean, down to the remote American lands! A distance of five thousand versts in width from Persia, one of the southern Asiatic states, to the end of the inhabited world - to the North Pole. What state can equal it? Its half? How many states can match its twentieth, its fiftieth part?… Russia - a state which contains all types of soil, from the warmest to the coldest, from the burning environs of Erivan to icy Lapland; which abounds in all the products required for the needs, comforts, and pleasures of life, in accordance with its present state of development - a whole world, self- sufficient, independent, absolute.
Loe thus I make an ende: none other news to thee But that the country is too cold, the people beastly bee.
AMBASSADOR GEORGE TURBEVILLE REPORTING TO ELIZABETH I OF ENGLAND
These poor villages,
This barren nature -
Native land of enduring patience,
The land of the Russian people!
The Russian empire, and later the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, represented a land mass of over eight and one-half million square miles, an area larger than the entire North American continent. To quote the leading Russian encyclopedia: 'The Russian empire, stretching in the main latitudinally, occupies all of eastern Europe and northern Asia, and its surface constitutes 0.42 of the area of these two continents. The Russian empire occupies 1/22 part of the entire globe and approximately 1/6 part of its total land surface.'
Yet, this enormous territory exhibits considerable homogeneity. Indeed, homogeneity helps to explain its size. The great bulk of Russia is an immense plain - at one time the bottom of a huge sea - extending from central and even western Europe deep into Siberia. Although numerous hills and chains of hills are scattered on its surface, they are not high enough or sufficiently concentrated to interfere appreciably with the flow of the mighty plain, the
* A
largest on the entire globe. The Ural mountains themselves, ancient and weather-beaten, constitute no effective barrier between Europe and Asia, which they separate; besides, a broad gap of steppe land remains between the southern tips of the Ural chain and the Caspian and Aral seas. Only in vast northeastern Siberia, beyond the Enisei river, does the elevation rise considerably and hills predominate. But this area, while of a remarkable potential, has so far remained at best on the periphery of Russian history. Impressive mountain ranges are restricted to Russian borders or, at the most, borderlands. They include the Carpathians to the southwest, the high and picturesque Caucasian chain in the south between the Black Sea and the Caspian, and the mighty Pamir, Tien Shan, and Altai ranges farther east along the southern border.
Rivers flow slowly through the plain. Most of them carry their waters along a north-south axis and empty either into the Baltic and the Arctic Ocean or into the Black and the Caspian seas. In European Russia, such rivers as the Northern Dvina and the Pechora flow northward, while others, notably the Dniester, the Bug, and the larger Dnieper, Don, and Volga proceed south. The Dnieper and the Don empty into the Black Sea, the Volga into the Caspian. Siberian rivers, the huge Ob and Enisei, as well as the rapid Lena, the Indigirka, and the Kolyma, drain into the Arctic Ocean. The exception is the Amur, which flows eastward, serves during much of its course as the boundary between Russia and China, and empties into the Strait of Tartary. South of Siberia in Central Asia both the Amu Daria and the Syr Daria flow northwestward to the Aral Sea, although the former at one time used to reach
