At the peak of the Russian Empire/Soviet Union, Russian territory was larger than 8.5 million square miles. You could fit two United States of America into Russia and still have plenty of room for four more Texases and an extra California, too. Russia is massive. It covers 1/6 of the surface area of the planet. It's larger than our entire continent!
Your first task in understanding Russia is to understand it's sheer size. Below are a series of maps to cartographically guide set the scene for our Russian story.
- Ural Mountains
- Carpathian Mountains
- Caucasus Mountains
- Altai Mountains
- Stanovoy Mountains
6. KHAZARS
7. VARANGIANS
8. EASTERN SLAVS
9. RUS
10. PERUN
CLIP 1: OVERVIEW OF THE DIVERSITY OF RUSSIA (4m 56s)
You don't have to learn how to speak Russian... but, you do need to know a few phrases that we will use from time to time. For the first unit, just a few basics:
At the bottom of each page, we will have a collection of the RUSSIANS TO KNOW for each unit.
Words are scary. Below is a shortened version of everything above.
1. Russia is the largest country on earth (1/6 of the surface area).
2. Russia is geographically diverse encapsulating multiple biomes, peoples, bodies of water, etc.
3. Russians speak Russian.
4. Prior to becoming it's own state, Russia suffered through tons of invasions.
5. The Russian state originates in a place called Kievan Rus (which is in Ukraine today).