Oil, natural gas, coal, minerals and timber are hugely exported.

The Great Reforms of Alexander's reign spurred increasingly rapid capitalist development and Sergei Witte's attempts at industrialisation.

A Turkic people, the Khazars, reigned the lower Volga basin steppes between the Caspian and Black Seas through the 8th century.

After Peter the Great's reforms, Russia emerged as a major European power.

In December 1991, the USSR was splintered into fifteen independent republics and it has since struggled to build a good democratic political system.

The points which are furthest separated in longitude in Russia are 6,600 km (4,100 mi) apart along a geodesic. These points are: in the West, the same spit; in the East, the Big Diomede Island (Ostrov Ratmanova). The Russian Federation spans eleven time zones.

Most of the roughly 141 million Russians derive from the Eastern Slavic family of peoples, whose original homeland was probably present-day Poland. Russian is the official language of Russia and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the language of such giants of world literature as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn.

The Nazi Genocide of the Jews carried by German Einsatzgruppen, along the local collaborators resulted in almost complete annihilation of the Jewish population over the entire territory temporary occupied by Germany and its allies. During occupation, Russia's Leningrad, now Saint-Petersburg, region lost around a quarter of its population. Soviet Belarus lost from a quarter to a third of its population. 2.8 - 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war (of 5.5 million) died in German camps.