Lithuania operates a simplified transit regime for Russian nationals traveling from the Kaliningrad coastal exclave into Russia, while still conforming, as an EU member state with an EU external border, where strict Schengen border rules apply.

The vast majority of the population is currently between 15 and 64 years of age with men living an average of 60 years and women living an average of 71 years.

Within European part of Russia you will find Europe’s highest mountain and longest river.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Muscovite Russia remained the only more or less functional Christian state on the Eastern European frontier, allowing it to claim succession to the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire.

The 1990s were plagued by armed ethnic conflicts in the North Caucasus. Such conflicts took a form of separatist Islamist insurrections against federal power (most notably in Chechnya), or of ethnic/clan conflicts between local groups (e.g., in North Ossetia-Alania between Ossetians and Ingushs, or between different clans in Chechnya).

As a part of the proposed First Five-Year Plan in 1928, the government took control of agriculture through the state and collective farms (kolkhozes).

The Brezhnev era did offer a relative prosperity to a populace and leadership battered by decades of war and social shocks, and the volatility of the Khrushchev years.