Russia
The largest country on Earth, spanning Europe and Asia across eleven time zones
Russia is the largest country on Earth, sprawling across northern Eurasia from the Baltic to the Pacific and crossing eleven time zones. Though assigned here to Europe, where its historic heartland and most of its roughly 146 million people live, Russia is profoundly transcontinental: the Ural Mountains divide European Russia from the vast Siberian expanse of Asia, which makes up the great bulk of its territory. Centered on Moscow and the imperial city of Saint Petersburg, it is a nation of immense rivers, boreal forest, and frozen tundra.
The terrain ranges from the East European Plain to the swampy West Siberian Lowland and the mountains of the Caucasus, where Mount Elbrus rises to 5,642 meters, the highest peak in Europe. Siberia holds the world's deepest lake, Baikal, and the boreal taiga, the planet's largest forest. The Volga, Ob, Yenisei, and Lena rank among the longest rivers on Earth. Russia possesses staggering reserves of oil, natural gas, timber, and minerals, and its climate spans humid continental in the west to the brutal cold of the Siberian interior.
From the medieval state of Kievan Rus and the rise of Muscovy, Russia expanded into a sprawling empire under the tsars before the 1917 revolution created the Soviet Union, a superpower that reshaped the twentieth century. The USSR's collapse in 1991 left the Russian Federation as its principal successor. A land of Orthodox cathedrals and a literary canon from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to Chekhov, Russia today exerts outsized influence in world energy, security, and geopolitics while contending with the consequences of its actions abroad.