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Russia

Contents General Information

History 6 Nature 26 People 36 Economy & Transportation

Culture 52

Russian Personalities

Peter The Great

Catherine The Great

Ivan the Terrible

Tsar Nicholas II

Vladimir Putin

Feodor Dostoievski

Piotr Ilich Tchaikovski

Yuri Gagarin

Ivan Pavlov

Lev Nikolaievich Tolstoi

Russian Cuisine

Shci (Russian Cabbage Soup)

Okroshka (Russian Cold Soup)

Ukha 96 Pelmeni 96 Solyanka 98 Kamchatka King Crab

Blini with Smoked Salmon

Russian Salad

100

Stroganoff Beef

100

Pozharskie (Salmon Burgers)

101

Moskovskaya Vodka

102

Russia Travel

103

Moscow 104 Sankt Petersburg

114

Kazan 122 Nizhny Novgorod

126

Yaroslavl 130 Vladivostok 132 Volgograd 133 Suzdal 135 Other Places

136

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General Information Location

Russia (Росси́я) or the Russian Federation (Росси́йская Федера́ция) is a country that stretches on a vast territory, occupying the northern part of Eurasia. It is bordered by the following countries, in a trigonometric direction from north-west to south-east: Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. Russia is washed by the waters of three Oceans: the Atlantic in the west, the Pacific in the east and the Arctic in the north. It also has access to various seas such as: Baltic Sea, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Sea of Okhotsk, Bering Sea, Laptev Sea, Kara Sea, Barents Sea, Chukchi Sea and the East Siberian Sea. Russia covers an area of more than 17.100.000 km2, has a density of 8,4 persons/km2 and its capital is located in the city of Moscow, which hosts a population of some 12.100.000 people. Russia’s national anthem is simply called “Государственный гимн Российской Федерации” which means “State Anthem of the Russain Federation”, and was composed by Alexander Alexandrov, while the lyrics were made up by Sergey Mikhalkov and Gabriel El-Registan. The country is

organized as a semi-presidential constitutional republic. There are 85 federal subjects, but only 22 are recognized as republics. The total population of the country reaches up to about 146.000.000 people. Other important Russian citizens can be found in Ukraine (8.300.000), Kazakhstan (4.500.000), Germany (1.200.000), Israel (1.000.000), Belarus (800.000) and Uzbekistan (700.000). The official currency in Russia is the Russian Ruble (RUB). The national day of Russia is celebrated on 4 November every year. Russia is a great power and is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The country is also an important member of the following organizations: G20, Council of Europe, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), World Trade

Russian Rubles

Organization (WTO). Russia is also the leading member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and one of the 5 members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), along with Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Flag

Russia has a tricolor flag with three horizontal fields of equal width, with the first being white, blue in the middle and red at the bottom. The Russian flag is the inspiration for the Pan-Slavic colours. This flag was used as the flag of the navy and of the land army in 1693 and was adopted in 1705 as a civil flag to be hoisted to the mast of the merchant vessels. On 7 May 1883, it has been authorized the use of this flag on land. However, it didn’t become the national flag until the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in 1896. Popular legends say that the origin of the national flag can be found in Peter the Great’s visit of the Netherlands in 1699. The Tsar, who arrived to this country on a visit, wanted to study the issue of shipbuilding and would have been realized that Russia should need a flag to be hoisted to the mast of the ships that were to be built. As it is being said, he designed a flag based on the flag of the Netherlands. The flag was used but the Russian national colours (white, blue, red) replaced the Dutch orange with the Russian red. This story, very popular, apparently hasn’t any truth, because a German book that presented the national flags described in 1695, four years before the visit of Tsar Peter I in the Netherlands, the white-bluered tricolor flag of the Principality of Moscow. Moreover, there is evidence that the tricolor flag had been flown by Oriol (Eagle), the first Russian warship from 1667. Most likely, the three colors are the Arms of the Grand Principality of Moscow, which had represented Saint

George wearing a white-silver armor, riding a white horse, wearing a cape and having a blue spear, all on a red field. Another version states that the three colours of the clothes are associated with the Virgin Mary, the patron saint of Russia. Another interpretation of the three colours and of the order they are placed is to represent the social system of the monarchy in which whites would represent God, blue would represent the Tsar and red would represent the peasants. Another widespread interpretation is the link between the three colours and the main parts of the Russian Empire: White - White Russia (Belarus), Blue - Little Russia (Malorossia or Ukraine) and Red - Great Russia (Russia).

Coat of Arms

The coat of arms of the Russian Federation derives from the first national emblems of the Russian Empire recovered in 1992 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Although it has been repeatedly modified during the reign of Ivan III (1462-1505), the current coat of arms is directly derived from the original medieval and the colors correspond to the imperial coat of arms of the 15th century. The shape of the two-headed eagle dates back to the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725), although the bird of prey was currently of gold instead of the original imperial black. The Moscow coat of arms depicting Saint George and the dragon is depicted on the bi-headed eagle.

History Antiquity and Old Russians

The first human settlements on this great territory date back 300.000 years ago in Central Siberia. Around 4000 years BC in the steppes of southern Russia and Central Asia, the Kurgan civilization started developing. Around 2000 BC, the northern Iranians, a branch of the Indo-Europeans known as Steppe or Cimmerian Peoples occupied an immense territory between present-day Poland and present-day western China. Around 1000 BC, Iranian Scythians created an empire that lasted until the 3rd century AD and was located between the Dniester and the Volga. Nowadays Russia’s wide territories were inhabited between the 3rd and the 6th centuries by different tribes, conquered one at a time by invaders such as Goths, Huns and Turkic Avars. Iranian Scythians populated the southern steppes and the Turkic people of Khazars mastered the west of this territory in the 8th century. They were driven away by the Scandinavian group of Varangians, who established their capital in the Slavic city of Novgorod and they gradually mixed with the Slavic military leaders. The Slavs constituted the majority population since the 8th century, managing to assimilate gradually both the Scandinavian conquerors and the Finno-Ugric indigenous population.

Khazaria and Volga Bulgarians

Map of Khazaria

8th and 9th centuries. Many Eastern Slavic tribes paid tribute to the Khazars. Their power began to decline, however, at the end of this period, when Oleg, a Varangian warrior, went south from Novgorod and expelled the Khazars from Kiev and thus founded the Kievan Rus’ Empire around the year 880. Invaders of Slavic and Turkish origins precipitated the final fall of the Khazar rule around the 10th century. The Bulgarians of the Volga were a non-Slavic state concentrated around the Volga River. After the Mongol invasion it became part of the Golden Horde. The Chuvash and the Tatars of Kazan are the descendants of the Volgo-Bulgarians. Around the 10th century, Volga Bulgarians embraced Islam, which led to the independence of Khazaria. In the 16th century, Russia conquered their lands under the reign of Tsar Ivan IV “the Terrible”.

The Khazars were a Turkish people who inhabited the steppes of the lower Volga between the Kievan Rus’ The Scandinavian Vikings, named Varangian by the Byzantines, combined piracy with merchandise and began to cross the waterways from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The Slavs that had settlements along these rivers often hired the Varangian people to defend them. According to the first Kiev chronicles, a Varangian called Rurik became Prince of Novgorod in 860. His successors moved to the south and expanded his authority over Kiev. Until the end of the 9th century, the Varangian princes widened their authority over a vast area that began to be known as Russia. The name Russia (like the Finnish Ruotsi or the Estonian Rootsi) is considered by some scholars as being related to the name of the Roslagen region (a 6

Domovoi was considered a protective house spirit in Slavic folklore

Varangian Rurik and his brothers arrive in Staraya Ladoga

coastal area of Sweden), while others regard it as having Slavic or Persian roots. Kievan Rus’, the first state of the Eastern Slavs, appeared during the 9th century along the Dnieper River as a federation of principalities with common interests in the trade of furs, slaves and wax between Scandinavia and the Byzantine Empire. Until the end of the 10th century, the Varangian minority was assimilated by the Slav majority. Among the lasting achievements of Kievan Rus’ was the conversion to Orthodox Christianity in the Slavic version, which would define Russian culture for the next thousand years. The conversion to Christianity was made in 988 following a public act of baptism of the inhabitants of Kiev during the reign of Prince Vladimir I. A few years later, the first code of laws, the Russian Pravila was introduced. From the very beginning, Kievan principles followed the Byzantine example and kept the church under their strict control, even in terms of its income, so the Russian state and its national church remained closely related. Until the 11th century, especially during the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, a process of economic

and cultural development took place in Kievan Russia, particularly in the fields of architecture and literature, with stronger results than those in Western Europe. Compared to the languages of the Western European Christian peoples, Russian language was very little influenced by Greek and Latin in which the first Christian theological works were written. This was due to the fact that the Slavonic language was used instead of the Greek or Latin language as the language of the liturgy. The Varangian dynasty lasted several centuries, time in which they established lasting ties with the Byzantine Empire and the Orthodox Church. They moved their capital to Kiev in 1169. During this time, the Varangian people and by extension the Slavic population who inhabited the region where called “Rhos”, “Russian” or “Russians”. Between the 10th and the 11th century, the state known as Kievan Russia was the most stretched in whole Europe, its source of prosperity being due to the trade between Europe and Asia and between Northern Europe and the Middle East. The Kipchak nomadic Turkic people conquered 7

Map of Kievan Rusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s southern Russia in the late 11th century and formed a state along the north coast of the Black Sea (Desht-e-Kipchak).

Mongol Invasion and the Golden Horde

In the 13th century, the area was troubled by internal disputes and was devastated by the Mongol pagan invaders of the Golden Horde and by the nomadic Turkic Muslim who robbed the Russian principalities for over three centuries. Known with the generic name of Tatars, these conquerors ruled the southern and central

parts of nowadays Russia. Meanwhile, the western parts of the Russian territories were incorporated into the Polish-Lithuanian State. Kievan Russian political dissolution led to the separation of Russians in the north from the Belarusians (White Russians) and Ukrainians in the west. In 1223, Kievan Russia had to cope with the decisive military campaign of the Mongols, being completely defeated in the Battle of the Kalka River. In 1240, the Mongols plundered the city of Kiev and continued their attack towards the west in Poland and Hungary. Until that time, the Mongols had conquered almost all the Russian principalities. Only the Novgorod Principality remained independent. The impact of the Mongol invasion on Russian territories was unequal. Nearly half of the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population was lost during the invasion. Cities like Kiev have never returned to their former glory after the devastation of the initial attack. While Novgorod continued to thrive, the city of Moscow, which was under Mongolian suzerainty, began to flourish in 1328. Although the Russian armies managed to defeat the Golden Horde in the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, the Mongols continued to dominate the territories inhabited by the Russians and to claim tribute from the Russian Princes until the year 1480. The capital of the Golden Horde was the city of Sarai on the Volga River near Volgograd. The Knyaz (princes) of southern and eastern Russia were obliged to pay tribute to the Mongols, being usually named in function by the Tatars of the Golden Horde. The Knyaz received charters through which they were empowered

Battle of Kulikovo

Alexander Peresvet and Mamaiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Champion)

to act as substitutes for the Khan. The princes were given considerable freedom to govern the territories under their control. One of these princes, Aleksandr Nevski, Knyaz of Vladimir, gained a particularly important role among his fellow men in the 13th century after the resounding victories against the Teutonic Knights, Swedes and Lithuanians. In the eyes of the Orthodox churches and the Orthodox Church, the Westerners seemed a much greater threat to the Russian lifestyle than the Mongols. Nevski obtained the protection of the Mongols and their help in the fight against Western invaders who, hoping to use the collapse of the Russians after the invasion of the nomads, tried to conquer new territories in the east. Despite this, Nevskiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s followers rebelled against the Tatar domination because the Mongol invasions of the Russian principalities continued throughout the existence of the Golden Horde, causing great devastation. The influences of the Mongols on the Russians were particularly concerned with military tactics and the development of commercial roads. During the Mongol occupation, the Moscow Principality developed its postal network, laid the foundations for accurate censuses, developed the tax system and organized the army. Oriental influences remained strong until the 18th century, when the Tsars made continuous conscious efforts to westernize their country. Icon of Saint Aleksandr Nevski

The northern part of Russia, including Novgorod, managed to maintain a certain status of independence during the Mongol yoke and was therefore exempt from the atrocities and exploitation which affected the rest of the country. Also, semi-independent Russian regions have had to fight against Germanic crusaders who attempted to colonize the region. Just as it happened in the Balkans and Asia Minor, the nomadic mastering delayed the social and economic development of the region. Autocratic Asian influences have degraded numerous political institutions of the state and affected its culture and economy in a negative manner. Despite all this facts, as opposed to the spiritual leader of the Eastern European World, the Byzantine Empire, Russia could be reborn from the ashes, starting a re-conquest war and succeeding thus to subjugate the former conquerors and to annex these territories. After the fall of Constantinople (1453), Russia remained the only strong enough Christian country at the eastern extremity of Eastern Europe, which allowed it later to claim itself as the sole heir of the Eastern Roman Empire, more exactly the Third Rome.

Principality of Moscow

Although under the suzerainty of the Mongols, the Grand Duchy of Moscow began to assert its influence in the area and at the end of the 14th century, it became powerful enough to shake off the yoke of the invaders. The Russian State was controlled by the Crimean Khanate, the successor state of the Golden Horde. The Russians captured by the nomads during the raids were sold in the slave markets of Crimea. In 1571, Khan Devlet I Giray devastated Moscow with a horde of 120.000 horsemen. Every year, thousands of Russians fell victims to the nomad attacks. Tens of thousands of soldiers were to be kept on the southern frontier. This was a burden which slowed a lot the social and economic development in Russia. In the 15th century, Moscowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s principals began to gather Russian lands under their obedience. The best man in this enterprise was Ivan The Great (14621505), who was the leader who laid the foundations of the future Russian national state. Ivan managed to obtain more than twice the surface of his principality, placing most of northern Russia under the leadership of

Conflict at the southern border of the Moscow state between Mongols and Russians (by Sergey Vasilievich Ivanov)

Ivan The Great, Grand Duke of all Russians tearing the Khan’s letter to pieces

Moscow. Ivan also proclaimed his absolute suzerainty over all Russian nobility and nobles. After refusing to pay tribute to the Tatars, Ivan initiated a series of attacks that paved the way for the final defeat of the Golden Horde, which was in a continuous process of decay and decomposition into several hordes and khanates. Ivan sought to protect the southern borders from the horde attacks. To achieve this goal, Ivan offered the nobles’ estates in exchange for military obligations. This system of granting the possessions of the warrior boyars was the foundation of an extremely powerful army of knights.

During the conflict with Pskov, monk Filofey wrote a letter to Ivan III in which he prophesied that the Russian Kingdom would become the third Rome. With the help of the betrayal of some of the local princes, after border strikes and a war with the Lithuanians, which ended without spectacular results until 1503, Ivan III managed to conquer new territories in the West and the Moscow Principality tripled the surface during his reign. The strengthening of power within the country was accompanied by external expansion. Until the 16th century, Moscow’s Knyaz’s saw the entire territory of Russia as their collective property. Several semi-independent princes still claimed possession over certain territories, but Ivan III forced the less important princes to recognize him and his descendants as undisputed chiefs in the military, legal and foreign affairs. Slowly, the rulers of the Moscow Principality rose to the rank of powerful autocratic rulers known as Tsars. At the beginning of the 16th century, the Russian state has set as its national policy targets: to recapture the territories seized during the Mongol invasions and to protect the borders from new attacks. The Boyars (military aristocracy) began to receive properties with fief from the sovereigns in exchange for military service. The allotment of the land in exchange of the military service was the base to the creation of one of the most

Ivan’s destruction of the Novgorod Assembly

Ivan the Terrible Showing His Treasures to Jerome Horsey (by Alexander Litovchenko)

important medieval armed cavalryman. Ivan The Great was the first who took the title of Grand Duke (Prince) of all Russians after he married Sofia Palaiologina, (granddaughter of a former Byzantine Emperor) in 1469. The Grand Duke strengthened Moscow’s dominance in the surrounding areas, conquering smaller principalities or forcing local princes to recognize its suzerainty. In 1574, the grandson of Ivan The Great, Ivan The Terrible was formally crowned Tsar of Russia (Slavicized term of Roman Caesar) at the age of only 16 years old. At the end of the 16th century, Cossacks established the first settlements in western Siberia. In the mid-17th century, Cossack settlements were established in Eastern Siberia, in Chukotka, along the Amur River and along the Pacific Coast. Mikhail I Romanov, the grandson of Ivan the Terrible, was chosen by a Russian assembly of representatives of 50 cities as the new Tsar. The Romanov Dynasty reigned in Russia until 1917. The immediate task of the Tsars from the new dynasty was to restore the order. Luckily for the Muscovites, their most important enemies, the Polish-Lithuanian State Union and Sweden, were involved in a bilateral conflict, allowing the Russians to make peace with the Swedes in 1617 and sign an armistice with the Poles in 1619. 12

Rather than risk their lives and fortunes in new civil wars, the boyars chose the way of cooperating with the new power, which thus managed to complete the bureaucratic centralization work. The centralized state needed the services of both the old nobility and the newly enlightened boyars, especially in the military field. For the services rendered to the Tsar, the boyars were allowed to complete the long process of peasantry. In the centuries that had passed, the state had gradually restricted the peasants’ right to move from one estate to another, from one landowner to another. As the state had totally accepted the serfdom, the peasants fleeing from their estates became criminals against the state. The land masters had full powers over their peasants and they could have exchanged, borrow, sell or warrant with or without the estate on which they lived. The state and aristocracy threw the overwhelming burden of taxes and duties on the peasants’ shoulders. The serfs’ debts had increased hundreds of times in the 17th century to the levels of the century that had passed. In addition, the middle layer of merchants and craftsmen was subject to taxation and they were forced, like peasants, not to leave towns. Representatives of all social classes had military duties and had to pay special taxes. At a time when the peasants’ revolts were

Stenka Razin Sailing in the Caspian Sea (by Vasily Surikov)

endemic, the greatest rise in the battle of the serfs was that of 1667. When the Cossacks rebelled against the increased centralization of the state, the serfs joined them and left the estates of the feudal masters. The rebel captain Stenka Razin led his comrades up the Volga River, instigating the peasants to the uprising and replacing the local leaders with heads of the Cossacks. The Tsar’s army eventually succeeded in crushing the rebellion in 1670. A year later, Stenka was captured, sentenced to death and beheaded. The uprisings and repressions that followed the defeat of the revolt led to a significant decline in the peasant population in the areas where the revolt took place.

Russian Empire

In 1648, Cossack Semyon Dejnev discovered the Bering Strait which separated Asia from North America. The Great Russian Empire which was to be in a continuous expansion for almost three centuries was thus born. Moscow’s control over the new nation’s regions of nowadays Russia continued after the Polish intervention in the 1605-1612 period. Russia was ruled, starting from 1613 by the Romanov dynasty, the first Tsar of this new dynasty being Mikhail I Romanov. Peter the Great, who ruled from 1689 to 1725, was the one who managed to bring the culture and ideas from Western Europe to Russia in order to

modernize the country. Peter made the first major military effort against the Ottoman Turks. Then the Emperor’s attention turned north. Russia still had no safe seaport in the northern area except White Sea’s Archangelsk, whose waters were frozen nine months a year. Access to the Baltic Sea was blocked by Sweden, which surrounded the shores of the Baltic in three parts. The ambition of Peter the Great to conquer a spot to the sea made determined the emperor to make a secret alliance with the Polish-Lithuanian State Union and Denmark against Sweden in 1699, after which he then triggered the Great Northern War. The war ended in 1721, when exhausted Swedes called for peace. The Russian Empire won four provinces in the south and east of the Finnish Gulf, which opened up the muchsought seaward gateway to the west and ensured the possibility of building a Baltic Sea port. At the order of Emperor Peter the Great, Russia’s new capital, Sankt Peterburg, was built as an “open window to Europe”, replacing Moscow both as a political center and as a cultural center. Peter reorganized his form of government after the latest Western models, turning Russia into an absolutist state. He replaced the Duma of the Nobility with a Senate consisting of nine members. The administrative reform was underway, defending new provinces and districts. Peter gave the new Senate the 13

of power. It has brought to the forefront the problems of Russia’s retention in comparison with the Western states, the aptitude of the reforms described above and many of the others that its successors had to solve. However, Peter the Great was the one who laid the foundations of the modern Russian state. Catherine the Great (1762-1796) continued this westernization effort of the country, transforming Russia not only into an Asian power, but also an European power equal to countries like England, France or Austria. She managed to increase the empire’s territory by dismembering Poland. Catherine the Great extended Russia’s political control over the PolishLithuanian state through actions such as supporting the Targowica Confederation. The cost of the empress’ military campaigns was paid especially by the serf peasants who were forced to work more in the land of their masters, which led to a massive uprising in 1773, after Catherine approved the law that permitted the sale of serfs separately from the land of the masters they were working on. Led by a Cossack, Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev, and mobilized by the slogan “Hang all the landlords!”, the rebels had threatened to conquer Moscow. Eventually, the rebellious peasants were defeated and punished without mercy. Pugachev was

Mikhail I Romanov

task of collecting taxes and duties. During his reign, the amounts collected to the state budget increased three times. As part of the reforms, the Russian Orthodox Church was partially incorporated into the administrative structure of the state, transforming it into a governmental tool. Peter abolished the patriarchate and replaced him with a collective governing body, the Sonod, led by a secular official of the state. In those times, any vestiges of local forms of self-government have been abolished and Peter continued the policy of his predecessors to oblige the entire nobility to provide state services. Peter the Great died in 1725, leaving an unclear situation of succession and an empire deprived 14

Tsar Peter The Great, founder of the modern Russian state

Yemelyan Pugachev’s Judgement

Portrait of Catherine The Great (by Dmitry Levitsky)

taken prisoner and then executed in the Red Square, but the threat of the revolts continued throughout Catherine’s reign. Even during Pugachev’s revolt, Catherine managed to win a victorious war against the Ottoman Empire and conquered the northern Black Sea territories. Then, in understanding with Prussia and the Austrian Empire, she occupied half of the Polish-Lithuanian State Union during the three divisions of Poland. Upon the death of the Empress in 1796, Catherine’s expansionist policy transformed Russia into a great European power. The Russian expansion continued in the time of Tsar Alexander I, who annexed Finland in 1809, ceded by a

Alexander I of Russia, Francis II of Austria and Frederick William III of Prussia, the leaders of the 3 Great Empires after the Battle of Leipzig

The manifesto of the abolition of serfdom being read to people

Sweden too weak for any resistance. When Russia started to rule parts of Poland under the imperial crown, there were also administrated territories inhabited by ethnic Ukrainian and Belarusian people of the former Kievan Russia. As a result of the victorious Russian-Turkish wars, the borders of the Empire came to touch the Black Sea shores. The future Tsars who came at the power settled their aim to protect the Christian population of the Balkans, who were under the Ottoman yoke. However, this was used only as a pretext to reach for the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles Straits. In 1783, Russia and the Kingdom of Georgia (which had been almost totally devastated by Persian and Ottoman attacks)

signed the Treaty of Georgievsk, according to whom, Georgia received Russian protection. After Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, the Great Russian Empire was stated definitively on the European political scene as a superpower. Thus, the empire was involved in the war for the Polish succession and the 7 Years War. In 1812, after managing to unite under one banner almost half a million soldiers from France and from the countries conquered in Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia and, after a series of successes at the start, he was forced to withdraw. Almost 90% of the invading forces died in the clashes with the Russian regular army, in the clashes with the troops of partisans, but also because of the Russian winter and hunger. In 1813, Russia together with its allies, Austria and Prussia, defeated the French at the Battle of Leipzig. When on the emperorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s throne ascended Alexander II in 1855, the desire for reform was general. The Russian humanist movement, which was morally and ideologically linked to the abolitionism in the United States of America before the American Civil War, publicly attacked the serfdom. In 1859, there were 23.000.000 serfs living in the Russian Empire, often in heavier conditions than Western-European serfs from the 16th century feud. The Tsar decided to abolish serfdom through a movement from the top downwards rather than waiting for the demolition of the serfdom

Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War

Japanese assault on the entrenched Russian forces in 1904

from the bottom up through revolution. Russia was defeated in the Crimean War of 1853-1856 by the Ottoman Empire, who was backed by England and France. Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom in 1861 by an imperial decree. Russia, however, continued its anti-Turkish wars and after the Russian-Romanian-Turkish War of 1877-1878, the Russians forced the Ottoman Empire to recognize the independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro and also to grant autonomy to Bulgaria. The peasant uprisings and the suppression of the revolutionary tendencies of the liberal-minded intellectuals were among the problems that hardly could’ve been solved. The disastrous failure of the Tsarist armies in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) was a harsh blow to the Tsarist regime and increased the revolutionary potential to huge odds. In January 1905, following the incident known as the “Bloody Sunday”, during which the Cossacks opened fire on peaceful demonstrators led by Father Georgy Gapon, killing many people in front of the Winter Palace in Sankt Peterburg, the Russian Revolution of 1905 began. The protest movements paralyzed the country. In October 1905, Tsar Nicholas II unconditionally agreed to sign the famous Manifesto of October, in which he agreed to summon the Duma without delay. Moderate groups were satisfied, but the Socialists rejected the reforms as insufficient and tried to hold new strikes. By the end of 1905, the Tsar’s position was heavily reinforced by the lack of unity of those who wanted reform.

armies attacked the German ones to support the French in the battle on the western front. However, the weakness of the Russian economy and corruption and government inefficiency have been hidden for a short period of time behind the fierce nationalism. Military defeats and government incompetence radically radicalized the Russian population. German control over the Baltic Sea and Ottoman control over the Black Sea has deprived Russia of access to potential markets and the allies’ supplies. Until the middle of 1915, the impact of the war was profoundly demoralizing. Supply of food and fuel had come to an end and inflation was unbelievably high. More and more often, the poor paid workers used to strike in support of their economic demands and the peasants who wanted to gain lands were always ready to revolt. Meanwhile, public confidence in the regime was undermined by Grigori Rasputin’s political true or suspected influence on the government. Rasputin’s assassination at the end of 1916 ended the scandal, but did not restore the lost prestige of Tsarism. On 3 March 1917, a strike broke out at a factory in Petrograd (former Sankt Peterburg). Within a week, all the city workers ceased work and street fights broke out. When the Tsar dissolved the Duma and ordered the workers to resume work, these actions triggered the

Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War

Tsar Nicholas II and his subjects entered the World War I with enthusiasm and patriotism to defend the Serbian Slav brothers. In August 1914, the Russian Monk Grigori Rasputin was suspected to have influenced the Romanov Imperial Family

February Revolution. Lenin returned to Russia from his exile in Switzerland with the help of German espionage. The Germans hoped the political quarrels would make Russia stop fighting. When the train on which Lenin had arrived to the station, thousands of peasants, workers and soldiers enthusiastically welcomed the Bolshevik leader. After numerous backstage struggles, the soviets succeeded in taking control of the government in November 1917. The Tsar was overthrown in 1917 after

a revolutionary movement known as â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Bolshevik Revolutionâ&#x20AC;?. Kerenski and his moderate government ministers were banished into exile and all of these actions remained in the history under the name of the October Revolution. At the end of the 1917 revolution, the Bolshevik Marxist faction led by Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, alias Lenin, seized power in Moscow and Petrograd and the Bolshevik Party changed its name to the Communist Party. When the parliament in January 1918 refused to turn only into a puppet in the hands of the Bolsheviks, the armed men of Lenin scattered their members forcefully. With the dissolution of the constitutional elected parliament, any trace of bourgeois democracy had been utterly erased. After escaping the stumbling block of moderate opposition, Lenin chose to make peace with the Germans under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty (1918), making important territorial sacrifices. At the end of WWI, the fate of Tsar Nikolai II and the Romanov dynasty was permanently sealed by the repeated defeats of the Russian army, the deteriorating economic situation and the numerous public disorder problems in the cities caused by food shortages. There was a civil war, which opposed the communist Red Army forces by a confederation of antisocialist monarchist and nationalist group, known as the White Army (mostly Belarusians). After the Red Armyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s victory in 1922, the Soviet Union was proclaimed, Russia becoming the most important country of the new federation. For the overthrow of the Bolsheviks that gained the power, a strong counter-revolutionary alliance called the White Movement was formed. During this time, the Allies sent more expeditionary armies to Russia to support the anti-communist forces. The Allies were afraid that after the signing of the BrestLitovsk Treaty, the Bolsheviks could have allied with

Lenin urging the people to revolution

Red Guard Bolsheviks at Vulkan factory during the Russian Civil War

Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia

the Germans and also hoped that an anti-Communist government, once in power, would once again have hired the country in the global conflict against the Central Powers. In the autumn of 1918, the Communist government was in a very dangerous situation as it was attacked by internal enemies and former allies, by the anarchist forces and armed forces of some temporarily independent states: Belarus and Ukraine. To deal with these emergencies, a regime of terror has been established in Russia, the Red Army and CEKA succeeding in destroying all the enemies of the revolution. In spite of the uplifting ideals they had declared, the Bolsheviks did not enjoy the support of all the elements of society and therefore abused brutal dictatorial measures during the civil war. The Bolsheviks destroyed the Tsarist secret police, so despised by the Russians of all political orientations, and abolished all imperial institutions. In order to ensure the survival of their own political regime, the Bolsheviks set up their own political police, larger and acting more brutally than the defunct Okhrana. Until 1920, the last white elements were crushed, foreign armies were evacuated from the country, while in Belarus, Ukraine, and the Caucasus, Bolshevik governments were settled and have merely perpetuated new forms of Russian autarchy. As long as Russia was involved in the civil war, the border between Russia and Poland was left unchallenged by the peace treaties. In 1919, the Polish-Soviet war broke out ending in 1921 with the defeat of the Bolshevik army and the division between the two belligerents: Ukraine and Belarus.

Russia as part of the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union should’ve been a transnational state of workers freed from nationalism. The concept of Russia as a separate national entity was therefore not emphasized in the early Soviet Union’s existence. Although Russian cities and institutions remained dominant, many people who were not of Russian origin participated in the new governing bodies at all levels. One of these kind of people was Georgian Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Stalin). After Lenin’s death in 1924, a brief power for struggle was held. Stalin managed to get rid of all claimants to supreme power in the state and to destroy all limitations and balances in the political system established by the Soviet power, being able until the end of the decade to assume dictatorial powers. Lev Trotsky and all the veteran Bolsheviks were either exiled or executed. At the beginning of the fourth decade of the last century, Stalin launched the Great

Stalin seized the power after Lenin’s death

Purge, a series of political repression on such a large scale which have never been seen before. Millions of people whom Stalin or the local empowered institutions suspected of disloyalty were executed or deported to labour camps of the Gulag, in the most remote areas of Siberia. Stalin initiated the industrialization of a country that had until then mainly a rural society and started the Russian agricultural collectivization. In 1928, Stalin introduced the first “Five-Year Plan” designed to modernize the Soviet economy. Most of the economic resources were directed towards the development of heavy industry. In addition to modernizing civil industries, many companies have been established for the production of arms and ammunition. To some extent, the plan worked, the Soviet Union managed to quickly transform from an agrarian economy into an industrial superpower, everything happening in an unexpectedly fast rate, with the cost of great human losses due to hunger caused by collectivization, the risky planning and the rush fulfillment of the proposed task, at any cost, as well as from the poor policy regarding the job security. 19

Soviet propaganda under Stalinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leadership

In 1936, the Soviet Union was in a smoldering conflict with Nazi Germany, supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, which were fighting against nationalists, who were backed by Germans and Italians. Finally, Germany and the rest of the European powers (England, France, Italy) signed the Treaty of MĂźnchen (29 to 30 September 1938), which forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. Then, on 15 March 1939, Germany divided Czechoslovakia together with Poland and Hungary. USSR, bound by a treaty of mutual military assistance with Prague, failed to comply with any obligations specified in the alliance. Moreover, fearing a possible German attack against its territories, the USSR began diplomatic maneuvers in order to prevent a future conflict. In 1939, after Poland refused to participate in any collective security measures with the Soviets, the Soviet Union signed the RibbentropMolotov Pact with Nazi Germany. According to the secret stipulations of this pact, Poland was to be wiped off the political map of the world and the Soviet Union was to occupy the Baltic countries and Bessarabia. On 17 September 1939, when the Wehrmacht forces were about 150 kilometers from the western borders of the Soviet Union, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland, populated by some ethnic Belarusians and Ukrainians.

Finnish troops defending their country during the Winter War

province of Karelia at the negotiation table. Moreover, this conflict has revealed to the world the weakness of the army (especially the officer corps), ravaged by the Stalinist purges. On 17 June 1940, the Red Army occupied the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and installed there new pro-Soviet governments. After elections were held in the three countries, during which the pro-communist candidates were allowed to participate in the election campaign, the newly elected Parliament have formally requested in August 1940 as their countries to be admitted to the Soviet Union. On 26 June 1940, the Soviet Union presented an ultimatum to the Romanian government in which the USSR claimed the Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina regions. The regions were occupied four days later after the hastily withdrawal of the Romanian military forces and administration. Germany and its European allies of the Axis (Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland and Slovakia) invaded the USSR on 22 June 1941. Although the Wehrmacht forces had some resounding successes in the early Soviet War, the German armies

The Soviet Union in WWII

The following year, the Soviet Union attacked Finland (who had been in a certain period part of the Russian Empire), in an attempt to remove an alleged threat to Leningrad. The USSR tried to prevent a possible attack from Germany through Finland, although the two countries were on good terms at that time. The conflict, which today is known as the Winter War, had disappointing results, the Finns managing to successfully defend on the battlefields, but lost the 20

Bessarabians taking refugee trains after finding out that they will be torn apart from Romania

The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point of the war

were defeated in front of Moscow. Then the German offensive was stopped in 1943 after the Red Army obtained some crushing victories. The Battle of Stalingrad proved to be the turning point of the war. Since then, the Soviets never lost the strategic initiative during the war, pushing the Germans back to Berlin throughout Eastern and Central Europe. Berlin was conquered by the Red Army in May 1945. During the war, the Soviet Union lost around 27 million people, including 18 million civilians, most of them being ethnic Russians. However, many persons who died in the war fighting under the Red Army banner were ethnic Ukrainians, Baltics, Belarusian and so on. Although devastated by the war, the Soviet Union managed to become the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s second superpower after the conflict ended. After the war, the Red Army occupation forces remained in Eastern Europe, including the eastern half of Germany and part of Berlin. Relying on this power, Stalin installed communist governments in all countries of the pro-Soviet occupation zone, turning them into satellite states of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the war, the Soviet Union remade its economy and later, continued

the development of the economy through a process controlled solely from the center, Moscow. The Soviets claimed and received major war compensation from East Germany and from other countries such as Hungary, Finland, Italy or Romania. The USSR solidified its control over the so called Eastern European block. The United States, in turn, helped the restoration of democratic regimes in Western Europe (including West Germany), and participated in the economic recovery of the area. The two superpowers began a struggle for the economic, political and ideological domination of the Third World in a conflict that became known as the Cold War, which transformed into enemies the former allies of the Second World War.

The Cold War

Stalin died in early 1953. As it seemed, he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t leave any instructions regarding the person who ought to succeed to the head of the state and the party. People who were close to the former dictator decided to lead the Union through collective political bodies, while the chief of the secret police (NKVD), Lavrenti Beria, sought dictatorial control. The General Secretary 21

Nikita Khrushchev became the Soviet Union’s leader after Stalin’s death

of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, and several other leading politicians organized an anti-Beria alliance, managing to arrest the chief of the secret police. He was trialed in June 1953 and executed later that year. In this manner, Khrushchev became the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. During the reign of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, the Soviet Union successfully launched the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik 1, and the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. Khrushchev’s reforms in agriculture and administration proved unproductive, while the foreign policy, particularly with China and the United States were on a track of wrong options (most notably the Sino-Soviet split and the Cuban missile crisis). After several angry, undiplomatic outputs at the United Nations, Khrushchev’s party colleagues have begun to consider him more as an aggressive, lout and dangerous individual for the USSR. As a consequence, the Soviet leadership removed Khrushchev from power in 1964. After the ousting of Khrushchev, a new period of collective leadership followed until the beginning of the eighth decade of the last century, when Leonid Brezhnev 22

Leonid Brezhnev became famous for the “Brezhnev stagnation” Leonid Brezhnev greets Gerald Ford upon his arrival at Vozdvizhenka for the Vladivostok Summit on 23 November 1974

became the central figure of Soviet policy. The new Soviet leader was often ridiculed by historians for what today is called the “Brezhnev stagnation”. By contrast with the revolutionary enthusiasm that accompanied the birth of the Soviet Union, the prevailing mood of the Union’s leadership at Brezhnev’s death in 1982 was one of aversion to any kind of change. After the brief period when Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko were in power at the head of the Soviet state, reformer Mikhail Gorbachev came at power. He introduced the policies of Glasnost (Transparency) and Perestroika (Restructuring) in a desperate attempt to modernize Soviet communism. Glasnost was designed to reform the very restrictive framework in which people should manifest the freedom of speech. Censorship, which had been a predominant feature of life since the establishment of the Soviet Union, has been dissolved, then free political discourse and criticism

Konstantin Chernenko

Yuri Andropov

Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in 1985

Federal President Boris Yeltsin (left) congratulating President of Tatarstan Mintimer Shaimiev (right) on getting state award

decline in both GDP and industrial output between 1990 and 1995. The privatization largely shifted control of enterprises from state agencies to individuals with inside connections in the government. Many of the newly rich transferred billions in cash and assets outside the country in an enormous capital flight. The depression of the economy led to the collapse of social services. The birth rate plummeted while the death rate skyrocketed. Millions plunged into poverty, from a level of 1.5% in the late Soviet era to 39–49% by mid-1993. The 1990’s saw extreme corruption and lawlessness, the rise of criminal gangs and violent crime. On 31 December 1999, President Yeltsin Russian Federation During and after the disintegration of the Soviet unexpectedly resigned, handing the post to the recently Union, wide-ranging reforms including privatization, appointed Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, who then market and trade liberalization were undertaken, won the 2000 presidential election. Putin suppressed including radical changes along the lines of the “shock the Chechen insurgency although sporadic violence therapy” as recommended by the United States and still occurs throughout the Northern Caucasus. High the International Monetary Fund. All this resulted oil prices and the initially weak currency followed in a major economic crisis, characterized by a 50% by increasing domestic demand, consumption, and 24 of the government became possible again. Perestroika had to ensure the decentralization of the rigid planning of the Soviet economy. These reforms aroused strong resentment among the conservative elements of the regime, leading eventually to an attempted military coup in order to remove Gorbachev, but led instead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin was the one who came to power in Russia and proclaimed the end of the exclusive Communist political rule and caused the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

investments has helped the economy grow for nine straight years, improving the standard of living and increasing Russia’s influence on the world stage. While many reforms were made during Putin’s presidency, he has been generally criticized by Western nations as undemocratic. Putin’s leadership over the return of order, stability, and progress has won him widespread admiration in Russia. On 2 March 2008, Dmitry Medvedev was elected President of Russia while Putin became Prime Minister. Putin returned to the presidency following the 2012 presidential elections, and Medvedev was appointed Prime Minister. In 2014, after President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine fled as a result of a revolution, Putin requested and received authorization from the Russian Parliament to deploy Russian troops to Ukraine. Following a Crimean referendum in which separation was favored by a large majority of voters, but not accepted internationally, the Russian leadership announced the accession of Crimea into the Russian Federation. On 27 March the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of a non-binding resolution opposing the Russian annexation of Crimea by a vote of 100 in favour, 11 against and 58 abstentions. In September 2015, Russia started a military intervention in the Syrian Civil War, consisting of air strikes against militant groups of the Islamic State, al-Nusra Front (alQaeda in the Levant), and the Army of Conquest.

Vladimir Putin is the most successful president after the fall of the Soviet Union

Russian Sukhoi on Syrian soil

Nature Landforms

Russia stretches from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean and has 11 different time zones. The countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s landforms are mainly plains and plateaus, the most important mountainous regions being in the southwest (Caucasus area), in the south (at the Mongolian border) and in the east (at the Chinese border and near the Pacific Coast). Most of these huge plains are spread throughout Siberia. The steppe is predominant to the south, while the north is densely wooded. Due to its size, Russia shows both monotony and diversity and, like its geography, its climate, vegetation and soils cover great distances. From the north to the south of the Eastern European plain, there is a sequence of tundra, forests of conifers (taiga) mixed deciduous forests, meadows (steppe), and semi-desert (the Caspian strip) reliefs with changes in vegetation that reflect the great changes in climate. The old Ural Mountains are rich in mineral resources and are a traditional barrier between European Russia to the west and Asian Russia to the east. The Ural Mountains have a length of more than 2.000 km on the north-south direction, and the maximum altitude

Ural Mountains

is 1.895 meters at Gora Narodnaya. In the Asian parts, between the Yenisei and Lena Rivers, there is the Central Siberian Plateau, with an average altitude of 1.000 meters. It is a giant plateau, among the oldest of the continent. In the southwest, there are the younger Caucasus Mountains with its peak, Elbrus, at 5.642 meters. To the east are the Verkhoyansk Range and the volcanoes of the Kamchatka peninsula dominated by Kliuchevskoy, a 4.835 meters stratovolcano. The Urals, which separates Russia from Europe on a north-south axis from Russia to Asia, is an eroded mountain range rich in mineral resources. In the south of Central Siberia, the Sayan and Altai Mountains can be found, both having an average altitude of 3.000 meters. In the southeast, center-east

Lake Baikal

Azov Sea

and east of Siberia there are quite a few mountain ranges with high peaks and glaciers. In the eastern parts, such as the Verkhoyansk Range or the volcanoes of Kamchatka Peninsula (containing Klyuchevskaya Sopka, which at the 4.750 m is the highest active volcano in Eurasia as well as the highest point of Asian Russia). In the far southeast, near the Japan Sea, the SikhoteAlin Mountains can be seen. Russia’s major islands and archipelagos include Novaya Zemlya, the Franz Josef Land, the Severnaya Zemlya, the New Siberian Islands,

Wrangel Island, the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin. Russia has an extensive coastline of 37.650 kilometers that stretches along the Arctic and Pacific Oceans, as well as bordering inland seas such as the Baltic, Black and Caspian Seas. Some of the seas are part of the oceans: The Barents Sea, the White Sea, the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea are part of the Arctic, while the Bering Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan belong to the Pacific. The huge 1.200 km wide forest belt in “European Russia” with the

Koryaksky Volcano in Kamchatka

Volga River

Urals as the natural barrier and 2.000 km in Siberia is the largest forest reserve on the planet. Cultivated areas represent 8.9% of the world’s arable land. Russia’s main plains are The Great Russian Plain, in Europe, drained by the Volga and Peciora Rivers and the Great Plains of Western Siberia, a marshy plain in Asia, drained by the Obi River. The largest and most prominent of Russia’s bodies of fresh water is Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest, purest, oldest and most capacious fresh water lake. Baikal alone contains over one-fifth of the world’s fresh surface water. Other major

Russia’s climate types

lakes include Ladoga and Onega, two of the largest lakes in Europe. Of the country’s 100,000 rivers, the Volga is the most famous, not only because it is the longest river in Europe, but also because of its major role in Russian history. The Siberian Rivers Obi, Yenisey, Lena and Amur are among the longest rivers in the world.

Climate

Russia’s climate is varied, due to its large territory. A large part of Russia’s territory lies in a temperate climate zone, the islands of the Icy North Ocean and continental northern districts are in the Arctic and sub-Arctic areas. The Black Sea coast of the Caucasus is located in a warm enough subtropical area. More than half of the country is located north of latitude 60°, while only a small portion is located south of 50° latitude. The mountains that close the southern borders (Altai Mountains) prevent the rise of the hot air masses coming from the more southerly regions. On the other hand, the plains which dominate in the north of the country allow the masses of air cooled by the Arctic Ocean to penetrate far inland. The result is an average temperature of -5.5°C with a large temperature range between winter and summer. The climate is almost everywhere continental,

Frozen landscape in Siberia

with cold winters, with permanent layer of snow and warm summers. In the Far East’s south, the climate is temperate monsoon with average temperatures in January from 0 ° С to -5 ° C. The greatest amount of precipitation falls in the Caucasus and Altai Mountains (up to 2000 mm per year), the driest region being the Caspian Depression (about 150 mm rainfall per year). Moscow freezes in November and the snow stays until April. Temperatures in the capital in January are falling to -12° C. Sankt Petersburg is a little more moderate, with temperatures of -8° C at the same time. The coldest inhabited point of Russia, Oymyakon, has extreme temperatures, which reach up to -65° C in winter. In most of the country there are only two great seasons: winter and summer. Spring and fall are usually of very short duration and the transition from the hottest temperatures to the coldest temperatures is extremely rapid. The coldest month is January or February on the coast. Winter temperatures are decreasing both from south to north and from west to east (much more continental). Average temperature in February is -8°C in Sankt Petersburg at far-west, -27°C in the plains of western Siberia and -43°C in Yakutsk, located in eastern Siberia roughly at the latitude of Sankt Petersburg. The cold record is held by the city of Verkhoyansk (-70°C

recorded). The southern wind generated by the high pressure winter in most of Russia reduces temperature differences between regions at different latitudes. In summer, the hottest month is usually July (the average temperature in Russia is 20°C). Temperatures can be very high in continental areas (up to 38°C in the south). The temperature range is usually extremely high. Summer can be very hot and humid even in Siberia. A small part of the Black Sea coast near Sochi has a subtropical climate. The continental climate severely limits rainfall. If in the west the annual rainfall is 600 mm in the Baltic regions and 525 mm in Moscow, it falls to 425 mm in Novosibirsk (Siberia). The duration of the winter, the intense cold and

Oymyakon, Russia’s most cold inhabited area

Frozen Sea of Okhotsk

the sudden changes in temperature have a huge impact on the way of life of the population and the functioning of the economy. In the coldest part of the country, the subsoil never thaws: we speak of permafrost (merzlota in Russian). Water stagnates on the surface and creates gigantic swamps, a recurring landscape of Siberia. The presence of frozen basement generates very costly constraints on the construction of buildings and infrastructure. The large rivers are generally covered by ice from October or November to April or May, thus

blocking any river traffic. In the spring, ice breakup often leads to catastrophic floods on the largest Siberian Rivers. Russiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main tourist season runs in the warmest months, July and August. This period is the wettest, with rains every two days. To avoid the clutter and the rain, May, June, September or October can be ideal for a holiday. The winter seasonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s months include numerous cultural and sporting events, as well as Christmas, New Year and the ancient Yule feast, perfect for revelers and fans of Vodka.

Chamomile is the national flower of Russia

Flora

The climateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s variety leads to a variety of vegetation in Russia. In the polar region, there can be found the polar tundra (moss, lichens, dwarf plants some even having flowers in the polar summer, however, the vegetation is not continuous) and forest-tundra (isolated shrubs). In the southern tundra, the Taiga, which occupies about half of the country, there are numerous coniferous forests, which form a vegetation unit from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. The Taiga is the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest forest. Forests cover 47% of Russian soil, most of it belonging to the Asian continent. Together, the Russian forest territory constitutes about a quarter of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s forests. This forest area is divided into the boreal forest or taiga in the northern areas and a much smaller area occupied by mixed forests. The taiga is located to the south of the tundra and occupies two fifths of the north of European Russia, although it extends towards Siberia and Eastern Russia. Almost all this region is also under the effects of permafrost. The taiga area is occupied mainly by conifers, although in some regions there are small leaf trees such as birch, white poplar, aspen and willow. In the extreme northwest of the European zone, the taiga prevails and is dominated by different varieties of pines, although firs and birches are the most present. To the east, on the western slope of the Urals, pine trees still

Siberian Taiga Forest

grow, but firs appear as the dominant species, while in other regions, birch is almost the only existing species. The taiga of the lowlands of Western Siberia is made up of several species of pine, although on the margins of the forests the birch predominates. On the other hand, in most of the lowlands of central Siberia, a deciduous coniferous known as larch dominates. In the whole taiga area, trees are generally small and widely spaced. A considerable portion of land is completely devoid of trees, mainly due to poor drainage of water. In

Yugyd Va National Park in the Komi Republic, Russia

Don Steppe in Volgograd Oblast

these regions, the vegetation cover is formed by bushes and herbs typical of swampy areas. The soils of the taiga are acid and sterile, leached from their minerals. To the south, the mixed forest becomes a narrow strip of forest steppe before passing into the steppe zone itself. Although nowadays these steppe forests are cultivated, this type of forest has a natural prairie vegetation, in which different arboreal species are present. With an average of about 150 km in width, this area extends eastwards through the middle valley of the Volga River and the southern part of the Ural Mountains to the southernmost areas of the lowlands of western Siberia. This type of isolated areas also appears in the basins of the mountains of eastern Siberia. The authentic steppe is a mixture of grasslands with little developed trees in the valleys. It constitutes the vegetation typical of a region that encompasses the western half of the North Caucasus plain and a strip that extends to the east through the southern valley of the Volga, south of the Urals and some areas of western Siberia. The forest steppe is a cultivable area. Between the taiga and the steppes from the south, there are mixed forests, coniferous areas and oak forests. The steppe has herbaceous vegetation, while in the semi-deserts, the vegetation is poor. The steppe and the hardwood forests are stretching towards the European parts. Russia has the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest forest reserves known as â&#x20AC;&#x153;the lungs of Europeâ&#x20AC;?, second only 32

to the Amazon Rainforest in the amount of carbon dioxide it absorbs. There are about 140 Zapovedniki (Parks and National Interest Reserves), which were born in the days of the Soviet Union in view of the need to preserve endangered species. They had survived the uncontrolled attack of the hunters. The most famous are Prioksko-Terrasniy, located south of Moscow and Berezina.

Siberian Iris

Fauna

The Brown Bear is the national animal of Russia

In terms of Fauna, Russia is extremely rich. In the tundra there can be found: reindeers, moose, polar foxes, tundra wolves, white rabbits and polar partridges. In the Arctic Ocean Islands, the polar bear still lives. Beneath the waters, there are several seals and walruses. In the Taiga, squirrels, wolves, brown bears, lynx, ermines and sables, reindeers and elks are living, while in the mixed forests there are wolves, bears, foxes and wild cats. The Steppes are rich in rodents and birds of prey while dessert snakes are living in the semi-desert regions. The wild life of the tundra along the Arctic coast, the northern coast of the Pacific and the islands near the coast is very diverse and includes polar bears, seals, walruses, polar foxes, reindeer and white hares. The avifauna is formed by the white partridge, the white owl, the gull and the bobo bird. With the arrival of summer, geese, swans and ducks migrate to these regions, which at this time of the year are infested with mosquitoes, gnats and other insects. The rivers are rich in fish. The taiga offers an important habitat for moose, brown bear, reindeer, lynx, marten and a large variety of birds such as owls and nightingales. The swamps are inhabited by muskrats and squirrels. The first is today the main source of trade in furtive skins. The broadleaf forests provide shelter Amur Leopard

Sika Deer

for wild boars, deer, wolves, foxes, mink and a wide variety of birds, snakes, lizards and turtles. The forests of eastern Russia are known for the presence, among other species, of the famous Siberian tigers, as well as leopards, foxes and deer. Rodents such as marmots and hamsters live in the steppe, although this type of habitat also harbors quadrupeds such as the steppe antelope. The polecat and the tartar fox are the most common predators in the area. Among the avifauna are the crane, the eagle and the kestrel. Animal species in the Caucasus region are tur, bezoar, endangered mouflon, chamois, Persian leopard, brown bear and bison. Most predominant avifauna species are the bearded vulture, endangered griffon vulture, imperial eagle, peregrine falcon, goshawk, and snow cock. Spawning salmon are abundant in the rivers of peninsular Kamchatka on account of enrichment of the region by volcanic ash. Other animal species in this region are the Kamchatka brown bears, sea otters and 34

sea eagles, as well as auks, tufted puffins and swans. The Siberian tiger, which is one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest felines and is closely related to the Caspian tiger, is the most prominent species in Siberia. As of 2015 there were 480 to 540 remaining species. The Amur leopard is also present. Other species include wolves, sables and Asian black bears. Zov Tigra National Park has been established in this region to aid in conserving these species. In Russia, there are almost 25 national parks where rare species of fauna are protected: the Siberian Tiger, the Sika Deer and the Baikal Seal. There are 266 mammal species and 780 bird species in Russia. A total of 415 animal species have been included in the Red Data Book of the Russian Federation as of 1997 and are now protected. The Game Departments rules are based on the Law on Protection and Use of Wildlife 1982, which defines game species on all lands, except the designated protected areas such as the Zaponvedniks.

The Baikal Seal

Siberian Tiger

People Language

Russian is the official and only language of the country, but in every federal republic, the native’s language is recognized as co-official. The Cyrillic alphabet is used, which means that all of the minority languages are written in Cyrillic. After Russian, Tatar (5.3 million) and Ukrainian (1.8 million) are the most spoken languages. Despite its wide distribution, the Russian language is homogeneous throughout the country. Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, as well as the most widely spoken Slavic language. It belongs to the Indo-European language family and is one of the living members of the East Slavic languages, the others being Belarusian and Ukrainian. Also, Russian is the second most used language on the internet, after English. Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. In March 2014, after the accession of Crimea and Sevastopol to the Russian Federation, the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol adopted Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar as official languages.

A language map of European Russia

Despite the regulations made after 1900, especially in terms of vocabulary, there are a large number of dialects in Russia. Some linguists divide the Russian dialects into two main regional groups, the “northern” and the “southern” dialects with Moscow as

Widespread use of Russian Language

a transition zone between the two. Others divide it into three groups: “northern”, “central” and “southerner” with Moscow in the central group. Dialectologists recognize within the Russian language a few dozens of minor varieties. Mikhail Lomonósov was among the first to study Russian dialectology in the 18th century. In the 19th century, Vladimir Dal compiled the first dictionary that included dialectal vocabulary. The detailed study of Russian dialects began at the beginning of the 20th century. The Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language (Диалектологический атлас русского языка) was published in three volumes between 1986 and 1989, after four decades of work. Russian is spoken mainly in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and to a lesser extent in the other countries that made up the USSR and Mongolia. Until 1917, it was the only official language of the Russian Empire. From the Soviet period, the attitude towards the languages of the other ethnic groups fluctuated. Although each of the Soviet republics had its own official language, the superior prestige was reserved for the Russian. After the disintegration of the USSR in 1991, the newly independent nations have promoted their native languages. This has fostered the decline of Russian knowledge by some nations, although it remains a language of political and economic exchange in the region. In the 20th century, Russian was often taught in the communist nations of the former Warsaw Pact and in other satellite countries such as Poland, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. However, younger generations do

Knowledge of Russian in the EU

not learn it anymore since Russian is not compulsory in their educational system. In Latvia, its official recognition and its legality in the classrooms has been a subject of important debate in a country where more than a third of the population speaks Russian, especially among those who migrated from the Russian RSFS and the Byelorussian SSR and the RSS Ukraine after the occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Union. Similarly, in Estonia, immigrants from the Soviet era and their descendants make up about a

Ex-USSR countries competence in speaking Russian

Language

Language Family Federal Subject

Ossetic

Indo-European

Ukrainian

Indo-European

North OssetiaAlania Republic of Crimea

Kalmyk

Mongolic

Kalmykia

Abaza

Russian Cyrillic Alphabet

quarter of the current population. As for Lithuania, a much smaller Russian-speaking population has been assimilated after independence and currently represents less than one-tenth of the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s total population. However, unlike its neighboring countries, the Russian minority and the Lithuanian-speaking Russians are assured of teaching the language in the country. The standard language is based on the Muscovite dialect with its characteristics. In the town of Ninilchik in Alaska, United States, there is a group of elderly people who preserve a dialect of Russian as their mother tongue, existing from the period in which Russia possessed Alaska. This dialect, as characteristics, has lost the neutral gender and the feminine has reduced its use. Common Russian words are used but some have changed their meaning. They also use some Siberian words from the indigenous languages of Alaska and English. In Israel there are about 750.000 Jewish immigrants from the former USSR and the Israeli press frequently makes publications in Russian. Also in North America and Western Europe, there are hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking people. In general, the descendants of emigrants lose their ability to speak Russian before the fourth generation. Russian-speaking communities in Western Europe total about 3 million persons. Formerly descendants of Russian emigrants tended to forget their language in the third generation. Currently, given the ease of travel and access to TV and Russian websites, it is likely to survive longer. There are 35 officially recognized languages by various local governments in Russia and some of them are: 38

Northwestern Caucasian Adyghe Northwestern Caucasian Chechen Northwestern Caucasian Cherkess Northwestern Caucasian Ingush Northwestern Caucasian Kabardian Northwestern Caucasian Altai Turkic

Karachay-Cherkessia

Bashkir

Turkic

Bashkortostan

Chuvash

Turkic

Chuvashia

Crimean Tatar KarachayBalkar Khakas

Turkic

Republic of Crimea

Turkic Turkic

Karbadino-Balkaria Karachay-Cherkessia Khakassia

Nogai

Turkic

Karachay-Cherkessia

Tatar

Turkic

Tatarstan

Tuvan

Turkic

Tuva

Yakut

Turkic

Sakha Republic

Erzya

Uralic

Mordovia

Komi

Uralic

Komi Republic

Hill Mari

Uralic

Mari El

Meadow Mari Moksha

Uralic

Mari El

Uralic

Mordovia

Udmurt

Uralic

Udmurtia

Adygea Chechnya Karachay-Cherkessia Ingushetia Karbadino-Balkaria Altai Republic

Religion

The ancestors of many of today’s Russians adopted Orthodox Christianity since the 10th century. According to the Orthodox Church Tradition, Christianity was first brought to the territory of modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine by Saint Andrew, the first Apostle of Jesus Christ. At the time of the 1917 Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church was deeply integrated into the autocratic state, enjoying official status. This was a significant factor that contributed to the Bolshevik attitude to religion and the steps they took to control it. Bolsheviks consisted of many people with non-Russian, Communist Russians and influential Jewish backgrounds such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Grigori Sokolnikov who were indifferent towards Christianity and based on the writings of Jewish philosopher Karl Marx with Marxism–Leninism as an ideology went on to form the Communist party. Thus the USSR became the first state to have, as an ideological objective, the elimination of religion and its replacement with universal atheism. The communist regime confiscated religious property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in schools. The confiscation of

Saint Basil Cathedral in Moscow

religious assets was often based on accusations of illegal accumulation of wealth. Results of a survey organized by the Faculty of Sociology at the State University of Moscow, about religion in Russia were presented at the Second International Festival “Faith and Word”, which took place in Lesnye-Dali, near Moscow. According to the survey most respondents claimed to be Christians but they do not have the view of the Church or the true teachings about God. 83% of the working population claimed to be Christian Russian. More than 50%

Russia’s Religious Map

Shamanism Spirituality near Lake Baikal

claimed to be Orthodox but do not practice it. Most of them represent a population with an older age. 90% of Muscovites are Christians. Across the country, 10% of Russians declare themselves atheists, 3,5% Muslims (0.8% at Moscow), 0,4% Buddhists (1.6% in Moscow) and 0,3% Catholics (0.5% in capital). Even if 80% of Russians declare themselves Christians (50% Orthodox), only 14% of them were able to answer correctly to some questions about the

QolĹ&#x;Ă¤rif Mosque in Kazan

Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Russia

Christian teachings. Finally, 16% of those questioned have proposed their own concepts about God, excluding the traditional doctrine of the Church and 5,7% said that God does not exist. The poll revealed that only 23% of Christians consider important the religious services while 69% of them do not attend religious services and do not go to church. In this context, it is worth to mention that 40% of Muslims consider compulsory attendance and participation in rituals at the Muslim mosque. The main values of the majority of those surveyed mentioned were: family, health and friends. Islam is the second religion in Russia. It is the traditional or predominant religion amongst some Caucasian ethnicities (notably the Chechens, the Ingush and the Circassians), and amongst some Turkic peoples (notably the Tatars and the Bashkirs). Those who are affiliated are mostly Sunni Muslims, with Shia and Ahmadiyya minorities. Buddhism is traditional in three regions of the Russian Federation: Buryatia, Tuva, and Kalmykia. Some residents of the Siberian and Far Eastern regions, such as Yakutia and Chukotka, practice shamanism, pantheism, and pagan rites, along with the major religions. In conclusion, Slavs are significantly Orthodox Christian, Turkic speakers are predominantly Muslim, and Mongolic peoples are generally Buddhists.

World Heritage

On UNESCO’s list there can be found 16 cultural objectives and 10 natural objectives in Russia: Cultural Objectives: • Kizhi Pogost • Kremlin and Red Square, Moscow • Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments • White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal • Cultural and Historic Ensemble of the Solovetsky Islands • Historic Monuments of Novgorod and Surroundings • Architectural Ensemble of the Trinity Sergius Lavra in Sergiev Posad • Church of the Ascension, Kolomenskoye • Curonian Spit • Ensemble of the Ferapontov Monastery • Historic and Architectural Complex of the Kazan Kremlin • Citadel, Ancient City and Fortress Buildings of Derbent • Ensemble of the Novodevichy Convent • Historical Centre of the City of Yaroslavl • Struve Geodetic Arc • Bolgar Historical and Archaeological Complex Natural Objectives: • Virgin Komi Forests • Lake Baikal • Volcanoes of Kamchatka • Golden Mountains of Altai • Western Caucasus • Central Sikhote-Alin • Uvs Nuur Basin • Natural System of Wrangel Island Reserve • Putorana Plateau • Lena Pillars Nature Park

Demographics

In spite of the fact that Russia has a numerous population, its density is one of the smallest in the world. The highest density is in the European part, in the Ural Mountains region. In Southeastern Siberia and in the Far East, there are very few inhabitants. However, the numbers are increasing towards the Chinese and Mongolian borders. Russian ethnics are representing 79.8% of the population. Russia has about 160 ethnic groups and indigenous people. A low birth rate, combined with alcoholism and a poor health system led to a situation where Russia’s population drops by 500,000 people every year. However, the Russian

Russia’s demographic challenge - birth rate

Federation includes several significant minorities. In 2008, the population decreased by 121.400 people, or -0.085% (in 2007 - by 212.000, or 0.15%, and in 2006 with 532.600 people, or 0.37%). In 2008, migration has continued to grow at a rate of 2.7% to 281.615 migrants who arrived in the Russian Federation, of which 95% came from the CIS countries, most of them Russians or Russian speakers. After the Second World War, which had killed about 27 million people (civilians and military), the population had returned to pre-war levels in 1955 (111 million), then increased by almost 35%, reaching its peak in 1992 (148.7 million). However, several phenomena

Russia’s demographic challenge – death rate

Natural Population Growth Rates in 2015

have modified this population dynamics, the most important of which is undoubtedly the “normalization” of Russian fertility, which has made its demographic transition since 1988 and now has a birth rate close to that of other European countries from the east, that is, very low. The natural deficit is partly offset by migratory flows from the countries that emerged from the break-up of the USSR. In 2008, Russia had some 10 million immigrants. The economic crisis, the increase in unemployment and the redefinition of the Russian identity caused a rise in xenophobia in the country: 74

racist killings were recorded in 2007 and 114 in 2008, which is to put into perspective with the lower statistics of other European countries also familiar with this phenomenon. Life expectancy is lower than the European average for women (75 years) but for men the average age at death is 63 years (9 years lower than the European average). The mortality rate stands at 15‰, while the birth rate stands at 9‰. Life expectancy dropped dramatically during the period of political and economic chaos in the 1990’s following the demise of

Flag Map of the subjects of the Russian Federation

Russia’s nations and minorities

the Soviet Union. This is due to a number of factors: mass alcoholism, suicide, a deficient health system that failed to halt the rapid development of AIDS and tuberculosis. For example, during the transition crisis, Russia experienced four times more violent deaths than the United States. In fact, at the time, it ranked second in the world for homicides (28.4 per 100.000 inhabitants in 2000) and third for suicides (38.4 per 100.000 inhabitants in 2002). The arrival, later than in the West, of certain epidemics such as AIDS also explains the situation: at the end of 2005, Russia recorded nearly 350.000 HIV infections. The number of emigrants from Russia decreased by 16% to 39.508 of which 66% went to other CIS countries. There are also an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants in post-Soviet Russia. Roughly, 116 million ethnic Russians live in Russia and about 20 million currently reside in other former republics of the Soviet Union, mostly in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The main causes of Russia’s decline in population are the high rate of deaths and low birth rate. Although the birth rate in Russia is comparable to that of other European countries (12.1 births per 1.000 people in 2008, compared with the EU average of 9.90 per 1.000), its population is

Russian Regions

declining at a higher rate than many other countries because the mortality rate is significantly higher (in 2008, the mortality rate in Russia was 14.5 per 1.000 people, compared with the EU average of 10.28 per 1.000. Moreover, the current of emigration towards Israel, the United States and Germany, very important during the 1990’s, has now practically dried up and was well below certain forecasts. After the annexation of Crimea on 18 March 2014, the Russian population suddenly increased by about two million people, bringing the total population to about 146.5 million. The top 20 largest cities from Russia can be seen in the following table: Rank City Name

Region

Population

1 2

Moscow Sankt Petersburg Novosibirsk Oblast Sverdlovsk Oblast Nizhny Novgorod Oblast Tatarstan Chelyabinsk Oblast Samara Oblast Omsk Oblast Rostov Oblast

12.100.000 5.200.000

Bashkortostan Krasnoyarsk Krai Perm Krai Voronezh Oblast Volgograd Oblast Saratov Oblast Krasnodar Krai Samara Oblast Udmurtia Ulyanovsk Oblast

1.090.000 1.050.000

Moscow Sankt Petersburg Novosibirsk

Yekaterinburg

Nizhny Novgorod

6 7

Kazan Chelyabinsk

8 9 10 11 12

Samara Omsk Rostov-naDonu Ufa Krasnoyarsk

13 14

Perm Voronezh

Volgograd

16 17 18 19 20

Saratov Krasnodar Tolyatti Izhevsk Ulyanovsk

1.560.000 1.420.000 1.250.000 1.200.000 1.180.000 1.175.000 1.170.000 1.100.000

1.030.000 1.005.000 1.000.000 840.000 800.000 720.000 640.000 615.000 43

Economy & Transportation Economy

At more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia is still trying to build a functioning market economy and to achieve higher economic growth. After the dissolution of the USSR, the first signs of economic recovery emerged in 1997 in Russia, proving the influences of the market economy. However, that year, the Asian financial crisis culminated in August, and affected Russia by the depreciation of the ruble. It followed the rise of the public debt and the decline in living standards for most of the population. The following year, in 1998, the recession continued. In 1999, the economy began to recover. This recovery was driven by a weak ruble, which has stimulated exports and made imports more expensive. Between 1999-2005, the GDP growth was around 6,7%, largely due to higher oil prices, continuation of the weak ruble policy, and growth of the industrial production. At the moment, Russia has a huge trade surplus, due to its protectionist barriers of imports and to the local corruption which prevents smaller and medium enterprises to import foreign products without the mediation of the local Russian firms. The country’s economic development was extremely uneven: Moscow region contributes to 1/3 of the GDP, while in the region there is concentrated only 1/10 of the total population. The recent restoration of the country’s economy due to rising oil prices, with renewed government efforts in 2000 and 2001 for carrying out the structural reforms, have raised business

Russia’s Export Tree Map

Russia’s GRP per capita (Green = highest, Yellow = medium, Orange = lowest)

people and investors confidence in Russia’s chances in the second decade of transition. Russia remains deeply dependent on exports of commodities, particularly oil, natural gases, metals and timber, which provides 80% of total exports, leaving the country vulnerable to changes in world market prices. In recent years, the domestic demand for consumer goods has greatly increased, about 12% annually in the 2000-2005 period, demonstrating the strengthening of its internal market. The GDP approached 1.200 billion € in 2004, making Russia’s economy the 9th in the world and 5th in Europe. If the annual rate of growth continues as it is now, Russia’s economy is expected to reach the second position in Europe, after Germany, in a few years. On 1 April 2006, Russia’s international reserves had reached 206 billion $ and there were forecasts to increase this reserve at 230-280 billion $ by the end of the year and to 300-400 billion $ by the end of 2007. The biggest challenge that lies ahead is how the Russian government could encourage and help develop the small and medium enterprises, in a young banking system, which lacks functionality and is dominated by Russian oligarchs. Many banks are owned by local oligarchs, who often use bank funds to finance their own businesses only. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank have tried to start normal banking

Russia’s unemployment rate since the fall of the Soviet Union

Moscowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s International Business Center

practices through capital investments and dividends, but success has been limited. Other issues include the Russian economy and the uneven development of the regions of the country. While Moscow is growing explosively and the standard of living in the metropolitan area is approaching to that of most developed European countries, most of the country, particularly in the rural regions and in the areas of the minority populations in Asian Russia the economic situation remained deplorable. Economic development is noticeable in several other cities such as Sankt Petersburg, Kaliningrad and Yekaterinburg, as in

the adjacent rural areas. Encouraging foreign investment is also a challenge due to legal, cultural, linguistic barriers and certain peculiarities politics of the country. Lately there have been significant investments of large European investors, encouraged by the low prices of land and labor, as well as by the higher growth rates than in the rest of Europe. The high levels of education and civility of the majority population, including women and minorities, the secular attitudes, the adaptable structure of the population and the very good integration of minorities into the cultural main mainstream places Russia much

Higher and lower GDP per capita than in Russia

Labour productivity level of Russia in 2016 was one of the lowest in Europe according to OECD

better than most other so-called “developing countries” and even better than some highly developed countries. So far, the country has benefited from the rising of the oil and natural gas prices and was able to pay most of its old huge external debts. Fair redistribution of income from exports of raw materials to other sectors is still a big problem. However, in 2003, the importance of natural resources exports began to decline in the economic balance, while the domestic market has strengthened even more, being massively stimulated by the growth in constructions and the increase in demands for various goods and services. In addition, several large international companies are investing in Russia. According to International Monetary Fund statistics, in Russia there were directly invested almost 26 billion $ in 2001-2004, of which 11,7 billion $ in 2004 alone. Another problem is modernization of infrastructure, ageing and inadequate after years of being neglected in the 1990’s. The government has said that 1 trillion $ will be invested in development of infrastructure by 2020. In December 2011, Russia finally joined the World Trade Organization, allowing it a greater access to overseas markets. Some analysts estimate that WTO membership could bring the Russian economy a bounce of up to 3% annually. Russia ranks as the second-most corrupt country in Europe (after Ukraine), according to the Corruption Perceptions Index. It is estimated that corruption is costing the Russian economy an estimated 2 billion $ (80 billion rubles) per year. In 2014, a book-length study by Professor Karen Dawisha was published concerning corruption in Russia under Putin’s government. Russian economy began stagnating in late 2013 and in combination with the War in Donbass is in danger 46

of entering stagflation, slow growth and high inflation. The Russian ruble collapsed by 24% from October 2013 to October 2014 entering the level where the central bank may need to intervene to strengthen the currency. Moreover, after bringing inflation down to 3,6% in 2012, the lowest rate since gaining independence from the Soviet Union, inflation in Russia jumped to nearly 7,5% in 2014, causing the central bank to increase its lending rate to 8% from 5,5% in 2013. In an October 2014 article in Bloomberg Business Week, it was reported that Russia had significantly started shifting its economy towards China in response to increasing financial tensions following its annexation of Crimea and subsequent Western economic sanctions.

M3 Russian Highway

Transportation

As of 2006, Russia had 933.000 km of roads, of which 755.000 were paved. Some of these make up the Russian federal motorway system. With a large land area the road density is the lowest of all the G8 and BRIC countries. Since 2000, the trend towards the street development in Russia has been clearly visible. The road density is very low with 40 meters of road per square kilometer. This is partly due to the very low population density in large parts of the country. The road network in Russia is of very different quality. Its development can’t keep pace with the ever-increasing traffic. The density of the network decreases sharply from west to east: the farther one moves from Moscow to the east, the more the road conditions deteriorate. Nevertheless, the bulk of freight traffic between Western Europe and Russia is handled by road - in transit through Poland and Belarus or via the Northern route via Poland and the Baltic republics and via Finland. This also contributes to the difference in track width of the railways. Transportation As of 2006, Russia had 933.000 km of roads, of which 755.000 were paved. Some of these make up the Russian federal motorway system. With a large land area the road density is the lowest of all the G8 and BRIC countries. Since 2000, the trend towards the street development in Russia has been clearly visible. The road density is very low with 40 meters of road per square kilometer. This is partly due to the very low population density in large parts of the country. The road network in Russia is of very different quality. Its development can’t keep pace with the ever-increasing traffic. The density of the network decreases sharply from west to east: the farther one moves from Moscow to the east, the more the road conditions deteriorate. Nevertheless, the bulk of freight traffic between Western Europe and Russia is handled by road - in transit through Poland and Belarus or via

M18 Highway

Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express

the Northern route via Poland and the Baltic republics and via Finland. This also contributes to the difference in track width of the railways. The Russian highway and highway network together covers about 540.000 kilometers (2001), of which two-thirds are fixed. Only since 2003 there is a spatially and seasonally continuous road connection from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific. The highways outside of the metropolitan areas are usually not built as highways or highways and even with larger wide streets, the directional lanes are not separated by guardrails. The main highway in Russia is the European Route 30, which ends in Siberia. Railway transport in Russia is mostly under the control of the state-run Russian Railways monopoly. The company accounts for over 3,6% of Russia’s GDP and handles 39% of the total freight traffic (including pipelines) and more than 42% of passenger traffic. The total length of common-used railway tracks exceeds 85.500 km (53.127 mi), second only to the United States. Over 44.000 km (27.340 mi) of tracks are

A Russian Railways Siemens Velaro Sapsan Train

Diesel Locomotive in Siberia

Bus in Nizhny Novgorod

electrified, which is the largest number in the world, and additionally there are more than 30.000 km (18.641 mi) of industrial non-common carrier lines. Railways in Russia, unlike in the most of the world, use broad gauge of 1,520 mm, with the exception of 957 km (595 mi) on Sakhalin island using narrow gauge of 1,067 mm. The most renowned railway in Russia is the Trans-Siberian (Transsib), spanning a record 7 time zones and serving the longest single continuous services in the world, Moscow-Vladivostok (9.259 km), Moscow–Pyongyang (10.267 km) and Kiev–Vladivostok (11.085 km). Much of Russia’s inland waterways which total 102.000 km are made up of natural rivers or lakes. In the European part of the country the network of channels connects the basins of major rivers. Russia’s capital, Moscow, is sometimes called “the port of the five seas” because of its waterway connections to the Baltic, White, Caspian, Azov and Black Seas. Major sea ports of Russia include Rostov-na-Donu on the Azov Sea, Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, Astrakhan and Makhachkala on the Caspian, Kaliningrad and Sankt Petersburg on the Baltic, Arkhangelsk on the White

Sea, Murmansk on the Barents Sea, PetropavlovskKamchatsky and Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean. In 2008 the country owned 1.448 merchant marine ships. The world’s only fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers advances the economic exploitation of the Arctic continental shelf of Russia and the development of sea trade through the Northern Sea Route between Europe and East Asia. In Russia and the Soviet Union aviation has always been of great importance, not only thanks to the technical achievements of many Russian aircraft designers such as B. Andrei Tupolev. Particularly important is the national air traffic in remote areas, which would be very difficult to develop by land and would also be largely not worthwhile. Several international airlines fly directly to other Russian cities besides Moscow. In addition to the Aeroflot, as larger companies there also are Rossija, S7 Airlines and UTair. The number of airports in Russia has been reduced from 1.302 to 496 since 1992, with the number of international airports increasing from 19 to 70. 55 airfields have a paved runway over 3.000 meters in length. The biggest and most important airports are

Novorossiysk Port

Port of Murmansk

Russian-Armenian Gas Pipeline

Taxi in Moscow

Tram in Moscow

Sheremetyevo and Domodedovo near Moscow. The aircraft fleet of Russia currently comprises about 6.000 aircraft, including nearly 2.000 cargo aircraft. By total length of pipelines, Russia is second only to the United States. Currently many new pipeline projects are being realized, including Nord Stream and South Stream natural gas pipelines to Europe, and the Eastern Siberia â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Pacific Ocean oil pipeline (ESPO) to the Russian Far East and China. Russia has 1.216 airports, the busiest being Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, and Vnukovo in Moscow, and Pulkovo in Sankt Petersburg. Typically, major Russian cities have welldeveloped systems of public transport, with the most common varieties of exploited vehicles being bus, trolleybus and tram. Seven Russian cities, namely Moscow, Sankt Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Samara, Yekaterinburg, and Kazan, have underground metros, while Volgograd features a metro-tram. The total length of metros in Russia is 465.4 kilometers (289.2 mi). Almost half of passenger transport takes place in local transport, mainly via the bus network, which exists in 120 cities. In addition, 90 Russian cities have a trolleybus network. 50

Moscow Metro Map

Sankt Petersburg Metro

Moscow Domodedovo Airport

Typically, major Russian cities have welldeveloped systems of public transport, with the most common varieties of exploited vehicles being bus, trolleybus and tram. Seven Russian cities, namely Moscow, Sankt Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Samara, Yekaterinburg, and Kazan, have underground metros, while Volgograd features a metro-tram. The total length of metros in Russia is 465.4 kilometers (289.2 mi). Almost half of passenger transport takes place in local transport, mainly via the bus network, which exists in 120 cities. In addition, 90 Russian cities have a trolleybus network. Moscow Metro and Sankt Petersburg Metro are the oldest in Russia, opened in 1935 and 1955 respectively. These two are among the fastest and busiest metro systems in the world, and are famous for rich decorations and unique designs of their stations, which

is a common tradition in Russian metros and railways. There are trams and suburban trains in 66 cities, as well as one subway in seven cities and four suburban rail lines. In Russia, when trying to approach a taxi cab or to stop a taxi on the street, always wait for the driver to roll down the window as this is the preferred manner. After the driver does that, tell him the destination you want to go at and the price you offer for it. Generally, it should not cost more than 500 rubles to go from one part of a big city to another. The driver can rather agree, name a higher price or haggle further. In another scenario he may try to ask for a huge price in which case you should walk away from him. This is the Russian way that people take taxis and it is much cheaper than using the cab companies. Always pay the taxi drivers in cash. Lots of taxis painted in one color are used as share taxis.

Aeroflot is the national air carrier of Russia

Culture Russian Proverbs 1. Neither fur, nor feather (Ни пу́ха, ни пера́) - Means “Good Luck” 2. A friend is known in time of needs. ( Друг познаётся в беде́.) 3. Visiting is good, but home is better. (В гостя́х хорошо́, а до́ма лу́чше.) 4. There was and there wasn’t. (Была́ не была́.) 5. Without effort, you won’t pull a fish out of a pond. (Без труда́ не вы́тащишь и ры́бку из пруда́) 6. Better late than never. (Лу́чше по́здно, чем никогда́.) 7. Live for a century, learn for a century. (Век живи́ — век учи́сь.) 8. In a quiet pond, devils dwell. (В тихом омуте черти водятся.) 9. There’ll be a party on our street too. (Будет и на нашей улице праздник!) 10. Love is so cruel that you could even fall in love with a goat. (Любо́вь зла́, полю́бишь и козла́.) 11. You won’t get hit in the nose for asking. (За спрос не бьют в нос.) 12. It’s not bad to want. (Хотеть не вредно.) 13. Repetition is the mother of learning. (Повторе́ние – мать уче́нья.) 14. Don’t drink reckless, the sea is only knee deep. (Пья́ному мо́ре по коле́но.) 15. It’ll heal before your wedding. (До сва́дьбы заживёт.) 16. A wolf ’s legs feed him. (Во́лка но́ги ко́рмят.) 17. Time is the best doctor. (Вре́мя – лу́чший до́ктор.) 18. Everything genius is simple. (Всё гениальное просто.) 19. Taste isn’t argued over. (О вку́сах не спо́рят ) 20. Without torture, no science. ( Без муки нет науки.)

6 January 7 January 8 January 14 January 23 February

New Year Holiday Week (Новый год Праздник Неделя) Orthodox Christmas Day (Православное Рождество) New Year Holiday Week (Новый год Праздник Неделя) Old New Year (Старый Новый год) Defender of the Fatherland Day (День защитника Отечества)

27 February

Special Operations Forces Day (Специальный день операции силы) 7 March New Year Holiday Substitution (Новый год Праздник Замена) 8 March International Women's Day (Международный женский день) April-May Orthodox Easter Day (Православная (variable) Пасха день) 1 May Spring and Labor Day (весна и день труда) 2 May Spring and Labor Day observed (Весна и День Труда Наблюдаемые) 3 May New Year Holiday Substitution (Новый год Праздник Замена) 9 May Victory Day (День Победы) 12 June Russia Day (День России) 13 June Russia Day observed (День России наблюдается) 4 November Unity Day (День народного единства)

Russian Holidays Period

Holiday

1 January 4 January

New Year's Day (День Нового года) New Year Holiday Week (Новый год Праздник Неделя) New Year Holiday Week (Новый год Праздник Неделя)

5 January 52

Sunday Communion in Orthodox Russia

Traditional Russian Samovar

Traditional Russian Folk Costumes

Russia has various ethnicity across its vast territory (Buranovkiye Babushki are of Udmurt origin)

Traditional Matryoshka Toys

Woman wearing Traditional Russian Costume

Typical Russian Winter in small village

Russian Winter Clothing

Russian Personalities

Peter The Great Peter The Great (b. 9 June 1672 in Moscow, Tsardom of Russia - d. 8 February 1725 / b. 30 May 1672 - d. 28 January 1725 according to Julian Calendar in Sankt Petersburg, Russian Empire) was the ruler of Russia, since 7 May/27 April 1682 until his death. He was a tall person, having a height of 2 meters, which was way above the average men height of that period. His true name was Piotr “Veliki”. Peter the Great’s (Piotr Veliki) parents were Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and Natalia Naryshkin. Tsar Alexei, nicknamed the Peaceful had from his first marriage to Maria Miloslavski 2 boys, Feodor and Ivan and 6 girls, and from his second marriage to Natalie, he had a son, Peter and 2 other girls. Feodor succeeded him to the throne Feodor, but for a little while because he died early on 7 May 1682.

Peter The Great

Because Ivan, the oldest of the royal brothers, was rather poor in spirit and his body was rather feeble, Peter, aged just 10, was declared the future Tsar. Again for a brief period, as in the race for the throne entered the gossips and intrigues of the Miloslavski family who wanted Ivan as successor to the throne, despite his stinginess with which the nature endowed him. One of the daughters of the first wife of Alexei, the ambitious and fierce Sofia, seconded by the Tsar’s militia has massacred the Naryshkins, the Czarina’s brothers, and their supporters, then she proclaimed herself regent, whilst Ivan and Peter were still minors. They were together ascended to the throne on the same day, 23 July 1682, the only case in the history of Russia when two Tsars occupied the royal chair at the same time. An interesting detail: those who today see the double throne preserved at the Kremlin Museum can easily see the hole in the back of the chair, where regent Sofia, placed backwards from the eyes of the courtiers was dictating the two of them her will. Not after a long time, the young Peter was recorded by his draconian stepsister in a Moscow suburb called Preobrajenskoe. The care of his education was bored for a few years by a mediocre preceptor named Zotov, who used to teach him when he wanted and depending on his mood, meaning rarely and poorly. Young and restless, gaining news in all fields, Peter arrives, in one of his many wanderings through the streets of Moscow, in Nemetskaia Slobada, the district of foreigners, where he gets acquainted with interesting characters, trained and eager to communicate their knowledge: Lefort, a Genovese man, old Gordon, a man from Scotland, Timmerman from Strasbourg, the Dutchman Winnius and others. This people will initiate Piotr into the mysteries of the European civilization and will become his teachers in the field of military arts and navigation, as well as its future generals and engineers. About the first of these companions, Voltaire said: “It so happened that a young man from Geneva, Franz Lefort on his name, to be in Moscow, visiting the Danish Ambassador of the time. Tsar Peter was 19 years old when met the Genovese man. The latter swiftly learned Russian and spoke almost all languages of Europe. Lefort was liked a lot by the prince and he quickly came into his job and quite swift in his soul. Lefort made the young Peter understand that there were other ways of living and reigning than those practiced since all times in his vast empire. Perhaps, in the absence of the Genovese, even today Russia would be barbaric.” As Piotr was not sick to caress his flesh, he was

the young Tsar to try to conquest the Azov Sea, in possession of the Turks then. The Don Cossacks and the Preobrajenski and Semionovski regiments went down on the Moscow and Volga river paths, accompanied by Peter who is willingly garrisoned as a simple gunner. The inexperience of the troops, the absence of a proper fleet, as well as the betrayal of German engineer Jansen causes the failure of his first expedition. Unaccustomed to the taste of abandonment, hardly discouraged in no matter what contrary circumstances, the sovereign Russian builds at once several shipyards in Voronezh and calls from abroad some brilliant gunners, naval officers and engineers, so a few months later, in May 1696, he defeats the Turkish and blocks the Sea of Azov, both on water and on land. The discord does not stop here because Peter wants to win on all fronts: he orders the digging of a canal between the Don and the Volga, builds a fleet in the Black Sea and manages to obtain a symbolic capitulation from the Turks. The event occurred in 1700 when he sends an ambassador to Constantinople. Before that, eager to find among his subjects the same good habits and high

Anonymous Portrait of Peter the Great

wasting a lot of time in gallant adventures, his mother marries him by force in 1689 with Evdokia Feodorovna Lapukin. That same year, Peter thwarts a plot skillfully planned by Sofia, then he arrives at the gates of Moscow with an ordered army and forces his sister to leave the throne. His mother, the Czarina was surrounded by hypocrite counselors and she governs until 1694 a country engulfed in chaos, corruption and scandals. At the age of 22 years old since his motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death, Peter finally becomes the absolute rulers of the destinies of Russia. The first measure of the new Tsar was to organize a permanent army based on the European model. Lefort and Gordon are appointed to name the officers and to develop a strategy for the troops. In parallel, Peter develops the marine industry, he improves the weapons and the military techniques, creates elite contingents and installs a permanent military fleet in the Baltic Sea. The ancient enmity between the Russian Orthodox people and the Turkish â&#x20AC;&#x153;pagansâ&#x20AC;? became a state of war since the time of the regents and thus, it prompts

Portrait of Peter The Great

Not only he walked through the mud, behind General Lefort, but he neglected the old parades and traditions of the court, living as a bad Christian. After he defies all his enemies from the inside, Peter manages to finally go to Europe, not before leaving some good substitutes and making himself a name which did not attract attention: Piotr Mihailov. Hidden among members of the Great Britan Embassy which included 270 subjects, Peter goes for a long road, having in mind to study the Western institutions and to negotiate alliances against their eternal enemies, the Turks. Arriving at Hanover and Brandenburg, Peter shows little interest in the life of the palace, being rather attracted by factories, arsenals, laboratories and pharmacies. He examined with a lot of patience all the bridges, canals, windmills and watermills, studying in parallel, with an equal ardor sciences such as: mathematics, chemistry, physics, zoology and medicine. But since his main objective remained the maritime art, he went unaccompanied at Zaandam and Amsterdam, where he simply was hired as a sawmill laborer at the rope factories or in the dock, living as a Dutch “skipper”. Realizing, however, that here, the “maritime

Portrait of Peter I (by Godfrey Kneller, 1698). This portrait was Peter’s gift to the King of England.

knowledge that he was obliged to learn from strangers and not only the eternal Russian hobbies, Piotr Veliki sends about 50 native nobles to Holland, England and Venice to refine in the arts and sciences fields. As he prepared to accompany them, a few riots bursted in the country. The Old Mother Russia was crossed by chills in front of the Tsar’s innovation: not only he surrounds himself by foreigners, his subjects were stuttering, but he offered them the most noble ranks. Not only he did not listen to the boyars of the old courtyard, but he defied them by enrolling himself as a simple gunner in the army or as a pilot in the navy. 58

Piotr Veliki as Tsar of Russia

art” is purely empirical, he leaves for England, where the vessels are built “according to solid principles.” He spent three months in the treacherous, but technically admirable Albion where Piotr employs about 500 workers, engineers and architects. Last but not least, he bought a few important models of boats. Peter reached Dresden after avoiding the French royal court, and he prepared to set up a camp in Venice, one of the great maritime powers of the time, but he learns out about a new uprising of the Moscow militia, staged by Sofia. As Europe proves itself as a fruitful example only in the direction of technical progress and mundane conventions, Peter embarks on to his homeland with lots of sketches of the modern military tools, but having at the same time his punitive rudimentary boyar skills. He overwhelms his opponents and hangs the plotters right in front of the monastery where he imprisoned Sofia and Martha, another one of his sisters, not before shaving their heads. Peter took advantage of the poor political sympathies of his old and not so attractive wife, Evdokia, to repudiate her, preparing at the same time the royal bedding for Marta Helena Skowrońska, the maid of his best friend, Aleksandr Menshikov. Being in love at first sight, in the house of the latter, the two of them, Marta and Peter will marry in 1712. They had two children, one of them being born before the marriage and Marta will take the name of Catherine. After Peter’s death, she will ascend to the throne as Catherine I of Russia. She will remain in history as the “Empressphilosopher”. In 1715, Peter will arrive in France. Upon seeing the tomb of Cardinal Richelieu and his imposing statue, the Tsar will be driven away by one of his lunatic impulses. He walks on the tombstone, embracing the Minister’s effigy and utters these memorable words: “Why haven’t you been born in my lifetime? I would have given you half of my kingdom just to teach me how to govern the other half.” Russia allied with Denmark and Poland entered the war with Sweden’s Charles XII in 1700. With five decades before, the vigorous Nordic state conquered the Russian territories from the Baltic Sea, and now Peter thought to be able to wash the affront. His mission however was not that easy because the young Charles proves himself a brilliant strategist and becomes Piotr’s greatest enemy. In the battle of Narva, Charles, in front of 8.000 Swedish soldiers manages to defeat an army consisting of 80.000 Russians. In the coming years, the Swedes are destroying Poland and Saxony, forcing the King August II to abandon his

Piotr Veliki planting a tree

throne. His proverbial tenacity pushes Peter to continue his campaigns in the north, where he conquers the present territory of Estonia and the space of the mouth of the river Neva in 1703. In the latter place, he will undertake the greatest and most enduring work of his lifetime, the building of a new city, Sankt Petersburg. “To raise this city, the future capital of the country, he defied the nature and at the same time, the past of Russia. Peter hated the old courtyard of the Tsar’s, with its continental climate, with its traditions of centuries, with its superstition, its intrigues of the court and its oriental spirit. The neighborhood of the sea makes him dizzy, it’s the place where he feels at home. The new town will reflect a desire for renewal of a Tsar that rejects the legacy of his ancestors.” Assuming he can kneel anytime his stubborn rival, Charles systematically ignores his campaigns. However, when he starts a decisively march to Moscow with the stated aim of making Peter abdicate, the Swedish sovereign feels forced to kneel for the first time in front of Piotr, in the Battle of Lesnaya on 28 September 1708. After another defeat in Riga, Charles’ advance to 59

Peter The Great on his deathbed

the east is stopped and he decides to invade Ukraine. This is the moment when Peter chooses the technique of the burnt field, forcing the Swedish army in a terrible famine. In the following spring, upon the resumption of the campaign, Peter becomes more aggressive and crushes its northern enemy at the Battle of Poltava on 27 June 1709, in which he kills 10.000 Swedish soldiers and captures all the survivors. Charles takes temporary refuge at the court of Sultan Ahmed III, to whom he requires support for a new campaign. In the following years, the brave Tsar’s armies conquered the Swedish province of Livonia (the northern half of modern Latvia and the southern parts of Estonia) and attacked the Swedes in the nowadays territory of Finland. The cease of hostilities barely occurred in 1718, when Charles XII is killed. In 1721, the Treaty of Nystad will record the end of what remained known in history 60

as the Great Northern War. 1721 is also the year in which Minister Golovkin utters a historical speech addressed to Peter: “The Senate finds it fit to beg Your Majesty, with the deepest humility to receive the name Peter the Great, father of the fatherland, king of all Russia... Long live Peter the Great, father of the fatherland, king of all Russia.” Many of the expected changes of Peter had targeted the external appearance of his subjects: after the Tsar shaved their beards, he was angry about their garments. Through an “ukaz” given on 4 January 1700 it was decided that “the boyars, the people of the court and the court officials should wear Hungarian clothing with the caftan above to below the knee, and the underneath one shorter.” Those who disobeyed the “ukaz” had to pay a fine. On 20 December 1699, Piotr Veliki had given another “ukaz”, which stated that the counting of the years was to be made after the European calendar, each year beginning on 1 January and not 1 September, as it was the custom. Also, he decided that in the first day of the new year, everyone should decorate the gates of their houses, should take part at the Church’s events and should greet each other with good wishes for the New Year. As Voltaire reports, some had come to ask: “How could God make people in winter?”, while others had gone even further: “The Bible says that the Antichrist has to change the weather. Peter must be the Antichrist”. It was a negative shift of sense, absolutely explainable, given the fact that the ecclesiastical administration was reformed in the direction of subordinating the spiritual power to the secular one. The death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700 has provided the opportunity for Piotr to dismantle this high office of the Church, whose prerogatives, theoretically at least, were equal to the Tsar and to replace it with a Holy Synod in 1721. Tolerant to all other Western Christian denominations, Peter has just expelled the Jesuits who were proselytizing. In 1702, the women were allowed to take part in the meetings of the society, engagement became mandatory six weeks before marriage, being beaten with a rod was banned and the right to kill an adulterous wife was taken away from men. A year later, the first Russian newspaper appeared in Moscow, “Moskovskie novosti”, a 4 page news journal. They have also prepared arithmetic manuals and even a dictionary. After the death of his two sons, Peter the Great has decided to ensure the regular succession to the throne and by the “ukaz” of 16 February 1722, he ensured the sovereign’s right to appoint his successor despite the principle of the first born.

Peter the Great as Emperor of all Russia

Catherine The Great Catherine The Great (b. 2 May 1729 in Stettin, Pomerania, Prussia, now Szczecin, Poland - d. 17 November 1796 / b. 21 April 1729 - d. 6 November 1796 according to the Julian Calendar in Sankt Petersburg, Russia) was the most renowned and the longest ruling female leader of Russia, reigning from 1762 until her death in 1796 at the age of 67. Born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), Pomerania, Prussia as Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, she came to power following a coup d'état when her husband, Peter III, was assassinated. Russia was revitalized under her reign, growing larger and stronger than ever and becoming recognized as one of the great powers of Europe. The future supreme Tsarina’s name was actually Sophia Augusta Frederica, was of German nationality and was born in the town of Stettin in Pomerania, Prussia (now called Szeczin in Poland). The child saw the light of the day in the family of Christian Augustus, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst. She spent her childhood in an

Catherine The Great in 1782

austere atmosphere, but marked by scholarly discussion and often joyful ones. Her father was a very strict and religious man, then commanding a regiment of the Prussian army. Her mother, Princess Johanna Elizabeth von Holstein-Gottorp was closely akin to the monarchs who ruled Prussia, Denmark and Sweden. In 1743, the young princess was baptized in the Lutheran Church rite to accomplish her mother’s wish, although soon after she married Tsar Peter III of Russia, the young girl switched to Orthodoxy without any regret. In 1744, Catherine received an invitation from Empress Elizabeth of Russia, an invitation which actually sought the arranging of a marriage between her son and Sophia Augusta. Her future husband was actually a second cousin, who was then only 11 years old and was already addicted to alcohol. Later, Catherine realized that getting married to the heir of Russia’s throne will pave the way to a dream life, so the princess accepted the ambitious plan of the two families. The two just married cousins soon proved to be totally incompatible with each other. However, Catherine tried to keep up the appearances for the sake of the court’s situation, she was patient with her slob and eccentric husband because she was following her goals in silence and with great ambition. Unlike her husband, Catherine was an ambitious woman, intelligent and talented in many areas. Her strong mind was of a male type, being always eager to learn and to discover new things. In fact come to Russia to accomplish their career and destiny. The Tsar soon began to cheat on Catherine with any woman that was around him. Instead of making bouts of jealousy or to declare herself scandalized by this reality, Catherine has decided to react similarly reaching therefore to have dozens of lovers throughout her life. Russian historians and biographers don’t know certainly even today if Tsar Peter was indeed the biological father of Prince Paul and Princess Anna, even more since Catherine had not been pregnant in the first 5 years of marriage and rumours said that the Tsar was sterile. One of the men for who Tsarina Catherine had a burning passion was Sergei Saltikov, none other than her own son’s chamberlain. He was already a famous philanderer coveted by many women of the court, being able to finally conquer Catherine’s love. According to some historians, the queen had actually been secretly advised by her aides to have a baby with Saltikov. Prince Paul, who became king Paul I after the death of Catherine was the chamberlain’s child. Russian historians claim that two other lovers

Catherine The Great

of Catherine, Grigori Orlov and StanisĹ&#x201A;aw August Poniatowski have also had two children with the Queen, a boy and a girl, thing which was actually never publicly acknowledged by the Tsarina. Among all these lovers of noble families and distinguished political careers (StanisĹ&#x201A;aw Poniatowski became King of Poland in 1764), none has used their intimate relationships with the queen to get involved in the state politics. Only one exception existed and that was Admiral Grigori Potemkin, who was the great love of Catherine, who according to some historians has finally married the Queen in secret. The last lover of this nonconformist and ambitious Empress was found to be the young and eccentric Platon Zubov. A generous and romantic nature, Catherine the Great took care of all her lovers, giving them both properties and lands, as well as titles of nobility. Although her sexual appetite was a defining aspect of her personality, Catherine never let her love life to stop her political ascent and thirst for power. An avid reader, the Queen had a childhood passion to read every book that fell into her hands. Soon, she began to be interested in philosophy, politics and history, her favorite authors being Diderot and Voltaire. Catherine the Great was fluent in German, French and Russian. She soon got attracted by the Russian culture and civilization which she loved a lot. The most literary and cult sovereign of Russia, Catherine heavily patronized and sponsored the fine arts and cultural life of her empire. A true patron of dress and scepter, Catherine sponsored the appearance of the first magazines for

satire and humour, as well as the comedy theaters. A keen traveler, the Empress did not hesitate to explore the most remote regions of her stretched empire. Although she was of German nation and had received a stiff Lutheran childhood education, the Empress proved to be a fervent believer of the Russian Orthodox Church and a defender of the Russian state institutions. Born with a strong political and diplomatic sense, the Queen struggled her entire life to promote friendship and mutual understanding between the rival families at the court. As a leader with vast interests, Catherine was involved in various courses of action simultaneously. Having an extremely hardworking and conscientious nature, the Queen woke up every day at 5 AM and worked on various administrative matters. In the early years of her reign, the Empress had big plans in both domestic and foreign policy of Russia, but she preferred to strengthen her position and situation. As there were enough influential people who saw a dim in her and her sonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, Paul ascension, the Queen quickly understood that without the support of the noble class and of the military, she could be overthrown in a few years. The broad lines of her policies were centered around the idea that Russia needed an extended period of peace during which she had to strengthen the state and continue the reforms started by Peter the Great. The Empress instructed the cunning Count Nikita Panin with the position of foreign minister. In 1764, the Queen felt that she had the needed

Portrait of Catherine The Great

Yekaterina Alexeievna (by Dmitri Levitzki)

foreign policy peace to start to develop her reforms. Her attitude towards reforms placed her among the famous “enlightened despots”, a number of state leaders of the 18th century, which were influenced by the ideas of Enlightenment and thought that through a wise and rational leadership they could ensure the prosperity of their subjects. Catherine’s governance was accompanied by a policy aimed at increasing the confidence of the common people in the state and to propel Russia as an equal power in Europe. She also increased the powers of the Senate, conquered and incorporated Ukraine into the Russian Empire, abolishing the rights of the Cossacks communities in southern Ukraine and along the Dnieper River, which had for centuries their own administration, they governed themselves, had their own policies and were led by Hetmans, elected on a traditional-democratic basis. Catherine the Great reformed from the ground the Russian legislature, bringing it to the level of laws, which were governing in other major European powers. The external situation made the Queen grow the power of Russia by taking advantage of the weakening of its neighbors, the Kingdom of Poland and the Ottoman Empire. Catherine sent troops in support of the Polish king, Stanisław Poniatovski, her former lover, who tried to stifle a revolt against Russia’s involvement in the internal affairs of Poland. The Russo-Turkish War of 64

the 1768-1774 years ended with the victory of Russia, which conquered southern Ukraine, Crimea and North Caucasus. But even before the war, Catherine had to overcome the Cossack uprising led by Yemelyan Pugachev, rebellion which proved to be the biggest domestic issue that struck during her reign. The Cossacks defeated several military expeditions of the Russian, but he was eventually captured and executed. The rebellion scared the Queen, who alongside its aristocrats decided that the best way to avoid similar riots would be the strengthening of the local authorities and nobility, instead of improving the living conditions of the lower classes. Catherine paid great attention to the introduction of education and literacy. She didn’t only manage the set up several elementary schools, but her reforms were continued by her successors to the throne. As one of her most important concerns was to strengthen the Russian economy, the Empress encouraged trade by reducing taxes and invited both Russian and foreign investors to settle in disadvantaged areas. Under her leadership, Sankt Petersburg has been partially restored and has become one of the most sumptuous cities of the time. Under her patronage, the Academy of Sciences has developed unprecedented. Also, she is the person who founded the Hermitage, a museum in an annex building of the Winter Palace. During her reign, she managed to add 11 new provinces to the Russian Empire and the Empire’s population has doubled. Catherine the Great founded 144 new cities at a rate of 4 new cities emerging within a year. She strengthened the Russian army and fleet that had a number of 78 victories during her reign, propelling Russia to the status of world power. Having a modest nature, the Empress used to say that everything she did for Russia was the equivalent of a drop of water in the ocean. Catherine the Great died of a heart attack on 6 November 1796. The epitaph on her tomb is revealing: “Here lies Catherine II. She came to Russia in 1744 to marry Peter III. At the age of 14 years old, Catherine took three tough decisions: to make her husband, Empress Elizabeth and the Russian people happy. 18 years of loneliness and boredom led her to read many books. Once ascended to the Russian throne, she did everything to offer her subjects happiness, freedom and prosperity. Catherine the Great forgave easily and did not hate anyone. She was a compassionate person and loved life. In her policies, she was a true republican. She had many friends. She loved her job and loved both people and the arts.”

Ivan the Terrible Ivan the Terrible (b. 3 September 1530 - d. 28 March 1584 / 25 August 1530 in Kolomenskoye, Grand Duchy of Moscow, Russia - d. 18 March 1584 according to the Julian Calendar in Moscow, Tsardom of Russia) was the Grand Prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547 and “Tsar of All the Russians” from 1547 until his death in 1584. His true name was Ivan Vasilievich. On 25 August 1530, Ivan is born, the highly anticipated son of the Grand Duke of Russia, Vasili III. Ivan’s birth is for the residents of the time the long awaited moment since he would be the first son of the

Ivan the Terrible

Prince. When he was born, the Kremlin was struck by a lightning which caused a serious fire and baby Ivan already had two teeth. These signs were regarded as of divine origin and interpreted in the following manner: He will tear down the country’s enemies with one tooth and with the other one he will bite his own people. When Ivan was just 3 years old, his father, Vasili III, Grand Duke of Russia, died, but not before appointing the successor to the throne, his eldest son, Ivan. The guardianship was left through testament for his mother, Elena and the noblemen until Ivan would reach the age of 15 years old. Because of his tender age, Ivan was considered an obstacle by the contender families, reason for which his mother, Elena and the squire Obolenski Telepnev started a series of arrests among the most feared landowners. The desire for power of the boyar families has become so great that the persecuted became persecutors, so the “prey” became Ivan’s mother, Elena Glinski and the squire Obolenski Telepnev, both patrons of Ivan. Their death has turned Russia into an open battle field for the power between the noble families. The families who have managed to put their imprint on the baby Ivan were Šuiski and Bielski, families due to which he will face hunger, cruelty, wickedness, beating and indifference. It is said that being inside the walls of the Kremlin, Ivan had a deviating behavior because his fun was considered to be plucking the birds feathers and throwing the baby birds from the walls. Along Ivan, Metropolitan Macarius will always be by his side and he will introduce him into the mysteries of theology and history. Aware that at the age of 16 years old he will gain legitimacy to the monarchy, a disagreeable thing for the families who were struggling for power, Ivan, having the Church members along him will declare himself Tsar of Russia and will ask the nobles to obey him. Ivan is crowned Tsar of Russia in Moscow on 16 January 1547. A month later, he married the daughter of an old noble family of noble heritage, Anastasia Romanovna at the Assumption Cathedral. Tsarina Anastasia will give birth to two girls and two boys: Dmitri who will die a few months after his childbirth and Ivan, which will become Tsarevich. After the death of Anastasia, Ivan will marry in 1561 with the daughter of the Circassian Prince, Temriuk, who was baptized and given the name of Maria. In 1571, Ivan married for the third time with Marfa Sobakina, then in 1572 with Anna Koltovski, daughter of a courtier, in 1575 with Anna Vasilcikova, in 1579 with Vasilisa Melentieva, in 1580 with Maria Dolgorukaya and in 1581 with Maria

Ivan the Terrible, Anonymous painting

Feodorovna Nagaya, the daughter of an officer of the court. The reign of the first Tsar of Russia can be divided into two periods: a prosperous one, full of wide-ranging reforms and benefits and the second one of full of the Tsar’s issues, shrouded in the mist of his madness. The period marked by reforms brought popularity to the Tsar among the nobility but also among ordinary people. From the series of reforms, we mention those of 1550, 1551 and 1565. However, before the reform of 1550, Tsar Ivan forms a new type of council, “Izbrannaia Rada” (Elected Council). The Council was made up of members of the nobility and clergy and was dominated by Metropolitan Macarius and by father Sylvester, the enlightened preacher. In 1550 it is formed the congregation that registered the Tsar’s decisions, “Zemski Sobor”. In the same year, the Tsarist Codex, “Tsarski Sudebnik” was composed and it was aimed to replace the old one from 1479 of his grandfather, Ivan III. In 1551, within the framework of the third church synod, Ivan handed the document called “Stoglav” which included reforms that will be implemented within the church: the abbots and monasteries will not be able to make any acquisition without the consent of the sovereign and it will be prohibited to the monasteries to lend money at interest. Each city will have its school, served by priests and clerks, which will teach writing, reading, arithmetic,

singing, religion and manners. In 1556, Ivan the Terrible divided the country in Oprichnina and Zemshchina. Oprichnina represented the private domain of the Tsar. In this domain, it will be included several districts of Moscow, 27 cities, 18 districts and main communication routes. The aristocratic families settled in the Tsar’s territories will massively lose their influence, however, a new social class will be born, “Oprichniki”, whose “battle horse” will be the Zemshchina territory. Zemshchina represented the remaining territory. The country’s nobility is reorganized, the peasants remained tied to the land; the Tsar governed the country with the help of the “Boyar Duma”. In serious considered cases, the “Zemski Sobor” will be convened, but these meetings were only advisory. The Oprichniki violence is encouraged by the Tsar which rewards them with goods taken from traitors. Soon, they became feared and detested. Among the boyars, the Tsar will start a series of brutal murders, in which most of them will be tortured and the Tsar will personally take part. Paradoxically, after each crime, the Tsar retired for a few hours to spend his time in prayer. The highlight of his madness and cruelty after which he got the name of “Grozny” (Terrible) is the massacre of Novgorod from 1570, whose continuity was intended to be in the city of Pskov. Under the pretext of an existent letter in which the willingness of the residents of the two cities to submit to Poland was noticed, Ivan orders the Oprichniki to kill the entire population. The massacre lasted for five weeks, during which around the town, there were raised walls so that

Ivan the Terrible after killing his son

Ivan’s repentance: he asks a father superior Kornily of the Pskovo-Pechorsky Monastery to let him take the tonsure at his monastery (Painting by Klavdiy Lebedev, 1898)

no people could escape. The officials were arrested and the priests were killed. The residents were brought in front of Ivan and his son, where they were tortured. “I entered Novgorod with a horse and left with 49 horses and 22 loaded wagons”, said Ivan. The total death toll stood at 15.000 according to Kurbski, at 18.000 according to the third chronicle of Novgorod and at 60.000 according to the first author of the chronicles of Pskov. The Oprichniki besieged the houses and shops and devastated the churches. Novgorod will never return to its glory again after the massacre of 1570. Upon seeing all of this, the residents of Pskov surrendered. On 2 October 1552, Ivan the Terrible defeated the Khanate of Kazan, whose armies devastated repeatedly the north-eastern parts of Russia and annexed its territory. In August 1554, he occupied the Astrakhan region. Because of this conquest, Russia gained an outlet to the Caspian Sea and controlled all the course of the Volga. In 1558, the Tsar’s army entered Livonia, while in February 1563, the great commercial 68

city of Polotsk is conquered, reason for the Tsar to add to his title the one of high prince of Polotsk. In 1570, the Turkish sultan, Selim II asked the regions of Kazan and Astrakhan from Russia and if they wouldn’t accept the offer, they would have to pay an annual tribute to the Porte. While the negotiations were stuck, in early 1571, the Crimean Tatars invaded the southern territories of Russia. On 24 May 1571, the Tartars burned the houses on the outskirts of Moscow. The Russian army under the leadership of Prince Vorotinski managed to defeat the Tartars. Ivan dissolved the Oprichniki which were detested in the country but because he also needed the consent of the Polish nobility. His goal is to be crowned King of Poland following the death of King Sigismund-August, which didn’t left any male-line heirs. But his plans will never reach their goal. The new King of Poland, Stephen Bathory wrote to Ivan IV that he will respect the three years truce signed between Russia and Poland. Ivan has annexed

Ivan the Terrible Showing His Treasures to Jerome Horsey by Alexander Litovchenko (1875)

most of Livonia in 1577. In 1579, the Polish army allied with the Swedish army crushed the Russian army. On 15 January 1582, a 10 year truce is signed between Poland and Russia. The Russians were to abandon Livonia and Polotsk and the entire Russian cities conquered by the Poles were to be evacuated. The great decline starts on 15 November 1581 when Ivan’s wife, who was pregnant, saw her daughter-in-law wearing a light dress instead of three dresses as it was the custom. She beat her so hard that she had to abort. The angry Tsarevich raises his voice against his father, the sovereign, which in a huff he randomly strikes his son with the iron tip of his stick and mortally wounds him. His son’s death became the drop that filled the glass. Ivan could sleep only a few hours per night. The debauchery, excess of food and drink ruined his health. Because not even the doctor’s potions, nor the priest’s prayers couldn’t stop the disease, Ivan called the sorcerers. From all parts of the country, astrologers, fortune tellers and quacks arrive to Moscow. The conclusions of what they will see, however, were to be hidden, but he found out by chance that the astrologers have calculated his time of death, 18 March 1584. Upon hearing this, Ivan will start making gifts to churches and becoming preoccupied with the

succession. The heir will be Ivan’s second son, Feodor. To facilitate his work, Ivan formed a committee whose members were: Ivan Šuiski, the hero of the siege of Pskov, Ivan Matislavski, son of the niece of the great Prince Vasili, Nicetas Yuriev, brother of his first wife, Anastasia, Bogdan Bielski and Boris Godunov, whose sister Irene married to the Tsarevich. The calculations of the astrologers and soothsayers came true on 18 March 1584. Ivan the Terrible, died during a game of chess with Bogdan Bielski. It is said that Ivan died of a disease of the intestines and of the urogenital system, but after Stalin ordered the exhumation of Ivan the Terrible, to these conditions, mercury poisoning was added. He was buried in the church of Saint Michael the Archangel, along with his son who was killed in a huff. On his tomb there is the following inscription: “In the year of God 7092, 1584 AD, the eighteenth day of March, the pious sovereign Tsar and Grand Prince of All Russia, Ivan Vasilievich has presented himself in front of God.” According to testimonies of the time, Ivan was a genius diplomat, a true political visionary, an exceptional wielder of the pen, being considered a particularly religious man. His intelligence was overshadowed by his bouts of paranoia and depression, which led to extreme violence. 69

Tsar Nicholas II Tsar Nicholas II (b. 18 May 1868 in Alexander Palace, Tsarskoye Selo, Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire - d. 17 July 1917 in Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg, Russian SFSR / 6 May 1868 - d. 5 July 1917 according to Julian Calendar ) was the last Tsar of Russia, ruling from 1 November 1894 until his forced abdication on 15 March 1917. His reign saw the fall of Imperial Russia from being one of the foremost great powers of the world to economic and military collapse. Near Sankt Petersburg, on 18 May 1868 was born Tsar Nicholas II, on the feast day of the Holy and Righteous Job. For this reason, the Tsar used to say: “I was born on the feast day of Saint Job, the suffering, and I am doomed to suffer.” After 23 years of reign, on 17 July 1918, the Bolsheviks have executed the last Tsar of Russia, along with the Tsarina and their five children. He was the favorite nephew of Alexander II, who called him “ray of sunshine”. When he was little, he was sent daily to visit his grandfather.

Tsar Nicholas II

“My parents were missing and I, along with my grandfather were at the Midnight service. During the service, a tempest has unleashed, lightning flashed one after another, the thunder sounded like a cannon shot and shook the church as if the whole world to its foundations. Suddenly, a burst of wind came through the door and extinguished the lit candles in front of the iconostasis. It was then pitch dark. There was a prolonged rumble of thunder, stronger than the one before, and suddenly I saw a fireball, flying from the window to the Emperor’s head. A lightning ball rotated on the floor, then bypassed the chandelier and got out the door and it flew over the park. My heart was dumbfounded, I glanced at my grandfather: his face was completely quiet. He crossed himself with the same calm as when the fireball flew around us and I felt that it is not manly nor worthy to be so scared. I felt I only had to look forward to what will happen and trust in God’s mercy, just as my grandfather had done. After the ball circled around the church and suddenly got out the door, I looked back at my grandfather once more. An easy smile appeared on his face and he nodded to me. My fear vanished and from this time, I was never afraid of the storm”, recalled later Tsar Nicholas about the extraordinary childhood accident. He spent a long time studying, standing out through an extraordinary memory and great intellectual capacity. He studied economic sciences, law and military studies. He did military service in the infantry, cavalry, artillery and the navy. In the fall of 1891, when a severely period of famine fell over Russia, he led at his father’s request, the committee which had to relieve the hardships of those in need. With a burning soul of fervent love for each man, the future Tsar, suffered a lot for its people. Wanting to marry Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, granddaughter of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, he has long insisted to receive the blessing from the royal pair, which didn’t see kindly this alliance. At his marriage, the Tsarevich convinced the princess to receive the Orthodox faith. “When you see how beautiful, how gracious and humble our orthodox religion is, how wonderful are the churches and our monasteries and how grasping our divine jobs are, you’ll get to love them and then nothing will tear us apart”, he told to his future consort. The service through which she became the daughter of the Orthodox Church, receiving the name of Alexandra, was committed by Father John of Kronstadt. Here’s what Alexandra Feodorovna confessed to her husband, during her embrace of Orthodoxy: “Where will you live, I will live

The Tsar with his family

and thy people shall be my people and your God will be my God.” On the death of his father, Tsar Alexander III, Nicholas II accepted the royal service, putting all his hope in the Lord and having good care of his people like a good captain. He tirelessly fought for peace. He was a generous man, constantly concerned about helping those in need. He was busy supporting hospitals and charitable establishments, with money from a personal account. “He has spent for charitable nearly everything he had,” said the Chairman of the Administrative Council of His Majesty. One of his servants said: “His clothes were often repaired. His costumes from the time

he was a groom were still worn by him. “ He had a great power to endure and a great courage. What distinguished him was particularly his full submission to the will of God. Faith in the divine wisdom gave him a calm that never ever left him. “I lived many years near him, said one of his servants, and I have not seen him upset or angry. He was always balanced and calm.” On the occasion of the war with Japan, in 1904, the Tsar has shown a great strength of character, not accepting a shameful peace treaty. The Imperial family was an example of true Christian life. The Lord has blessed their marriage with four daughters: Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia and a son, Alexei. 71

Painting of Tsar Nicholas II as national hero and saint

The children were raised with love for the Russian people. “Children should learn self-sacrifice, giving up their own desires for the sake of others, said the Tsarina.” “The higher the status of a man, the more you have to help others and, addressing them, you should never mention his social position”, said Tsar Nicholas, “and my own children should do the same.” The two believed they ought to prepare them for any attempts coming from God. They all slept on beds without pillows and dressed with simplicity. Their food was also simple. “Their life was simple and modest, wrote a close friend of the family, other people were addressed with simplicity and they didn’t give any importance to their imperial status.” With a secluded life, they felt a real burden coming from the protocol of the courtyard. They often used to sing in church during Holy Mass, and Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, their confessor, remembered “with how many tears of repentance they approached the chalice”. In the evening, when the whole family was sitting, the Tsar was reading aloud and the Tsarina and her daughters were involved in crocheting and sewing. He liked to speak of God and pray together. Alexandra Feodorovna used to serve with love to all people: she often visited the sick, cared and comforted them. He organized all over the country vocational 72

schools for the poor, opened a school for nurses. She also set up a home for the unable to work soldiers from the Russo-Japanese War, in which they learned to work something appropriate to their situation. During the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, he was intensely occupied by the spiritual education of the Russian people. They built hundreds of monasteries and thousands of churches. Parochial schools were established. He has supported the arts: church architecture, iconography, Byzantine music psalms. New Saints were canonized. In the summer of 1903, it was held the canonization of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, an event attended by the Tsar, where he carried on his shoulders the coffin with Saint Seraphim’s relics. He supported other nations in times of hardships: he reacted firmly when the Turks massacred the Armenians and offered help when Serbia was attacked by AustroHungary. After World War I, the Tsar was occupied particularly by those on the front: he used to visit soldiers, bless the troops and encourage them, he was concerned about the wounded, used to visit several hospitals and infirmaries. He took command of the army himself and the arrival of Tsarevich Alexei on the front lines raised the soldier’s moral. The Tsarina transformed the palaces into military hospitals and from morning until night she cared for the wounded soldiers along with her daughters. “I cared for the people touched by the terrible wounds,” wrote Alexandra Feodorovna. “My heart is filled with compassion and sorrow for them, just as a wife to her husband or a mother to her children.” Forced to abdicate, “for the salvation of Russia and victory against the foreign enemy”, the Tsar and his family had to start their way of the cross, entrusting their lives in the hands of God. They were arrested and exhausted by endless interrogations. The Tsar was accused of high treason, although there was no evidence. They waited end in peace, aware that death was near. From the prison where she was incarcerated, Olga, the oldest daughter wrote: “My father asked to be told to all those who have remained faithful and all those who may be influenced by them not to seek revenge because of him. He forgave them all and prayed for the,. We should all be aware that the evil which is now in the world will become even stronger and that evil isn’t overcome by evil, but only by love.” The Imperial family was murdered by the Bolsheviks on 17 July 1918, which became their day of celebration after they were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2000.

Nicholas II, last Tsar of all the Russias, in the Nicholas 73 Hall. Portrait by Earnest Lipgart, early 1900â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Vladimir Putin Vladimir Putin (b. 7 October 1952 in Leningrad, USSR - now Sankt Petersburg, Russia) has been the President of Russia since 7 May 2012, succeeding Dmitri Medvedev. Putin was Prime Minister from 1999 to 2000, President from 2000 to 2008, and again Prime Minister from 2008 to 2012. During his second term as Prime Minister, he was the Chairman of the ruling party, United Russia Party. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad, now Sankt Petersburg and was the only child of a war veteran and of a working mother which were living on the outskirts of Leningrad. He grew up in a “communal” apartment, with two other families, a common practice at that time the Soviet Union. As a teenager, Putin has worked at the radio station of the school he learned in, where it seems that he was broadcasting the music of the Beatles and other rock groups from the West. Photographer Platon, author of

Vladimir Putin

the famous “Time” magazine cover with Putin in 2007, claimed that the Russian President was a fan of Paul McCartney and “Yesterday” was his favorite song. From a young age, Vladimir Putin became interested in judo. He became champion in judo at his university in 1974. A former finance minister of Russia believed that Putin’s love for judo said something about his strategy on foreign policy. “Unlike a chess player, a judoka does not expect a move by the opponent. His strategy is to wait and see when he gets the chance to perform a single shot, then he withdraws. A successful judoka must anticipate his opponents’ hits, take a quick decision and put them down”, wrote the Russian official in the “Moscow Times”. The Russian President is fond of spy novels and TV shows. Putin seemed to like very much the novel series “17 Moments of a spring”, which was later made into a TV series. The novels had a double agent as their main character, Max Otto von Stierlitz (born Vsevolod Vladimirovich Vladimirov), which has infiltrated into the Nazi elite during the Second World War. “What always amazed me was how a man managed more than an army,” Putin said about the series of novels. In a moment like “life imitates art”, Putin got himself into the shoes of the character from “17 Moments of a spring.” In 1985, the KGB sent Putin in Dresden, East Germany, where he lived undercover with the name “Mr. Adamov.” According to reports, Putin learned German so well that he was able to imitate certain dialects. Unlike other KGB agents, Putin liked to spend his time with Germans. But it is not known how exactly Putin spent his time in East Germany. According to the Kremlin, he received the bronze medal “for exceptional service to the People’s Army.” In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and Putin returned to Leningrad where he received a job under the tutelage of first Democrat Mayor of Leningrad, Anatoli Sobchak (which had been his law professor). Officially, Vladimir Putin resigned from the KGB in 1991. In this way, Putin began his work in administration. The publication “Newsweek” wrote that there was a group of Democrats in Sankt Petersburg who thought that Putin was sent by the KGB to the mayor’s office, but there was no evidence to support these claims. While working with Anatoli Sobchak, Putin earned the nickname “Gray Cardinal/Cardinal Grey” and was considered “the man you should call if you want things to be resolved” or the “man indispensable to Sobchak”. In the 1990’s, Vladimir Putin was the subject of a scandal, being investigated “for granting preferential

Vladimir Putin takes a shot from an air rifle at a tigress who managed to escape

import and export licenses.” Putin was occupied by an exchange of goods worth 100 million $. Russia had to export materials to receive in exchange the needed food for the citizens of Sankt Petersburg. Although the materials were exported, the city residents have not received the promised food. It seemed that Vladimir Putin was the one who signed the documents, but the Kremlin denied it. In 1996, Putin took his family and moved to Moscow, where he quickly climbed the ascension ladder. After several posts held, in 1998 he became leader of the FSB, the former KGB. “In July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Putin at the head of the FSB. It was a function that the president back then had only granted to the human in which he had the greatest confidence,” wrote Newsweek. In August 1999, President Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister. A month later, Putin’s popularity was up to 2%. He was the 5th premier in two years and nobody believed Yeltsin when he claimed that Putin will be his successor. Everyone expected Yevgeny Primakov to be the next Russian president because he had an impressive career behind

and was everybody’s friend “from Madeleine Albright to Saddam Hussein.” But to everyone’s surprise, Yeltsin announced his resignation and appointed Vladimir Putin as his successor in 1999. Many believed that Yeltsin did so to defend from him. The war in Chechnya was intensifying, and the president’s popularity dropped a lot. One of the first decisions of Putin’s new position was to give “full immunity to Yeltsin before any investigations for illegal activities, protection of its private documents, residences and assets in front of any possible confiscation”. In his first televised interview as president of Russia, Putin promised freedom of the press, freedom of expression and the right to private property. “I want to warn that any violation of the laws of the country and of the constitution will be punished. The freedom of speech, freedom of the media and the right to property are the fundamental principles of a civilized society which will be defended by the Russian state,” Putin said in the televised interview of 1999. Recognizing that the Yeltsin era oligarchs were more powerful than him, the President of Russia reached 75

Vladimir Putin at a meeting with Seliger 2014 Forum participants

an agreement with them. “In July 2000, Putin told the oligarchs that he will not interfere in their affairs as long as they will not get involved in politics or as long as they would not criticize the president,” according to the Council of Foreign Relations. An emblematic figure of the Russian oligarchs, Boris Berezovski was the formerly gray eminence of the Kremlin during Boris Yeltsin’s mandate. After a period in which he supported Putin, Berezovski fell from his grace when he began to criticize the Russian president. Berezovski won the status of political refugee status in Britain in 2003 and in March 2013 he was found dead in his home in Ascot, a town about 60 kilometers southwest of London. Following his autopsy it was determined that the probable cause of death was hanging, but people close to Berezovski claimed that the cause of death must have been an assassination. In the following years, Putin has won the reputation of a “man of action” by the way he managed the Second Chechen War and the hostage crisis in a Moscow theater in 2002. The Russian President refused to negotiate with the 40 military Chechens and after the police action after three days of siege, 129 of the 912 hostages died. The population continued to support 76

Putin at a rate of 83%. In 2004, Putin was re-elected for a second term. He focused on domestic issues, but has become increasingly criticized for censoring the local media. Journalist Anna Politkovskaia, one of the few Russian journalists who denounced the corruption and abuses during and after the war in Chechnya was killed in the lobby of the building from Moscow where she lived, on 7 October 2006, just the day Vladimir Putin celebrated 54 years. She worked for the newspaper “Novaya Gazeta”. The organizer and performer of the murder of journalist Anna Politovskaia were sentenced in June 2014 to life imprisonment by a court in Moscow, but the investigation did not identify any persons who may have ordered the assassination. The killing was followed by other crimes. In November 2006, Aleksander Litvinenko, a turncoat from the Russian secret service (FSB) who collaborated with the British service of foreign intelligence, MI6, died in London at the age of 43 years old, after being poisoned with polonium-210, an extremely radioactive and highly toxic substance, almost undetectable. He was the first victim of a “radioactive assassination”. During this period, Putin’s popularity

grew, while the country was enjoying an economic growth. But the year 2008 came, when a global economic crisis triggered. That year, Dmitri Medvedev was elected Russian president after he was Prime Minister, and he even named Vladimir Putin as his Prime Minister. The financial crisis has shown how dependent the Russian economy was on oil and gas, as well as how the interconnection between the industry and the political strategy of the country were, according to Brookings Institute. Going forward in 2012, Vladimir Putin ran again for the mandate of president of Russia, which he won with a percentage of 63%. He was chosen this time for a term of 6 years instead of 4. Two years later, Vladimir Putin has attracted the opprobrium of all countries after he decided the annexation of Crimea, following a crisis triggered by the ousting of Ukraine President, Viktor Yanukovich. In addition, the West accused Putin that he supported the pro-Russian separatist movement in eastern Ukraine, which had already led to the killing of over 5.000 people within one year since the start of the conflict. “Nobody knows what will be Vladimir Putin’s next move, but given the fact that he takes into account a 4th term, we might follow his action at least until 2024.” Vladimir Putin won his fourth and last term with more than 76% of the votes in May 2018.

Putin watching Russia’s Paralympics judo team take part in competition at the London Paralympics.

Vladimir Putin with Belarusian president, Aleksandr Lukashenko

Feodor Dostoievski Feodor Dostoievski (b. 11 November 1821 in Moscow, Russian Empire - d. 9 February 1881 / b. 30 October 1821 - d. 28 January 1881 according to Julian Calendar in Sankt Petersburg, Russian Empire) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. Feodor was the second child out of seven of Michael and Maria Dostoievski. Immediately after his mother died of tuberculosis in 1837, he and his brother, Michael were sent to the Military Technical Academy in Sankt Petersburg. Their father, a retired military surgeon who worked at the poor people Hospital Mariinski (Saint Mary) in Moscow, died in 1839. Although not certain, it seems that he was killed by a servant who poured vodka down his throat to suffocate him. Whatever really happened, Sigmund Freud was curious about this episode and he even wrote an article “Dostoievski

Portrait of Dostoievski

and the parricide” in 1928. Dostoievski was arrested and imprisoned in 1849 for anti-state activities against Tsar Nicholas I. On 16 November of that year, he was sentenced to death for links with a group of intellectual liberals from the Petrashevski Circle. According to the biographical plan, the most crucial moment of Dostoievski’s life was in 1849, when he was arrested and sentenced to death for participating in the meetings of a circle of a young Fourierists, led by Mikhail Petrashevski, where they had subversive discussions. Together with other detainees, he was transported to the square where the executions took place and was passed through the whole procedure of announcing the death sentence by shooting. After four years spent in “katorga”, followed by other five years of compulsory military service, Feodor Dostoievski returned to Petersburg where he resumed his literary work. By the time of his arrest, he had been placed in the shadow of Gogol by the critics. The incidence of seizures, to which Dostoievski was predisposed, had increased during that period. At his release from prison in 1854, he was offered the chance to become a soldier for the remainder of his sentence in the Siberian Regiment. Dostoievski has spent five years living there, he was first corporal, then he became a lieutenant in the 7th battalion of the regiment, stationed near Fort Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. It was an experience that changed him and his ideological views, so Dostoievski abandoned the liberal ideas and became a conservative and highly religious person. He became friends with another conservative, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. He had a connection and then married with Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the widow of an acquaintance in Siberia. In 1860, he returned to Sankt Petersburg, where he started publishing a number of literary newspapers with his older brother, Michael, but without any great success. In 1864, his wife died, an event that left him severely affected. Soon, he lost his brother, who was very dear to him. As Dostoievski had no financial savings and all his endeavors hadn’t foresee any source of income, the writer fell into an accentuated depression accentuated and started to gamble, a habit from which he accumulated huge debts. He suffered a lot from the passion of the game and from its effects. It seems that the novel “Crime and Punishment”, the writer’s best known novel, was completed in a hurry in order to give it for publication, which would have brought a cash advance from the publisher. Dostoievski wrote the novel at the same time

funeral of his friend, the poet Nekrasov, causing great controversy. Three years later, shortly before his death, he holds a speech about a famous monument of Pushkin unveiling in Moscow. In the later years, Feodor Dostoievski lived in the Staraia Russa resort, which was closer to Sankt Petersburg. He died on 28 January (old calendar) 1881 and was buried in the Tikhvin cemetery, near the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, Sankt Petersburg. The influence of Dostoievski was huge, practically there is no important novelist in the 20th century, from Herman Hesse to Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Henry Miller, Yukio Mishima, Gabriel García Márquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, upon which Dostoievski hadn’t exercise his influence. American novelist Ernest Hemingway quoted Dostoievski as a source of major influence in his autobiography. A mythical writer (in this regard he has been compared to Herman Melville), Feodor Dostoievski has created an opus of works of tremendous hypnotic power, having the following features: dramatized scenes (conclaves) in which the characters in a tense or scandalous atmosphere engage in Socratic dialogues à la Russe; the search for God, the problem of evil and the suffering of the innocent. The typology of his characters

Dostoievski in 1863

as he wrote “The Gambler” to satisfy the pretensions of his publisher, Stellovski which according to the contract, unless he got a new opera, he would have acquired the copyright for all of Dostoievski’s works. To evade obligations from his creditors and in searching for new casinos, Dostoievski travels to the West. He tries to resume contact with Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, a student with whom he had a relationship a few years ago, but she disclaimed his marriage proposal. Thus, Dostoievski married Anna Snitkina in 1867, a woman of only 20 years old, a professional stenographer. In this period, he wrote his most important works. From 1873 to 1881, Feodor managed to avenge his journalistic failures and edited a monthly newspaper called “A Writer’s Diary”, containing stories, drawings and articles about current events. The newspaper was a phenomenal success. In 1877, Dostoievski held a speech at the Dostoievski was one of the most important and influential writers of the 19th century

Bust of Feodor Dostoievski in Tallinn, Estonia

is extremely simple: the humble Christians (Prince Mishkin, Sonia Marmeladova, Aliosha Karamazov), self-destructive nihilists (Svidrigailov, Smerdiakov, Stavrogin), cynics (Feodor Karamazov), rebellious intellectuals (Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov). His characters act under the impulse of ideas, not of some instincts, though in some cases, the latter can play a significant role. Dostoievski’s novels are compressed in time (the action takes only a few days) and this process helped the author to get rid of one of the important characteristics of realistic prose, the corrosion of human life in time. His characters are in fact translations of spiritual ideas and thus, are out of this plea of time, they are timeless. Other themes that obsessively recure are: suicide, wounded pride, the collapse of family values, spiritual regeneration by means of suffering (most 80

important motive), rejection of the Western culture and affirmation of the Tsarist Russian Orthodoxy values. Russian literary critics like Mikhail Bakhtin have characterized his work as “polyphonic”: unlike other novelists, Dostoievski was not interested in a “single vision”, but he rather represented the situations as a suite of angles of very different forms. This is the reason why his novels are extremely dramatic, they are novels of ideas where conflicting views and characters often develop in an unbearable crescendo. It is a common opinion of literary critics that alongside the works of Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo and of several other writers, the novels and stories of Feodor Dostoievski are part of the European Canon which decisively influenced the existentialism and expressionism, to give just two examples.

Feodor Dostoievski

Piotr Ilich Tchaikovski Piotr Ilich Tchaikovski (b. 7 May 1840 in Votkinsk, Russia - d. 6 November 1893 in Sankt Petersburg, Russia / b. 25 April 1840 - d. 25 October 1893 according to Julian Calendar) was a Russian composer of the late Romantic period, some of whose works are among the most popular music in the classical repertoire. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally, bolstered by his appearances as a guest conductor in Europe and the United States. Tchaikovski was honored in 1884, by Emperor Alexander III, and awarded a lifetime pension. Piotr was born as the second son into a bourgeois family. His father, a mine engineer, and his mother of French origin, had decided to instruct the young Piotr to study law. However, starting with the age of 5 years old, he began to study piano. In 1854 his mother died, thing which caused him a deep sadness. He attended Tchaikovski in his teens

the law college, majored in law and was employed as a secretary at the Ministry of Justice. At the same time, he dealt with music as an amateur. His work at the ministry didn’t arouse him any interest, which is why he wrote to his sister that the job “made me a servant, and a really bad one.” Finally, in 1863, against his family’ will, Piotr Ilich leaves his job at the ministry and begins to study music with Anton Rubinstein. In 1866, after finishing his studies in music, Nikolai Rubinstein, Anton’s brother, offered him the post of professor of music theory at the freshly founded Conservatory in Moscow, a post he held until 1878. During this period, he composed Symphony no. 1 in G minor, op. 13, “Winter Dreams”. He had strong friendships with several members of the group of 5 Russian composers (Mili Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgski, Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin), so he dedicated his fantasy overture “Romeo and Juliet” to the founder of the group, Mili Balakirev. In the summer of 1872, Tchaikovski composed Symphony No. 2 in C minor (also called the “Little Russian Symphony”, “Little Russia” or “Ukraine”) op.17, which was based on Ukrainian and Russian themes, and in the winter of 1874 he gave his first performance with a piano concert. In the summer of 1875 he composed 82

Tchaikovski has produced some of the most beautiful Symphonies a man’s ear can hear

Symphony No. 3. In 1876, Tchaikovski started an epistolary communication with Nadezhda von Meck, a great admirer of him, which for 13 years she will provide the Russian composer an alimony of 6.000 rubles per year, which has substantially improved his financial situation, even if they never met and their relations remained “strictly epistolary”. Symphony No. 4, in F minor, op. 36, composed in 1877, was dedicated to Mrs von Meck. In July 1877, Tchaikovski would live one of the worst episodes of his life. To put an end to speculations about his homosexuality, he married Antonina Miliukova, a former student who had a real passion for him. The marriage was a failure. Unable to bear the presence of his wife, Tchaikovski tried to commit suicide by trying to become ill with pneumonia. Shortly thereafter, he separated from Antonina. Tchaikovski then composed his first ballet in four acts, “Swan Lake” (libretto by V. Beghicev and V. Geltzer). The premiere took place in Sankt Petersburg, at the “Mariinski Theatre”, on 15 January 1895, but was a failure due to an inadequate staging. Only 30 years after this even, the ballet texture was completed. He also composed an opera, “Eugene Onegin”, the libretto being drawn from a novel wrote by Alexander Pushkin. Towards the 1880’s, Tchaikovski’s reputation in Russia increased considerably and his name began to be known abroad following some trips taken that year. On this occasions, he met with the greatest composers of those times, Antonín Dvořák and Johannes Brahms. The period spent in Italy has inspired him to create many songs, among them, the “Italian Capriccio” op.45. Also in 1880 he composed the “Serenade for string orchestra” op.48 and “Solemn Overture, Year 1812” op.49. A year later, his good friend, Nikolai Rubinstein dies. Strongly affected by his death, Tchaikovski composed a marvelous Trio for the piano, “In memory of a great artist” dedicated to his former friend. In 1885, he composed the Symphony “Manfred” op.58, after Byron. In 1888, Tchaikovski composed Symphony No. 5 in E minor op.64, then, in 1889, his second ballet, “Sleeping Beauty”, a ballet-extravaganza in three acts with prologue on libretto by I. Vsevolojski and Marius Petipa after the story of Charles Perault, choreographed by Marius Petipa. The premiere took place on 3 January 1890 at the “Mariinski Theatre” in Sankt Petersburg and was a real triumph. In 1890 he composed an opera in three acts, with seven scenes, on a libretto inspired by a short story of Alexander Pushkin: “Queen of Spades”. In 1890, Nadezhda von

Drawing of Piotr Tchaikovski

Meck stops the funding of Tchaikovski. The official reason consists in “financial problems”. It seems that the real reason was that she found about the composer’s homosexuality, a moment at which, deeply shocked, she suddenly interrupted the correspondence with him. It is also said that she was planning to marry one of his daughters to Tchaikovski, a project incompatible with his sexual tendencies. This episode was a heavy blow to Tchaikovski. In 1891, he undertook a trip to the United States of America. There he directed his works at the inauguration of the Carnegie Concert Hall, and had an outstanding success. In 1892 he finished his 3rd ballet in two acts, “The Nutcracker”, after the fairy tale “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” by E. T. A. Hoffmann, which surprisingly, wasn’t successful. Only a few decades later, he achieved the success he deserves and now it is one of the most frequent played ballets and appreciated by the public. On 6 November 1893, nine days after he finished Symphony No. 6 in B minor “Pathetique” op.74, Tchaikovski died of cholera because he drank unsterilized water from the Neva river. At least this 83

is the official reason. Some believed that the act was deliberate, therefore a suicide, after it was discovered that he had a homosexual relationship with the nephew of a Russian nobleman. Whatever the real reason, he benefited of a state funeral, which was attended by almost 8.000 people, being buried in the Alexander

Nevski Monastery in Sankt Petersburg. Tchaikovski’s opera is a happy synthesis between the Western classical works and Russian tradition, represented at the time by Modest Petrovich Mussorgski and the Group of Five. Tchaikovski’s tumultuous life had inspired Ken Russell’s 1970 movie, “The Music Lovers”.

Piotr Ilich Tchaikovski

Yuri Gagarin Yuri Gagarin (b. 9 March 1934 in Klushino, USSR - d. 27 March 1968 in Novosyolovo, USSR) was a Russian Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961. Yuri Gagarin was born in the Smolensk Oblast, Russia, a region west of Moscow. He was the third of four children of the Gagarin family, having a brother 10 years older than him, Valentin, an older sister, Zoia and a younger brother, Boris. Gagarin began to go to school in September 1941. His family recently lost their home after the invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler’s Nazi army. About this time, he saw for the first time a plane. It was a Russian war plane which was hit during his flight and was forced to land. Shortly thereafter, the German army invaded Yuri’s village, his family was forced to move to a shelter, and the school was permanently closed. In 1942, the Soviet forces began to obtain victories in the battles against the Nazis, and after the successes near Smolensk, the school is reopened. Conditions of learning lacked, Valentina Gagarina, Sima Eivazova and Yuri Gagarin in Bulgaria in 1966 the school having no pencils or paper and little Yuri could not study how he would have wanted. Meanwhile, the Gagarin family was struck by a tragedy. Valentin and Zoia were captured and taken as hostages by the retreating German army. Their father was pursued by the soldiers, so the Gagarin family was temporarily reduced to three members. For a while, the family received no news about Valentin and Zoia, but eventually they found out that they had been released and returned home with the help of the Soviet army. Smolensk wasn’t a battlefield anymore afterwards and the war ended in 1945. In 1947, Gagarin finished elementary school and started high school, where he became fascinated by mathematics and physics, as well as by plane modeling. Gagarin continued his studies, making skydiving training and learning to fly airplanes. He got married and in April 1959 Gagarin’s daughter, Elena, was born. Meanwhile, he submitted his candidacy to be the first man to fly into space. Yuri was one of the 20 to have passed the extremely hard physical test, thus, moving with his family to a training base located 25 kilometers north of Moscow. The base received the name “Road to the stars”. All the potential astronauts met with leader training, Konstantin Berchinin and with Nikolai Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin in the Vostok spaceship

Kamanin, the responsible for preparing the astronauts from that base. During these workouts, Gagarin was received in the Communist Party, which helped him to be chosen to go into space. Finally, the space module has been built successfully, and Sergei Korolev was invited to the training camp as an instructor. At that time, there were only six candidates. The night before the flight, there were two candidates left, Gagarin and Titov. Only the second day it was announced who would be the first man to reach into outer space. In the take-off morning, on 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin knew that he would be the one to fly in space, but he continued to joke. Then, at Kamanin’s orders, Gagarin and the Vostok ship began to rise at a breakneck speed. Fifty-five minutes after the launch of the Vostok spaceship, the government issued an official announcement as planned: “The first aircraft manned on board was launched. The pilot is a member of the Soviet Communist Party, Major Yuri Alekseievich Gagarin”. Before takeoff, Gagarin was lieutenant. While he was in space, he was promoted in rank by two notches. Vostok flew around the orbit of the Earth, 86

right through the equator for about 90 minutes. 108 minutes after its launch, the spaceship landed near the town of Saratov, a city very dear to Gagarin. On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to reach into space and the first one to have reached the Earth’s orbit. Following the flight, Gagarin told the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev that during reentry he had whistled the tune “The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows”. The first two lines of the song are: “The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows/Where her son flies in the sky”. This patriotic song was written by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1951 (opus 86), with lyrics by Yevgeni Dolmatovski. Some sources have claimed that Gagarin commented during the flight: “I don’t see any God up here.” However, no such words appeared in the verbatim record of his conversations with Earth-based stations during the spaceflight. In a 2006 interview, Gagarin’s friend, Colonel Valentin Petrov stated that the cosmonaut never said such words and that the quote originated from Nikita Khrushchev’s speech at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU about

Gagarin in Warsaw in 1961

the state’s anti-religion campaign, saying “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there.” Petrov also said that Gagarin had been baptized into the Orthodox Church as a child, and a 2011 Foma magazine article quoted the rector of the Orthodox Church in Star City saying: “Gagarin baptized his elder daughter Elena shortly before his space flight and his family used to celebrate Christmas and Easter and keep icons in the house.” On 14 April 1961, Gagarin has met with the press to talk about the first manned space mission on board. Yuri Gagarin had already become a national hero. The government has begun to use it for propaganda purposes. Gagarin’s flight was a triumph for the Soviet space program. The announcement on the Soviet radio was made by Yuri Levitan, the same speaker who announced all major events in the Great Patriotic War. Gagarin became a national hero of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, and a worldwide celebrity. Newspapers around the globe published his biography and details of his flight. Moscow and other cities in the USSR held mass demonstrations, the scale of which was second only to World War II Victory Parades. Gagarin was escorted

in a long motorcade of high-ranking officials through the streets of Moscow to the Kremlin where, in a lavish ceremony, he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, by Nikita Khrushchev. Later on, Gagarin toured widely abroad. He visited Italy, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Egypt and Finland to promote the Soviet Union’s accomplishment of putting the first human in space. On 27 March 1968, while on a routine training flight from Chkalovsky Air Base, he and his flight instructor, Vladimir Seriogin died in a MiG-15UTI crash near the town of Kirzhach. The bodies of Gagarin and Seriogin were cremated and the ashes were buried in the walls of the Kremlin on Red Square. His tomb became a place of pilgrimage for those who were to go in outer space. Gagarin was survived by his wife Valentina and daughters Elena and Galina. Elena Yurievna Gagarina, Yuri’s elder daughter, is an art historian who has worked as the director-general of the Moscow Kremlin Museums since 2001. His younger daughter, Galina Yurievna Gagarina, is department chair and a professor of economics at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics in Moscow. 87

Ivan Pavlov Ivan Pavlov (b. 26 September 1849 in Ryazan, Russian Empire - d. 27 February 1936 in Leningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union / b. 14 September 1849 in Ryazan, Russian Empire - d. 15 February 1936 in Leningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union according to Julian Calendar) was a Russian physiologist known primarily for his work in classical conditioning. Inspired by the progressive ideas which D. I. Pisarev, the most eminent of the Russian literary critics of the 1860’s, and I. M. Sechenov, the father of Russian physiology, were spreading, Pavlov abandoned his religious career and devoted his life to science. Pavlov was born in Ryazan, Russia. He began his high studies as a seminarian, then, he gave up and joined the University of Petersburg to study natural sciences. He obtained his PhD in 1879. His mother, Varvara Ivanovna Uspenskaia (1826-1890), was a devoted homemaker. As a child, Pavlov willingly participated in house duties such as doing the dishes and taking care of his siblings. He loved to garden, to ride his bicycle, row, swim, and

Ivan Pavlov

play gorodki. He devoted his summer vacations to these activities. Although he was able to read by the age of 7 years old, Pavlov was seriously injured when he fell from a high wall onto a stone pavement. He did not undergo formal schooling until he was 11 years old as a result of his injuries. In 1890, Pavlov investigated the gastric function of dogs by externalizing its salivary gland in order to collect, measure and analyze the saliva produced in response to food under different conditions. He noticed that they tend to salivate before the food reached their oral cavity, and thus he started to investigate this “psychic secretion”, as he called it. He decided that it is far more interesting than the chemistry of saliva, and he changed his research purposes, performing a long series of experiments in which he manipulated the stimuli which appeared before bringing food to the dogs. He established the fundamental laws for the appearance of what he named “conditional reflexes”, the reflex responses, like salivation, which only appeared conditionally, as a result of the previous experiences with the animal. These experiments were conducted between 1890 and 1900 and have been available to Westerner researchers by translating individual experiences, but they only became fully available in English through a book which was published in 1927. Pavlov was obsessed with his schedule and work habits. He used to eat lunch at exactly 12 o’clock every day, used to sleep at the same time each night, fed his dog at the same hour each night and used to leave Leningrad for Estonia on vacation in the same day every year. This behaviour changed when his son, Victor, died in the White Army, then Ivan subsequently suffered from insomnia. Unlike many pre-revolutionary scientists, Pavlov was respected by the Soviet government, which allowed him to continue his investigations until old age. Pavlov himself didn’t have a favorable attitude towards Marxism, but as a Nobel laureate, he was seen as an important political asset, and thus was strongly supported. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934, Pavlov wrote several letters to Molotov, criticizing the mass persecutions which followed and demanding the retrial of the cases of people he personally knew. Later in his life, Ivan was particularly interested in the use of the conditioning to establish an experimental model over the induction of neurosis. He died in Leningrad. His laboratory in Sankt Petersburg has been preserved until today. Interestingly, the Pavlov’s term for the conditional

could find hospitality. Although their poverty caused despair, material welfare was a secondary consideration. Sara’s first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. When she conceived again, the couple took precautions, and she safely bore their first child, a boy whom they named Mirchik. Because she adored Mirchik, Sara was profoundly depressed following his sudden death in childhood. The family was staying in a country home at the time of his death, which most likely resulted from some type of children’s summer disease. Ivan and Sara eventually had four more children: Vladimir, Victor, Vsevolod, and Vera. Their youngest son, Vsevolod, died of pancreatic cancer in 1935, predeceasing his father by one year. It is widely believed that Pavlov usually brought food to his dogs announcing them by a bell, but his notes showed the use of a large number of auditory stimuli, including whistles, metronomes, as well as visual stimuli. In the 1990’s, when Western scholars had access to Pavlov’s laboratory, they haven’t found any of these items. Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904. He was elected a A thinking Pavlov Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1907 and was reflex (условный рефлекс) was mistranslated from awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 1914. He the Russian as conditioned reflex, and other scientists became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands who read his works have concluded that if such reflexes Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1907. Pavlov’s dog, the were conditioned, they would have been produced Pavlovian session and Pavlov’s typology are named in by a process called conditioning. After Pavlov’s work his honour. became known in the West, especially due to the writings of John B. Watson, the idea of conditioning as an automatic form of learning became a key concept in comparative psychology, and as a general reference to psychology, behaviorism. Bertrand Russell was an enthusiastic advocate of the importance of Pavlov’s work for the mind’s philosophy. Pavlov’s research on conditional reflexes heavily influenced not only science, but also everyday culture. The term “Pavlov’s dog” is often used to describe someone who merely reacts to a situation, instead of using a critical thinking. The Pavlovian conditioning was the main theme of Aldous Huxley’s novel, “Brave New World”. Ivan Pavlov married Seraphima Vasilievna Karchevskaia on 1 May 1881, whom he had met in 1878 or 1879 when she went to Sankt Petersburg to study at the Pedagogical Institute. Seraphima, called Sara, was born in 1855. In her later years, she suffered from ill health and died in 1947. The first nine years of their marriage were marred by financial problems. Pavlov and his wife often had to stay with others in order to have a home, and for a time, the two lived apart so that they Ivan Pavlov developed the conditional reflex theory

Lev Nikolaievich Tolstoi Lev Nikolaievich Tolstoi (b. 9 September 1828 in Yasnaya Polyana, Tula Governorate, Russian Empire - d. 20 November 1910 in Astapovo, Ryazan Governorate, Russian Empire / b. 28 August 1828 - d. 7 November 1910 according to Julian Calendar) was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. Born to an aristocratic Russian family in 1828, he is best known for the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction. Count Lev Tolstoi was the youngest of the four boys of the family. In 1830, when Tolstoi’s mother, born Princess Volkonskaia, died, his father’s cousin was busy caring for children. After their father, Count Nikolai Tolstoi, passed away just 7 years later, their aunt was appointed as their guardian. When their aunt died, Tolstoi and his brothers moved to a second aunt in Kazan, Russia. Although Tolstoi suffered many losses at a very young age, he will later idealize his childhood memories in his writings.

Lev Tolstoi

Tolstoi went through primary school at home with the help of German and French teachers. In 1843, he enrolled in a program of oriental languages at the University of Kazan. There, the writer hasn’t excelled as a student. His low grades forced him to transfer at an easier program, of law. Tolstoi finally abandoned the University of Kazan in 1847 without a diploma, the reason being its inclination towards excessive partying. He has returned to his parents’ property where he became a farmer. The writer has tried to coordinate the serfs, but he was pretty much absent because of courtesy visits from Tula and Moscow. The attempt to become the perfect farmer soon failed. He managed though to channel his energy into keeping a diary, the beginning of a habit from which he often inspired for his works. While Tolstoi was failing at the farm, his older brother, Nikolai, came to visit during military permits. Nikolai convinced Lev to join the army as a Junker in southern Caucasus, where he was distributed. Following the obligation of a Junker, Tolstoi was transferred to Sevastopol, in Ukraine, in November 1854 where he fought in the Crimean War during the month of August 1855. During the time Tolstoi worked as a Junker for the army, he had more free time. During the periods of peace, he was working on an autobiographic story called “Childhood” which contained his fondest childhood memories. In 1852, Lev Tolstoi sent the sketch to the “Contemporary” magazine, the most popular magazine at the time. The story was eagerly accepted and became his first published paper. After finishing the story “Childhood”, Tolstoi began to write about his daily life in the army outpost of the Caucasus. However, he didn’t manage to finish his work called “Cossacks” until 1862, after leaving the army. Amazingly, Lev managed to write while he was on the battlefield during the Crimean War. In all that time, he wrote “Adolescence” in 1854, a continuation of the story “Childhood”, the second book of what became known as the autobiographical trilogy of Lev Tolstoi. In the midst of the Crimean War, he expressed his views on the amazing contradictions of the war through a three part novel called “Tales of Sevastopol”. In the second part of the trilogy, Tolstoi experienced a new technique of writing: part of the story was presented from the perspective of a soldier’s consciousness. Once the war ended, Tolstoi left the military service and returned to Russia. At home, the author found himself highly regarded in the literary scene of Sankt Petersburg. Having a stubborn and arrogant

nature, Tolstoi refused to identify himself with a particular intellectual school of thought, declaring himself an anarchist, he went to Paris in 1857. Once he got there, he lost all his money on gambling and was forced to return to Russia. Lev has also managed to publish “Youth”, the third part of his autobiographic trilogy in 1857. In Russia, in 1862, Tolstoi published the first of the 12 numbers of the Yasnaia Poliana magazine and was married to the daughter of a doctor, Sofia Andreievna Behrs in the same year. Lev Tolstoi lived in Yasnaia Poliana together with his wife and children and spent most of the 1860’s toiling on the first great novel, “War and Peace”. Part of this book was published in the “Russian Messenger” in 1865 under the title “The Year 1805”. By 1868, he published another three chapters. A year later, the novel was finished. Both critics and the audience buzzed about the novel’s historical descriptions about the Napoleonic wars combined with the careful development of the fictional, but realistic characters. The novel uniquely integrated three long essays that satirized the historical laws. Among the ideas that Lev Tolstoi glorified in “War and Peace” is also the belief that a human’s meaning and quality of life are acquired through everyday activities. Following the success of “War and Peace”, in 1873 Tolstoi began to work on the second of his best novels, “Anna Karenina”. The novel was based in part on current events since Russia was at war with Turkey. Like the previous novel, in Anna Karenina, fictional events of the author’s life were transposed, as it is specifically obvious, the romance between Kitty and Levin whose relationship is said to resemble that of Tolstoi and his wife. The first sentence that opens the Anna Karenina novel is one of the most famous from the book: “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Anna Karenina was published in bundles from 1873 to 1877 to the critics and the public’s ovation. The copyright that he won for this novel have contributed to the rapid growth of his wealth. Despite the success that he had after finishing the novel Anna Karenina, Tolstoi suffered a spiritual crisis and developed a depression. The writer struggled to find the meaning of life and went to the Russian Orthodox Church, but he didn’t find the answers he sought. He came to believe that Christian churches were corrupt and instead of an organized religion, Lev Tolstoi developed his own beliefs. He decided to express his faith by establishing a new publication called “Mediator” in 1883. As a consequence of embracing the

Lev Tolstoi in 1895

unconventional controversial spiritual beliefs, Tolstoi was excluded by the Russian Orthodox Church and was supervised by the secret police. When his new beliefs requested Tolstoi’s willingness to donate money, his wife has strongly opposed. This disagreement has strained the couple’s marriage, until Tolstoi reluctantly agreed to compromise: he allowed the granting of all his written copyrights to his wife in 1881. Tolstoi continued to write fiction over the 1880-1890 years. Among his later works genres there are meaningful stories and realistic works. One of the most successful works was the novel The Death of Ivan Ilich written in 1886. In this work, the main character struggles to defeat the imminent death. The character’s name, Ivan Ilich, makes reference to the discordant note that he is wasting his life with trivial matters, but he comes to find out too late. In 1898, Lev Tolstoi wrote Father Sergius, a fictional opera that seemed to counter the beliefs that he developed after his spiritual conversion. The following year, he wrote his third longest novel, Resurrection. 91

youngest daughter, will become her father’s doctor on the journey. They were traveling incognito, hoping to avoid the press, to no avail. Unfortunately, the pilgrimage was found to be too dangerous for the old novelist. In November 1910, the head station of a train depot in Astapovo, Russia, welcomed Tolstoi to his house, allowing the sick writer to rest. Lev Tolstoy died shortly afterwards, on 20 November 1910. He was buried on his family property, at Yasnaia Polyana in Tula province, where the writer has lost many loved ones, and yet managed to keep long and beautiful memories of his childhood. Tolstoi’s wife and their 10 children have outlived him. The couple had 13 children, but only 10 survived an early age. To this day, Lev Tolstoi’s novels are considered some of the finest literary achievements. War and Peace is cited as the greatest novel ever written. In the contemporary academy, Tolstoi is still recognized worldwide for his gift to describe the unconscious motives of his characters. He is also recognized for his delicacy in determining the role of each action of man in everyday life, in defining its character and purpose.

Portrait of Lev Tolstoi by I.S. Kazakov (Odessa, 1900)

Although his work received praise, it could not equal the success and applause of his previous novels. Other works of Tolstoi are represented by essays on art, a satirical piece called The Living Corpse he wrote in 1890, and a short story called Hadji Murad, written in 1904 that was discovered and published after his death . In the last 30 years of his life, Tolstoi has self-proclaimed as a religious and moral leader. His ideas of non-violent resistance against the wicked, has influenced Mahatma Gandhi’s sympathy. During the last years, Tolstoi reaped the fruit of international appreciation. However, he still struggled to reconcile with the spiritual beliefs that have created tensions in his home. His wife wasn’t only against his convictions, but she disapproved of his followers who regularly visited the family property. Their marriage problems grew in the press. Eager to get rid of his wife’s resentment (which were getting bigger and bigger) in 1910, Lev Tolstoi and his daughter, Aleksandra, embarked on a long journey. Aleksandra, Tolstoi’s 92

Tolstoi in his mature years

Russian Cuisine

Shci (Russian Cabbage Soup)

Steps:

1. Boil a meat soup, usually made of chicken, turkey or whatever you want. 2. While the soup is simmering, peel the potatoes, cut them into cubes and boil them in the soup. Ingredients: 3. Onions and carrots must be cut into small pieces. • 5 liters of water Fry them in a pan with a little oil and then add them • 1,5 kg meat (if you are vegetarian or you are fasting, to the soup. you don’t need it) 4. When the meat is almost cooked, remove it and cut • 3 medium potatoes it into pieces, then put it back into the soup. • 1 medium onion 5. Cut the cabbage thick like noodles and add it to the • 1 carrot soup at about 10-15 minutes before finishing the • ½ medium cabbage food. • 2 normal peppers or 1 bigger (green, red or yellow) 6. Add one bay leaf and the pepper cut into pieces. • 2-3 tomatoes 7. Add the shredded greens and the chopped tomatoes • 1 bunch parsley towards the end. • 1 bunch dill 8. Add salt to taste. • 1 bay leaf 9. Serve hot as the first dish. • Sour Cream (for garnishing)

Shci (Russian Cabbage Soup)

Okroshka (Russian Cold Soup) Ingredients: • • • • • • • • • • •

4 medium potatoes boiled in their skins 6 medium radishes 4 cucumbers (gherkins type) 4 eggs (hard boiled) 1 green onion 100g smoked meat 600ml cold water 600 ml cold kefir (sour milk) 2 tablespoons sour cream 1 bunch dill Salt

• Freshly ground pepper

Steps:

1. Peel the potatoes and chop them into small pieces, then clean 2 eggs and chop them into small pieces, but hold the rest for decoration and cut them in 4. 2. Cut the radishes and cucumbers into thin slices, chop the green onion, dill and smoked meat. 3. Put all these ingredients in a large bowl and season them with salt and pepper. 3. Mix some water with the kefir, sour cream and chopped dill. 4. Pour the content over the vegetables and meat bowl, then mix it all. 5. You can let the dish cold until serving, or you can eat it immediately if the water and the kefir were very cold.

Okroshka (Russian Cold Soup)

Ukha Ingredients: • • • • • • • • • • • •

2 kg catfish and carp 8 to 10 cups of water 4 potatoes 4 carrots 2 celery roots 1 onion 1 teaspoon pepper 3 bay leaves Salt Parsley Dill Thyme

Steps:

1. Wash the fish and boil it with salt, pepper and bay leaves for 15 minutes. 2. Drain the fish and throw away the bay leaves. After

3. 4. 5. 6.

letting it cool for a bit, clean the fish from bones and skin. Add the meat pieces to the soup only at the end. Clean the vegetables. In boiling water add the potatoes, onion, sliced celery and carrots. Cook the vegetables in a pot under pressure for 15 minutes. The soup is served hot with pieces of fish and greenery.

Pelmeni Ingredients:

• 500g white flour • 300 ml water1 small egg • teaspoon salt Stuffing • 250g minced meat • 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

Ukha

• • • • • • • • •

1/4 teaspoon paprika 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 small onion 1 tablespoon oil 30 ml water Sour Cream Chopped dill 1 bay leaf A little bit of oil

Steps:

1. Put the flour in a bowl and make a hole in the middle. There, add salt, the beaten egg and water. Pull flour little by little over the water, stirring with your fingers until the dough binds. 2. Knead the dough by hand until it is homogenous. Exclusively by hand, knead it at least 10 minutes. 3. Place the dough on a floured worktable and cover it with a bowl. Let it stand for 30 minutes. 4. Cook the onion in oil until the raw smell disappears. Add all the ingredients over the meat and stir until smooth. 5. In the stuffing you can put a carrot, thyme, 1/2 clove garlic and chopped parsley. 6. Divide the dough into pieces with which you can

work easily. Let’s say 5. 7. On the table covered with flour, roll the dough thin sheet. 8. With a glass of 6 cm diameter cut out circles of dough. 9. The leftover dough is knead and stretched again until the dough is finished. 10. Put on each disc 1 teaspoon of the filling. Seal the stuffing inside, pressing gently all around the meat. You will obtain a crescent. Unite the ends of the crescent, overlapping them a little. Press well above there. 11. Place the formed pelmeni on baking paper or on an area covered with flour. 12. Put a large pot with plenty of water, salt and 1 bay leaf to boil. When boiling, turn the heat low, so that the water boils easy. 13. Pelmeni are put in the water (don’t overcrowd them! They must not stick between them, boil them in shifts) and boil them for 3 minutes after they rose to the surface (about 5-6 minutes in total). 14. Put the pelmeni in a bowl and drizzle them with a little oil, so that they do not stick between them. 15. Serve warm with sour cream and chopped dill or tomato sauce.

Pelmeni

ready) 5. Simmer for about 3 minutes. 6. Season with salt and pepper to taste, add the chopped parsley and take the pot off the heat. 7. Serve with sour cream, as desired.

Solyanka Ingredients:

• 150 to 200g of each - bacon beef, smoked sausages, smoked chicken breast, smoked meat and baloney (all cut in Julienne style. It shouldn’t be less than 5 types of sausages) • 3 to 4 liters of meat broth • 3-4 Grated pickles • 1 Onion • 1/2 lemon • 100g green olives • 2-3 tablespoons Tomato paste • Salt • Pepper • Parsley • Sour cream

Kamchatka King Crab Ingredients: • • • • • •

2 kg king crab legs and claws 1 stick of butter Lemon wedges (for garnish) ½ Onion 2 Hard boiled eggs Coriander

Steps:

1. Chop the onion and the salamis of 0,5cm wide and 3cm long and fry them in oil. 2. After about 10 minutes, add the tomato paste and the grated pickles, and keep the pot on heat for 3 more minutes. 3. Add the meat broth and boil gently for 10 minutes. 4. The lemon and the olives are sliced and added to the content (or you can add them when the Solyanka is

1. Boil the crab in salted water. 2. Allow it to cool and clean all the meat under the shell. Leave its feet and claws on the body. 3. Finely chop the meat, onions and boiled eggs and mix them. 4. Place a slice of shredded toast. Add coriander, any kind of sauce, salt and mix it until it becomes homogenous like a paste. 5. Fill the shell. 6. Serve with melted butter.

Solyanka

Kamchatka King Crab

Steps:

2. The dough will be quite thick, yet still liquid. Leave it to rise in a warm place for half an hour. 3. Beat the egg whites until foamy. Incorporate them into the composition, stirring gently. 4. Normally, the blinis are fried in a skillet with a little oil, forming small pancakes made from a spoon of Ingredients: composition. • 120g of flour 5. For aesthetic reasons, it is recommended using a • 120g of milk greased muffin pan with a little oil. Pour a spoonful • 2 eggs of batter in each place and leave the pan in the hot • 5 g of dry yeast oven at 200°C for about 6-7 minutes. This will give • 50 g of melted butter you small perfect discs and unburned on the edges. • ½ teaspoon salt 6. Using a tray with 5 cm forms, there will be about 25 • 100g of smoked salmon pancakes. • 100 ml sour cream 7. In a blender place the salmon, mustard, mayonnaise, • 1 teaspoon of mustard lemon juice and finely ground pepper. Mince the • 1 spoonful of mayonnaise composition to a fine homogeneous paste. • Zest of half a lemon 8. Remove from blender and mix this paste with sour • Little freshly ground pepper cream. Beat the composition with a mixer until the cream has the appearance and consistency of a soft Steps: cream. Give it to the refrigerator for at least an hour. 1. Separate the yolks from whites. Stir in the yolks, 9. Using a spoon put on each blini, glossy globes and melted butter and milk. Incorporate the flour, yeast aerated of the composition. and salt. 10. Decorate with salmon and dill or fennel streams.

Blini with Smoked Salmon

Russian Salad Ingredients: • • • • • • • • • • •

5 medium potatoes (boiled in their skins) 5 boiled carrots 200g cooked peas (or canned) 6-8 pickles 6 tablespoons mayonnaise 2 hard boiled eggs 1 hard boiled egg for decor Salt Pepper 1/2 teaspoon olive oil 1/2 teaspoon vinegar

pepper, olive oil and vinegar, then mix them with 4 tablespoons of mayonnaise. 3. Let the salad in the refrigerator for at least an hour so the flavors will interpenetrate better. After an hour decorate it with the remaining mayonnaise and boiled egg.

Stroganoff Beef Ingredients:

• • • • • • Steps: • 1. Cut the boiled potatoes and carrots into cubes. • Proceed in the same manner with the 2 eggs and • pickles. • 2. Put them all in a bowl, spice them with salt, •

100

2 tablespoons olive oil 500g beef (cut in strips about 2-3 cm) Salt and freshly ground pepper 30g butter 2 onions (finely chopped) 300g sliced mushrooms 2 cloves of garlic (finely chopped) 2 tablespoons white flour 1/4 teaspoon thyme Pinch of cayenne chili 1/4 teaspoon oregano

Russian Salad

• 125ml white wine • 800 ml water + 1/2 organic beef cube or 800ml beef broth • 200 ml sour cream (30% fat, it is important to have a large amount of fat in order not to separate) • 1 tablespoon chopped green onions • 800g tagliatelle

Steps:

1. In a saucepan or stainless steel skillet, pour some olive oil. 2. Season the meat and cook it over high heat until the water is reduced and the meat begins to caramelize. Remove it on a plate and set aside. 3. In the same saucepan place the butter, mushrooms and onions. Caramelize them on low heat for about 10-15 minutes. 4. Add the garlic, thyme and oregano. Mix and let them maximum 30 seconds. 5. Put the flour, distribute it and after it has “disappeared” pour the wine and the beef stock. 6. Bring to a slow boil and meanwhile scratch with a spatula the bottom of the pan the caramelized flavours. 7. Add the meat, cover and let it simmer on low heat for about 1 hour. Depending on the type of meat you use, it will need more or less time of cooking. 8. When the meat is ready, cook the pasta as directed on the package. 9. Strain and mix them with a little extra virgin olive oil and then portion them. 10. Remove from heat the stew, then add the sour cream, green onion and season to taste. Serve it over the pasta.

Stroganoff Beef

Pozharskie (Salmon Burgers) Ingredients: • • • • • • • • • •

700g salmon fillet 1 onion 1 egg 100 ml milk 3 slices of bread 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 70g butter 3 tablespoons breadcrumbs 2 tablespoons sour cream Half teaspoon salt and pepper

Steps:

1. Put the slices of bread in milk and squeeze them, then put them in a bowl. 2. Add the sour cream, melted butter, sliced onion, salt and pepper into the bowl. Mix the composition well. 3. In separate bowls put once the beaten egg and in another one the breadcrumbs. 4. Form long shaped forms out of the composition (just like burgers). 5. Cover the obtained burger forms in the beaten egg, then cover it with breadcrumbs. 6. Fry them on each side in a pan with heated oil. About 10-15 minutes.

Pozharskie (Salmon Burgers)

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