The coldest month is January (on the shores of the sea—February), the warmest usually is July. Great ranges of temperature are typical. In winter temperatures get colder both from south to north and from west to east. Summers can be quite hot and humid, even in Siberia.

Weather it's the snowy peaks of the Caucasus Mountains or the ancient domed majesty of Saint Petersburg, Russia has a lot to offer.

Within one year, Lenin had the Constituent Assembly dissolved by violent methods and soon he proclaimed the Soviets to be the new government of Russia. However, part of the reason for the widespread support of the Reds was a promise of peace with the German Empire and the Central Powers, and so the Bolsheviks immediately sought a way to make peace with Germany. A cease fire was announced and peace talks began.

Taiga is the largest natural zone of Russia and it is also the largest forest region in the world.

Many private higher education institutions have emerged since 1991, mostly in the fields where the Soviet system was inadequate or was unable to provide enough specialists for post-Soviet realities, such as economics, business/management, and law.

Soviet-era filmmakers, most notably Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky, would become some of the world's most innovative and influential directors. Eisenstein also was a student of filmmaker and theorist Lev Kuleshov, who formulated the groundbreaking editing process called montage at the world's first film school, the All-Union Institute of Cinematography in Moscow.

Russia ended 2006 with its eighth straight year of growth, averaging 6.7% annually since the financial crisis of 1998.

On March 3, 1917, a strike occurred in a factory in the capital Petrograd. On February 23 (March 8) 1917, International Women's Day, thousands of women textile workers in Petrograd walked out of their factories protesting the lack of food and calling on other workers to join them. Within days, nearly all the workers in the city were idle, and street fighting broke out. When the tsar ordered the Duma to disband, ordered strikers to return to work, and ordered troops to shoot at demonstrators in the streets, his orders triggered the February Revolution, especially when soldiers openly sided with the strikers. On March 2 (15), Nicholas II abdicated.