From north to south of Russia the East European Plain is clad sequentially in tundra, coniferous forest (taiga), mixed forest, broadleaf forest, grassland (steppe), and semidesert (fringing the Caspian Sea) as the changes in vegetation reflect the changes in climate.

President Putin has granted more influence to forces within his government that desire to reassert state control over the economy.

As is known from the Primary Chronicle, the history of the early East Slavs and the establishment of Kievan Rus started when this group began to form tribal unions between the Black Sea and Baltic Sea in the ninth century.

As a result of the victorious Russian-Turkish wars, Russia's borders expanded to the Black Sea and Russia set its goal on the protection of Balkan Christians against a Turkish yoke.

Much of Northern Asia and some of Western Europe are part of this country and it is bordered by the Arctic Ocean and the North Pacific Ocean.

Russian Orthodoxy is the dominant religion in Russia. The ancestors of today’s Russians adopted Orthodox Christianity in the 10th century. According to the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, 63% of respondents consider themselves Russian Orthodox. This makes the Russian Orthodox Church by far the most widespread religion.

In 2007, life expectancy at birth was 59 for men and 73 for women. The large annual excess of deaths over births is expected to cut Russia's population by 30% over the next 50 years.

The Cold War emerged out of a conflict between Stalin and U.S. President Harry Truman over the future of Eastern Europe during the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. Russia had suffered three devastating Western onslaughts in the previous 150 years during the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War, and the Second World War, and Stalin's goal was to establish a buffer zone of states between Germany and the Soviet Union. Truman charged that Stalin had betrayed the Yalta agreement. With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, Stalin was also biding his time, as his own atomic bomb project was steadily and secretly progressing.