Britannica Guide to Russia

Nijinsky succeeded Fokine as the company's choreographer, A classic dancer, Nijinsky was an anti-classic choreographer, specializing in turned-in body movements and in unusual footwork. In 1912 he choreographed Afternoon of a Faun to music written by Debussy - it is the only Nijinsky ballet still performed. Lйonide Massine assumed the role of choreogra­pher after Nijinsky. He quickly became noted for his wit and the precisely characterizing gestures of his dancers. His mu­sical collaborators included Stravinsky, Manuel de Falla, Ottorino Respighi, and Erik Satie, and his designers included leading painters such as Derain and Picasso.

Following Diaghilev's death, Massine created a furore in the 1930s with his ballets based on symphonies by Tchaikovsky and Johannes Brahms. It was considered inappropriate to use symphonic music for dance, and the incorporation of the style and movements of modern dance into the plotless ballets added to the controversy. Another of Diaghilev's choreogra­phers was Nijinsky's sister, Bronislawa Nijinska (1891-1972), who became famous for her massive ensemble groupings. Diaghilev's last choreographic discovery was the Russian- trained George Balanchine (1904-83). Balanchine's 1928 bal­let Apollon musagиte was the first of many collaborations with Stravinsky, and led the way to the final enthronement of neoclassicism as the dominant choreographic style of the following decades.

The artistic effects of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes were far- reaching. Ballet performance had changed irrevocably, and many of those who had worked with him continued and developed further his ideals. Pavlova formed her own com­pany, travelling to Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Asia.

A troupe assembled by Ida Rubinstein had Nijinska as a choreographer, and Stravinsky and Ravel as composers. A number of ballet teachers left Russia of their own accord to teach in and direct schools in Paris, London, and Berlin. Another Diaghilev dancer, Dame Marie Rambcrt (1888­1982), founded the Ballet Rambert in London, and, in New York, Balanchine set up the School of American Ballet in 1934, From it he drew the dancers for the several companies that led ultimately to the founding of the New York City Ballet in 1948. Russian-born ballet librettist Boris Kochno became a major influence on post-Second World War French ballet.

Other Ballet in the Soviet Period

Ballet enjoyed great success in the Soviet period, not because of any innovations but because the great troupes of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and the Kirov (Mariinsky) Theatre in Leningrad (St Petersburg) were able to preserve the traditions of classical dance that had been perfected prior to 1917 in tsarist Russia. The Soviet Union's choreography schools pro­duced one internationally famous star after another. Among the greatest talents were Maya Plisetskaya, Rudolf Nureyev (who defected in 1961), and Mikhail Baryshnikov (who de­fected in 1974).

The Post-Soviet Period

Theatrical life in post-Soviet Russia has continued to thrive. The Moscow and St Petersburg theatres have maintained their leading position, but they have been joined by hundreds of other theatres throughout the country. Liberated from state

RUDOLF NUREYEV (1938-93) Russian ballet dancer

Born in Irkutsk, Nureyev studied ballet in Leningrad (1955-8), where he joined the Kirov Ballet as a soloist. He defected during the company's tour to Paris in 1961. Thereafter he danced as a guest artist with many companies, especially the Royal Ballet, where he regularly partnered Margot Fonteyn. His performances, combining an intensely romantic sensibility with stunning muscularity and technique, made him an international star. He choreographed new versions of Romeo and Juliet, Manfred, and The Nutcracker. From 1983 to 1989 he was artistic director of the Paris Opйra Ballet.

censorship, the theatres have experimented with bold and innovative techniques and subject matter. The repertoire of the theatres has experienced a shift away from political topics and towards classical and psychological themes. The Moscow Academic Art Theatre remains prestigious. The Bolshoi is another of the most renowned theatres, but since the late 1990s its dominance has been challenged by the Novaya (New) Opera Theatre in Moscow. Among other successful theatres in Moscow are the Maly (Little) Theatre for drama, the Luna Theatre, Arbat Opera, Moscow City Opera, and the Helikon Opera.

The Bolshoi Theatre, founded in 1825, was so successful a venue for the performing arts that in 1924 a smaller auditor­ium was added to the theatre complex, and in 1961 the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, with a capacity of about 6,000, was acquired as a third performing space for bigger productions. The company was kept intact during the Russian Revolution of 1917, both world wars, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-1. Since the mid-1950s the Bolshoi's opera and ballet troupes have travelled extensively; in the twenty-first century they continue to attract audiences world­wide.

PART 4

RUSSIA TODAY

Present-day Russia

10

GOVERNANCE AND THE ECONOMY

Governance

During the Soviet era the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (the RSFSR) was subject to a series of Soviet constitutions, the last in 1977, under which it nominally was a sovereign socialist state within (after 1936) a federal structure. Until the late 1980s, however, the government was dominated at all levels by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), whose head was the country's de facto leader. Indeed, in each of the elections that were held there was a single slate of candidates, most of whom were in effect chosen by the Communist Party.

From the late 1980s until 1991, fundamental changes took place in the political system and government structures of the Soviet Union that altered both the nature of the Soviet federal state and the status and powers of the individual republics. In 1988 the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies was created, and a Congress of People's Deputies was established in each of tlie Soviet republics. For the first time, elections to these bodies presented voters with a choice of candidates, including non- communists, though the Communist Party continued to dom­inate the system.

Thereafter, the pace of change accelerated. In June 1990 the Russian Congress proclaimed that Russian laws took precedence over Soviet laws, and the following year Boris Yeltsin became the republic's first democratically elected president. An abortive coup in August 1991 by hardliners opposed to the reforms begun under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s led to the collapse of most Soviet government organizations, the abolition of the Com­munist Party's leading role in government, and the dissolu­tion of the Communist Party itself. Republic after republic declared its "sovereignty", and in December, when the Soviet Union was formally dissolved, Russia was established as an independent country.

Constitutional Framework

The structure of the new Russian government differed sig­nificantly from that of the former Soviet republic. It was characterized by a balance between the executive and legis­lative branches that led them to compete for supremacy, pri­marily over issues of constitutional authority and the pace and direction of democratic and economic reform. Conflicts came to a head in September 1993 when President Yeltsin dissolved the Russian parliament (the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet}; some deputies and their allies rebelled and were suppressed only through military intervention.

On December 12, 1993, three-fifths of Russian voters ratified a new constitution proposed by Yeltsin, and representatives were elected to a new legislature. Under the new constitution the president, who is elected in a national vote and can serve a maximum of two consecutive terms, is vested with significant powers. As Russia's head of state, the president is empowered to appoint the chairman of the government (prime minister), key judges, and cabinet mem­bers. The president is also commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and can declare martial law or a state of emergency. When the legislature fails to pass the president's legislative initiatives, he may issue decrees that have the force of law.

Under the new constitution the Federal Assembly became the country's legislature. It consists of the Federation Council (an upper house in which each of Russia's administrative divisions has two representatives) and the State Duma (a 450-member lower house). The president's nominee for chairman of the government is subject to approval by the Duma, but if it persists in rejecting a nominee the president may dissolve it and call new elections. All legislation must first pass the State Duma before being considered by the Federation Council. A presidential veto of a bill can be overridden by the legislature with a two-thirds majority. With a two-thirds majority (and approval by the Russian Constitutional Court), the legislature may remove the pre­sident from office for treason or other serious criminal offences. The Federation Council must approve all presiden­tial appointments to the country's highest judicial bodies (Supreme Court, Constitutional Court, and Supreme Arbi­tration Court).

The constitution provides for welfare protection, access to social security, pensions, free health care, and affordable hous­ing. The constitution also guarantees local self-governance, though national law takes precedence over regional and local laws. The constitution also enumerates many areas that either are administered jointly by the regions and the central govern­ment or are the exclusive preserve of the central government. In the decade after the constitution's enactment, the government implemented several measures to reduce the power and influ­ence of regional governments and governors; for example, in 2000 President Vladimir Putin created seven federal districts above the regional level to increase the central government's power over the regions.

Regional and Local Government

Under the Russian constitution the central government retains significant authority, but regional and local governments ex­ercise authority over municipal property and policing, and they can impose regional taxes. Owing to a lack of assertive- ness by the central government, Russia's regional and local governments exerted considerable power in the initial years after the passage of the 1993 constitution. However, the power of the country's administrative divisions was diluted in 2000 when seven federal districts (Central, Far East, North-West, Siberia, Southern, Urals, and Volga), each with its own pre­sidential envoy, were established by the central government. The envoys were given the power to implement federal law and to coordinate communication between the president and the regional governors. Legally, the envoys in federal districts had solely the power of communicating the executive guidance of the federal president. In practice, however, the guidance has served more as directives, as the president was able to use the envoys to enforce presidential authority over the regional governments.

Legislation lias further affirmed the power of the federal government over the regions. Legislation enacted in 2004 permitted the president to appoint the regional governors, who earlier were elected. In the first decade of the twenty- first century, the country began to undergo administrative change aimed at subordinating smaller regions to neighbour­ing members of the federation.

In practice the powers of local governments vary consider­ably. Some local authorities, particularly in urban centres, exercise significant power and are responsible for taxation and the licensing of businesses. Moscow and St Petersburg have particularly strong local governments; both possess a tax base and a structure that dwarf the country's other regions. Local councils in smaller communities are commonly rubber-stamp agencies, accountable to the city administrator, who is appointed by the regional governor. In the mid-1990s municipal government was restructured: city councils (du­mas), city mayors, and city administrators replaced former city soviets.

Justice

Russia's highest judicial body is the Supreme Court, which supervises the activities of all other judicial bodies and serves as the final court of appeal. In 1991 a Constitutional Court was established to review Russian laws and treaties and to rule on the constitutionality of laws. The Constitutional Court is presided over by 19 judges, who are nominated by the pre­sident and approved by the Federation Council. Appointed to life terms, judges for both the Supreme Court and the Con­stitutional Court must be at least 25 years of age and hold a law degree. The Russian legal system has attempted to overcome the repression practised during the Soviet era hy requiring public trials and guaranteeing a defence for the accused. The Supreme Arbitration Court of the Russian Fed­eration rules on commercial disputes.

Political Process

Soviet-era politics was authoritarian and predictable. The CPSU dominated the political process, and elections were merely ritualistic, with voters not allowed a choice between freely competing political parties. Political reform in the 1980s and 1990s brought greater freedom, but it also spawned a multitude of political parties, which disagreed fundamentally over the pace and direction of reforms. Although reform-oriented parties won victories in the early 1990s, institutions such as the army and the intelligence services continued to exert considerable influence, and many bureaucrats were highly resistant to change. Some political parties that were popular at the time of Russia's independence were moribund by the beginning of the twenty-first century, and some coalitions were formed solely around the appeal of charismatic leaders. In contrast to 1995, when 43 political parties competed, only 26 contested the 1999 election. Leg­islation enacted under the Vladimir Putin regime further reduced the number of political parties by mandating that they have at least 10,000 members, and registered offices in at least half of Russia's regions, to be eligible to compete in national elections. In the 2007 legislative elections, only four parties gained enough votes to be represented in the State Duma.

All citizens become eligible to vote when they reach the age of 18 years. Presidential elections are contested in two rounds;

if no candidate receives a majority in the first round, there is a run-off between the top two candidates. For elections to the State Duma, voters cast separate ballots for a party and for a representative from a single-member district. Half the seats in the State Duma are allocated on the basis of the party vote (with all parties winning at least 5 per cent of the national vote guaranteed representation on a proportional basis), and half through the single-member-district contests. Each regional governor and the head of each regional assembly appoints one member to serve on the Federation Council.

Several of the political parties that formed in the 1990s had a notable impact. Despite the dissolution of the CPSU and the general demise of communism, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation emerged asa major political force. Indeed, in both 1996 and 2000 the Communist Party's leader finished second in the presidential balloting, and in 2000 its contingent in the State Duma was the largest (though the party was a distant second in 2003). The ultra-nationalist and xenophobic Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) capitalized on popular dis­enchantment and fear in the early 1990s. Led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who finished third in the presidential election of 1991, the LDP won more than one-fifth of the vote and 64 seats in the State Duma elections in 1993. By the end of the decade, however, support for the party had dropped dramat­ically; its support rebounded slightly in 2003, when it won nearly one-eighth of the vote. Throughout the 1990s Yeltsin's government was viewed unfavourably by a large proportion of the Russian public. To secure legislative support for his policies, Yeltsin encouraged the formation of the Our Home Is Russia Party in 1995 and the Unity Party in 1999; both parties finished behind the Communist Party in parliamentary elections. The most liberal parties found themselves unable to secure a firm base outside the intelligentsia. One of the most intriguing parties that formed in the i 990s was the Women of Russia Party, which captured 8 per cent of the vote in the 1993 State Duma election, though its level of support had dropped by about three-fourths by the end of the decade. In 2001 a number of parties merged to form the pro-Putin United Russia Party; beginning in 2003, this bloc held the largest number of seats in the State Duma.

In the Soviet era women played a prominent roie in politics. The Soviet Congress of People's Deputies required that women constitute at least one-third of the total member­ship. Quotas subsequently were removed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and representation for women had declined dramatically by the mid-1990s to roughly 10 per cent in the State Duma and 5 per cent in the Federation Council.

In 2005 a People's Chamber was established to serve as an advisory board for Russia's civil society. A Soviet-style amal­gam of officials (President Putin supervised the confirmation of the initial members), it provided additional support for the presidency.

Security

The Russian armed forces consist of an army, navy, air force, and strategic rocket force, all under the command of the president. About half the troops are conscripts: military ser­vice, lasting 18 months for the army or 24 months for the navy, is compulsory for men over age 18, although draft evasion is widespread. In addition to an extensive reserve force, Russia maintains defence facilities in several former Soviet republics and contributes a small proportion of its

COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES

Free association of sovereign states formerly part of the Soviet Union

The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was formed in 1991. It comprises Russia and I I other former Soviet republics: Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia (which has, however, announced its intention to withdraw from the CIS in 2009), and Moldova, Its administrative centre is in Minsk, Belarus. The Commonwealth's functions are to coordinate its members' policies regarding their economies, foreign relations, defence, immigration policies, environmental protection, and law enforcement.

troops to the joint forces of the Commonwealth of Indepen­dent States. Russia's military capacity has declined since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, it still has one of the world's largest armed forces establishments, which in­cludes a vast nuclear arsenal.

During the Cold War the Soviet Union established the Warsaw Pact (1955), a treaty that was designed to counter the United States-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Warsaw Treaty Organization was dissolved in 1991, after which Russia maintained an uneasy military relationship with the United States and NATO, particularly during the fighting in the Balkans in the 1990s. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1990s Russia and NATO had signed a cooperation agreement, and in 2002 the NATO-Russia Council was established. In

1991 Russia assumed the Soviet Union's permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Foreign and domestic intelligence operations are managed, respectively, by the Foreign Intelligence Service and the Federal Security Service, agencies that emerged in the 1990s after the reorganization in 1991 of the Soviet KGB (Committee for State Security). High officials are protected by the Presidential Security Service, which was established in 1993. A Federal Border Service, which combats trans-border crimes (particularly drug trafficking and smuggling), and several other intelligence agencies were also established in the 1990s. Local police forces have been overwhelmed by the organized crime that flourished in Russia after the fall of communism. Well-trained private security forces have be­come increasingly common.

The Economy

By virtue of its great size and abundant natural resources, the Russian republic played a leading role in the economy of the Soviet Union. In the first decades of the Soviet regime, these resources made possible great economic advances, including the rapid development of mining, metallurgy, and heavy engineer­ing; the expansion of the railway network; and a massive increase in the energy supply. In the 1960s a second phase of Soviet industrial development began to exert a particularly strong effect on the Russian republic. In addition to further growth in established industries—especially in the ptoducti on of oil, gas, and electricity and in the chemical industries-there was a marked diversification in industrial output, including a limited expansion in consumer goods. In the years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, the economy of Russia and of the entire country was in a state of decline, and official statistics masked industrial inefficiencies.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian government implemented radical reforms designed to trans­form the economy from one that was centrally planned and controlled to one based on capitalist principles. Privately owned industrial and commercial ventures were permitted, and state-owned enterprises privatized. To encourage privat­ization, the government issued vouchers to Russian citizens that enabled them to purchase shares in privatized firms, though in practice these vouchers frequently were sold for cash and were accumulated by entrepreneurs. A commodity- and stock-exchange system also was established.

The privatization process was slow, however, and many firms - particularly in the heavy industries - remained under state ownership. In 2001 the government legalized the sale of land, though only for urban housing and industrial real estate, which together accounted for only a small fraction of Russia's total area. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, similar legislation was under discussion for rural and agricultural areas. Though full private ownership of land is provided for in the 1993 constitution, the practice has not yet been im­plemented. The conversion to market-based agriculture was slow, as many clung to the old, familiar collective system.

The reforms beginning in the 1990s caused considerable hardships for the average Russian citizen; in the decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian economy contracted by more than two-fifths. The removal of price controls caused a huge escalation in inflation and prices; the value of the ruble, the country's currency, plummeted; and real incomes fell dramatically. Conditions had begun to improve by the mid-1990s, but in 1998 a severe financial crisis forced the government to sharply devalue the ruble. Numerous banks became insolvent, and millions of citizens lost their life savings. In response, the licensing of private banks became more rigorous, and the government cracked down on rampant tax evasion. Taxes on medium and small enterprises were moderated, and the government created incentives to reinvest profits in the domestic economy. By the early twenty-first century, the Russian economy was showing signs of recovery and stable growth. Steady earnings from oil exports permitted investments in factories, and the devalued currency made Russian goods more competitive on the international market.

In the post-Soviet years, foreign direct investment was encouraged, but it was constrained by state intervention in industry, by corruption, and by an unpredictable legal system. Violence by organized crime syndicates deterred western in­vestment, and, although the activity of such groups was curtailed in the early twenty-first century, it still presented severe obstacles to both western and Russian businesses. Investment by non-Russian companies was also discouraged by the Russian government assuming ownership of various key industries, including oil and gas, aviation, and motor car manufacturing.

In addition to the difficulties the country encountered in its effort to restructure the economy, Russia had suffered serious long-term environmental degradation during the Soviet period, the full extent of which became apparent only in the 1990s. Its most visible aspects - such as the Chernobyl accident at a nuclear power plant in Ukraine in 1986, widespread industrial pollution, and the drastic reduction in the volume of the Aral Sea as a result of inflow diversions - were symptomatic of decades of wasteful resource exploitation. These environmental concerns placed another burden on Russia's already over­whelmed economic structure.

Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing

The Russian environment is so harsh that agricultural land constitutes less than one-sixth of the country's territory, and less than one-tenth of the total land area is arable. Overall, agriculture contributes little more than 5 per cent to Russia's GDP, though the sector employs about one-eighth of the total labour force.

The main product of Russian farming has always been grain (mostly wheat, though barley, rye, and oats are also widely grown), which occupies considerably more than half of the crop-land. The rest of the crop-land is devoted to fodder crops and industrial crops such as sunflowers, sugar beets, and flax.

Given that Russia is such a vast country, with wide regional differences in terms of relief, soil, and climate, its agricultural patterns also have pronounced regional variations. In Eur­opean Russia the further south one goes the more land is devoted to crops - virtually none are grown in the north region, whereas about two-thirds of cultivable land is devoted to crops in the central "black earth" region. In west and east Siberia and the far east, crops are largely confined to the southern fringe. Even in west Siberia, where the cultivated zone is at its widest, crops occupy less than one-tenth of the region's territory, and much less in east Siberia and the far east. Cereals occupy more than two-thirds of the crop-land in most regions, but less than half in the damper north-west and central regions, where fodder crops and livestock are more important. The intensity of farming and the yields achieved are generally much higher in the European section than in Siberia. The same is also the case for livestock farming.

In general, the old collective farms and state farms have continued to function in post-Soviet Russia. Privatized farms have experienced significant obstacles, because many in the agricultural sector treated them as pariahs, and the land that many were allocated was unproductive or inaccessible. Thus, the bulk of the grain continues to be produced by very large agricultural enterprises, particularly those in the Northern Caucasus and in the Volga regions.

Russia contains the world's largest forest reserves. More than two-fifths of the country is forested, and the country has more than one-fifth of the world's total forests - an area nearly as large as the continental United States. However, Russian forests grow very slowly because of the cold, and the country has lost about one-third of its original forest area. Although further deforestation is discouraged, logging continues to endanger the last intact forest landscapes of northern European Russia, and the problem is expanding to areas east of the Urals, The forestry industry in Russia employs some one million people. The lumbering, pulp, paper, and woodworking industries are particularly import­ant, contributing to Russia's export income. The wood is predominantly softwood.

The fishing industry plays a significant role in the Russian economy. With access to the substantial resources of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, marine fishing is particularly well developed, and Russia's fleet of factory ships can process huge catches at remote locations. The chief European ocean-fishing ports are Kaliningrad and St Petersburg on the Baltic Sea, and Murmansk and Arkhangelsk in the far north. Russia's chief Pacific port is Vladivostok, but there are several others, particularly in Sakhalin and Kamchatka provinces. Smaller- scale fishing takes place in the Sea of Azov and the Black and

Caspian seas (the Caspian sturgeon is the source of the world's finest caviar}, but reduced river flows and pollution from agricultural run-off, industrial waste, and sewage dumping have thinned fish populations. There are important inland fisheries on lakes and rivers, including a good deal of fish farming.

The Russian fishing industry rivals the size of the world's other leading producers (Japan, the United States, and China), and produces about one-third of all canned fish and some one- fourth of the world's total fresh and frozen fish. The privatiza­tion of fishing in the 1990s shifted the industry's focus from production for domestic consumption to exports. Especially important catches are pollack, herring, cod, and salmon. Russia's earnings from the export of fish are steadily larger than from grain export. Salmon, crabmeat, caviar, beluga, sterlet, and herring are among the important seafoods gen­erating export income.

Resources and Power

Russia has enormous energy resources and significant deposits of many different minerals. Its coal reserves are particularly extensive. The biggest fields lie in remote and untapped areas of east Siberia and the far east; the bulk of current output comes from more southerly fields along the Trans-Siberian Railway. About three-fourths of Russia's coal is produced in Siberia, some two-fifths from the Kuznetsk Basin alone and the remainder from the Kansk-Achinsk, Cheremkhovo, and South Yakut basins and numerous smaller sources. The production of hard (anthracite) coal in European Russia takes place mainly in the eastern Donets Basin and, in the Arctic, in the Pechora Basin around Vorkuta.

Privatization of the coal industry began in the 1990s, and by the early twenty-first century some three-fifths of overall coal production was coming from privatized mines. However, the removal of state subsidies also forced the closure of many unprofitable mines. Mines in regions with access to substantial reserves of oil and natural gas largely survived.

Russia is among the world's leading producers of oil, extracting about one-fifth of the global total. It also is re­sponsible for more than one-fourth of the world's total natural gas output. The great bulk of these oil and natural gas reserves comes from the huge fields that underlie the northern part of the west Siberia region, though another significant source is the Volga-Ural zone; the North Caucasus region, once the Soviet Union's leading producer, is now of little importance. Extensive pipeline systems link production sites with all re­gions of the country, with the neighbouring former Soviet republics, and with many European countries.

Electricity is generated by around 600 large thermal power plants and more than 100 hydroelectric stations, as well as several nuclear power plants. Most electricity production is fuelled by oil and gas. Nuclear power production expanded rapidly before development was checked by the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Much of Siberia's electricity output is transmitted to the European region of Russia along high- voltage lines.

Russia produces about one-sixth of the world's iron ore, mainly from the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly (central black earth region), the Kola Peninsula, the Urals, and Siberia. Although there is steel production in every economic region, the largest steel-producing plants are located mainly in the Urals, the central black earth region, and the Kuznetsk Basin. Non- ferrous metals are available in great variety from many districts, but by far the most important are those of the Ural region, which is Russia's main centre of non-ferrous metal­lurgy. Russia is also a major producer of cobalt, chrome, copper, gold, lead, manganese, nickel, platinum, tungsten, vanadium, and zinc. The country produces much of its alu­minium from plants powered by the Siberian hydroelectric stations, but bauxite deposits are relatively meagre.

Chemicals

Because of the complex history of the development of the chemical industries and the great variety of raw materials involved, chemical manufacture is widely dispersed. As oil and gas input increased in the second half of the twentieth century, new chemical plants were built, particularly in regions served by pipelines, which helped to reduce dependence on traditional resources. Chemical industries requiring large quantities of electric power, such as those based on cellulose, are particularly important in Siberia, where both timber and electricity are plentiful. Overall, Russia's chemical industry lags in scale and diversity compared with those of the United States, Canada, China, and the countries of the European Union.

Heavy and Light Industry

Russia's machine-building industry provides most of the coun­try's needs, from steam boilers and turbines to consumer durables and automation components. Durable consumer goods are produced primarily in areas with a tradition of skilled industry, notably in and around Moscow and St Petersburg, Russia's factories also produce armaments, which are sold to many countries and contribute significantly to Russia's export income. Textile industries are heavily concen­trated in European Russia, which produces a large share of the country's clothing and footwear.

Transport and Telecommunications

Russia's vast size and the great distances that often separate sources of raw materials and foodstuffs from consumers place a heavy burden on the transport system. One result has been the continuing dominance of the railways, which account for about nine-tenths of the country's freight turnover (three-fifths if pipelines are included) and half of all passenger movement. Nevertheless, the rail network is a very open one, and its density varies regionally: that of European Russia is nearly seven times as dense as that found in the Asian portion of the country. Indeed, east of the Urals the term "network" is a misnomer, since the system consists of only a few major trunk routes (e.g., the Trans-Siberian Railway and Baikal-Amur Main Line) with feeder branches to sites of economic import­ance. The railways are owned and run by a joint-stock company controlled by the state. Much of the country's rolling stock is obsolete.

Apart from highways linking the major cities of European Russia, the road system is underdeveloped and carries only a tiny fraction of all freight. The private motor car became a symbol of middle-class status in the post-Soviet years, but the percentage of people owning vehicles is still quite small. Inland waterways carry a much larger volume than roads. Although the greatest volume is carried on the Volga system, river transport is most vital in areas devoid of railways. In addition to its vital role in foreign trade, maritime transport has some importance in linking the various regions of Russia, particu­larly those that face the Arctic seaboard. Traffic on the Arctic Ocean route is seasonal.

Air transport plays an increasingly important role. Russian airlines carry only a minute fraction of all freight, chiefly high- value items to and from the remote parts of Siberia, where aircraft are sometimes the only means of transport. Airlines are responsible for nearly one-fifth of all passenger movement. Aeroflot (renamed Aeroflot-Russian Airlines in June 2000), formerly the state airline of the Soviet Union, is the country's largest air carrier; the Russian government retains majority ownership. Most major cities have services to international or domestic locations.

The Russian telecommunications sector is inferior to those of other industrialized countries. For example, in the early 1990s only about one-third of the country's households had a telephone. But the country's infrastructure in this respect has been greatly improved, largely through foreign investment. In 1997 the State Committee on Communications and Infor­matics was set up to regulate telecommunications policies, oversee the liberalization of the sector, and encourage compe­tition; by the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were more than 1,000 telecommunications companies. Neverthe­less, several large companies, such as Svyazinvest and Ros- telekom, control much of the industry. Internet use in Russia grew very slowly in the 1990s, particularly outside the major urban areas, but it has since grown fairly steadily.

Finance

Russia's monetary unit is the ruble, which is now freely convertible, a radical departure from the practice of artificial exchange rates and rigid restrictions that existed during the Soviet era. The Russian Central Bank (RCB), which took over the functions of the Soviet-era Gosbank, is exclusively re­sponsible for regulating the country's monetary system. The bank's primary function is to protect and stabilize the ruble, which it attempts to do through its control of foreign ex­change. The constitution adopted in 1993 gives the RCB greater independence from the central government than the Gosbank had enjoyed, but its head is appointed by the pre­sident and subject to approval by the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian legislature. In 1995 the RCB was granted the authority to oversee all banking transactions, set exchange- rate policies, license banks, and service the country's debt. To maintain its hard-currency reserves, the RCB relies on the obligation of all exporters to convert half their hard-currency earnings into rubles. The RCB supervises and inspects the country's commercial banks.

During much of the 1990s Russia's financial system was in a state of chaos, largely because many of the thousands of banks that formed after the fall of communism became insolvent, particularly during the economic crisis of the late 1990s. Even with consolidation of the banking industry, at the beginning of the early twenty-first century there were more than 1,000 Russian commercial banks, many of which were state-owned or offered few financing opportunities for small- and medium- size businesses. Dozens of foreign banks also operate in the country.

The state-owned Russian commercial banks, such as Vnesh- torgbank and Sberbank, shadow the RCB both in the pursuit of stability and in operations philosophy. The banking sector is frequently accused of cronyism, benefiting only an elite, parti­cularly former communist apparatchiks. Before the banking crisis in the late 1990s, private commercial banks mushroomed, but most of them acted as outsourcing financial agents for enterprises inherited from the Soviet era. By the beginning of the twenty-first century two major clusters of banks had survived. One cluster, which included the National Reserve Bank, Gaz- prombank, Promstroybank, and the International Moscow Bank, served the oil and gas industry; the second cluster, consisting of the Bank of Moscow, Mosbusinessbank, Guta Bank, Most Bank, Unikombank, the International Financial Corporation, Sobinbank, MDM Bank, Toribank, Promrad- tekhbank, and dozens of smaller banks, focused on servicing the government of Moscow.

Trade

During the communist era the Russian republic traded ex­tensively with the other Soviet republics, from which it "im­ported" a variety of commodities that it was unable to produce in sufficient quantities itself, such as cotton, grain, and miner­als. In return, Russia "exported" oil and gas to republics with a weak energy base, such as Belorussia (now Belarus) and the Baltic states, and sent its skilled-engineering products and consumer goods to most of its partners.

By the late 1990s trade between the former union republics no longer continued in any systematic manner, above all because agreement could not be reached on the prices to be charged for goods exchanged at artificially low rates during the Soviet period. Still, Russia generally has a positive trade balance with the former republics of the Soviet Union.

Internationa] trade during the Soviet era was rather limited until the 1960s, and most of it was governed by bilateral and multilateral arrangements with the other members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), the Soviet-led trade organization of communist East European countries. As Soviet economic expansion slowed during the 1970s and 1980s, it became apparent that further growth required large quantities of high-tech equipment from the West. To finance these imports, Russia came to rely heavily on oil and gas exports as a source of its hard-currency needs. With Comecon's collapse and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, individual republics began to develop their own trading relations with the outside world. Russia, with its large resources of oil, gas, and minerals, seemed well placed to continue the type of trading relations with the West already developed by the former Soviet Union. In 1994 Russia signed an agreement that strengthened economic ties with the Eur­opean Union, and it soon joined economic discussions with the Group of Seven (G-7), which represented the most advanced economies of the world; in 1997 it was admitted to member­ship of the Group of Eight (0-8). However, Russia's integra­tion into the world economy was not complete, as it did not fully participate in that organization's economic and financial discussions, and its application to join the World Trade Organization was delayed.

Foreign trade is tremendously important to the Russian economy. The country has generally enjoyed a healthy trade surplus since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Primary exports include oil, metals, machinery, chemicals, and forestry products. Principal imports include machinery and foods. Among Russia's leading trade partners are Germany, the United States, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.

Services

During the Soviet era the service sector suffered from drastic inadequacies. The state-owned services, which made little effort to respond to consumer demand, were characterized by inefficient bureaucratization. In the post-Soviet era private- sector services grew dramatically, and many of the shortages that characterized the previous era were eliminated. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, services accounted for more than half of GDP. Still, complaints remained regarding the provision of services by the public sector, particularly the police, schools, and hospitals. Owing to budget shortfalls, many of the public-sector services are poorly financed and have been unable to retain skilled employees.

Travel and tourism account for several million jobs in Russia. Some 20 million foreign visitors travel to Russia each year, though many of these visitors are seasonal workers from former Soviet republics. Preed from the restrictions of Soviet times, Russians have increasingly travelled abroad.

Labour and Taxation

Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an overarching All- Union Central Council of Trade Unions nominally represented the interests of workers, though it was controlled by the governing Communist Party. In the mid-1980s there was increasing labour unrest, particularly from miners, and greater rights were granted to workers. Since the collapse of com­munism, labour relations have been in constant flux, and several labour codes have been adopted. Trade union reform in 2001 effectively produced the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of the Russian Federation, which represents some 50 million workers organized into various branches, and exercises a monopoly on most union activity. Alternative trade unions were unable to operate unless they represented at least half of the employees at a company.

The primary and secondary sectors continue to provide employment for a large proportion of the workforce, with one-eighth of workers employed in agriculture and one-fifth in mining and manufacturing. Still, the service sector (including banking, insurance, and other financial services) has grown appreciably and now employs about three-fifths of all Russian workers.

Tax laws have undergone dramatic reform since the dis­solution of the Soviet Union. As a result of high tax rates, the large number of unreported incomes (particularly related to organized-crime syndicates), and general fraud, the govern­ment failed to collect a significant proportion of the revenue to which it was legally entitled. In the early twenty-first century, to combat fraud and encourage investment, the government simplified the tax system and reduced the overall tax burden, particularly on businesses. Corporate taxes were reduced by about one-third, a flat tax was imposed on incomes, and the value-added tax on the sale of goods was reduced. A single natural-resource extraction tax also replaced three existing resource taxes. The value-added tax is a large source of government revenue.

Despite Russia's abundant natural resources and relative strength in human capital, the country faces an uncertain economic future. In order to overcome the more negative factors - such as a low level of innovation, the persistence of strong vested interests, inadequate managerial skills, under­developed technological capabilities, the restricted demand for new products and processes, little long-term bank lending, a lack of venture capital, and modest foreign direct investment in manufacturing - the promotion of effective economic devel­opment strategies remains a government priority in the face of competition from other dynamic emerging economies, in par­ticular China and India.

EVERYDAY LIFE IN MODERN RUSSIA

Over the course of the twentieth century Russia witnessed sea changes in all areas of life, in government, in forms of social organization, and in freedoms of all sorts. It was a century that saw Russia move definitively from an essentially peasant economy to become an industrial superpower. These changes inevitably have left their mark, and for many meant that economic hardship has dictated the tone of everyday life. Of course there have been other, more imperceptible trans­formations, and constants, too.

One of the most significant factors that have generated wide­spread changes in Russia's lifestyles and social customs has been the growth of a Russian middle class. This began in the Leonid Brezhnev era (1964-82) and saw another period of expansion in the glasnost era of the late 1980s. Definitions of this class, and estimates of its extent, differ widely, but it is generally agreed that today it constitutes about one-fourth of Russian society, and is largely concentrated in and around Moscow, St Peters­burg, and other urban areas. In the later twentieth century increased salaries meant that ownership of consumer goods, such as refrigerators and cars, became a realistic expectation for some, and, more recently, travel abroad has become popular, and the purchase of imported luxury goods has increased. Many wealthy individuals have bought private land and built second homes, often of two or three stories. Underlying these new developments are changes in values: as distinct from Soviet practice, the new values include self-reliance and viewing work as a source of joy and pride; the middle class also tends to avoid political extremes, to participate in charitable organizations, and to patronize theatres and restaurants.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in further dramatic change. The effects have been visible in a wide spectrum of activities, from health care and education to the construction boom and a revival of religious practice and enjoyment of folk and religious festivals.

Food, Drink, and Festivals

One of the constants in Russian everyday life, as in all countries, has been food and drink. Russia's staple foodstuffs reflect the natural environment of steppe and forest, with a predominance of grain products - especially wheat, rye, oats, and millet - and an abundance of berries and mushrooms from the country's vast forested areas. Russia also has huge re­sources of fish - including caviar - while since the 1990s a wide array of imported packaged products are now found in Russian cities, thus adding to the country's natural richness and diversity of food products.

One of Russia's most celebrated dishes - at least interna­tionally - is borsch, a soup made with beets. The Ukrainian (and arguably the original) version is often eaten with a sour cream garnish and with pirozhki, turnovers filled with beef and onions, and can be eaten hot or cold. A dish celebrated across the world, borsch can be prepared in a great variety of ways, some clear and light, others thick and substantial. Sometimes it is even made with kvass, a mild beer fermented from grain or bread.

Another popular dish, both in Russia and across the world, is caviar, the processed, salted roe of certain species of fish, notably sturgeon. Like borsch, this too was once considered a humble foodstuff: for many years caviar in Russia was con­sumed as a staple of the poor - it was nor until the eighteenth century that it became the preserve of the aristocracy. And while it retains its connotations of luxury and wealth abroad, in Russia today caviar continues to feature at weddings, holiday feasts, and other festive occasions. Indeed, many Russians believe in the magical health benefits of caviar, seeing it as a kind of general panacea.

The main source of Russian caviar is the Caspian Sea. An idea of the scale of production can be seen in the export figures: in 1919, after the Bolsheviks had nationalized pro­duction, though exports amounted to only one-tenth of the annual harvest, Russia was able to export widely across the world and to supply the United States with the bulk of its needs, following the overfishing of its own natural reserves. During the Soviet era, despite Russia continuing to be a major exporter, caviar was readily available to the country's citizens. But in the 1960s it disappeared from the shelves, becoming a delicacy reserved for the political elite. With the opening of a market economy in the 1990s, caviar became more expensive still, though readily available at a price. According to consumption figures, this does not seem to have had a significant effect: Russians today consume 1,000 tonnes of caviar a year, a massive 92 per cent of it poached, according to figures provided by the World Wildlife Fund; Russia's agriculture ministry puts the figure even higher, at 1,200 tonnes, most of it acquired illegally.

This has brought another factor into play: the environment. Sturgeon numbers went into decline in the 1960s, and then in the 1990s the economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a sharp increase in poaching in the Volga delta, an activity to which the authorities largely turned a blind eye. The poachers, who paid little heed to the age and size of the fish they caught, caused a further sturgeon decline. Follow­ing warnings issued by ecologists that Russian caviar could disappear altogether as the Caspian Sea's sturgeon population reaches dangerously low levels and even risks extinction, since August 1, 2007, the harvest and sale of black caviar have been banned in Russia.

If caviar is a symbol of Russia in restaurants and shops across the world, so too is vodka, Russia's national drink. Vodka originated during the fourteenth century; the name is a diminutive of the Russian voda ("water"). It is an in­expensive drink to produce, since it can be made from a mash of the cheapest and most readily available raw ma­terials suitable for fermentation. Potatoes were traditionally employed, but have largely been supplanted in Russia and in other vodka-producing countries by cereal grains. A dis­tilled liquor, clear in colour and without definite aroma or taste, it ranges in alcoholic content from about 40 to 55 per cent.

In Russia, vodka accompanies many family meals, especially on special occasions. Vodka is traditionally consumed straight, unmixed and chilled, in small glasses, and is accompanied by a fatty salt herring, a sour cucumber, a pickled mushroom, or a piece of rye bread with butter. It is considered bad manners and a sign of weak character to become visibly intoxicated from vodka.

The basic vodkas have no additional flavouring, but they are sometimes infused with cranberries, lemon peel, pepper, or herbs. Zubrovka, yellowish in colour, highly aromatic, and with a somewhat bitter undertone, is produced by steeping several stalks of zubrovka, or buffalo grass, in vodka.

Vodka is not the only popular drink in Russia, of course. Normally, Russians prefer to finish their daily meals with a cup of tea or coffee (the latter more common in the larger cities). Alternatively, kvass remains popular, a traditional drink that can be made at home from stale black bread. On a hot summer's day, chilled kvass is used to make okroshka, a traditional cold soup laced with cucumbers, boiled eggs, sausages, and salamis.

As in many countries, Russia's culinary traditions are closely woven into the fabric of its religious and folk festivals. Some of these date from pagan times. During Maslyanitsa - the oldest Russian folk holiday, marking the end of winter - pancakes (symbolizing the sun) are served with caviar, various fish, nuts, honey pies, and other garnishes and side dishes. The meal is accompanied by tea in the ever-present samovar (tea kettle) and is often washed down with vodka. At Easter baked goods can be found in abundance and include round-shaped sweet bread and Easter cake. Traditionally, pashka, a mixture of sweetened curds, butter, and raisins, is served with the cake. Hard-boiled eggs painted in bright colours also are staples of the Easter holiday. During Troitsa (Pentecost), homes are adorned with fresh green branches, and girls often make garlands of birch branches and flowers to put into water for fortune-telling. In

August there is a cluster of three Spas holidays that celebrate honey and the sowing of the apple and nut crops, respectively.

Russia also has several official holidays, including the Russian Orthodox Christmas (January 7), Victory Day in the Second World War (May 9), Independence Day (June 12), and Constitution Day (December 12). Women's Day (March 8), formerly known as International Women's Day and celebrated elsewhere in the world by its original name, was established by the Soviet authorities to highlight the advances women made under communist rule. During the holiday women usually receive gifts such as flowers and chocolates.

Sport

Sport played a major role in the Soviet state in the post-the Second World War period. The achievements of Soviet athletes in the international arena, particularly in the Olym­pic Games (the Soviets first participated in the 1952 Summer and the 1956 Winter Olympics), were a source of great national pride. Although Soviet athletes were declared ama­teurs, they were well supported by the State Committee for Sport. Soviet national teams were especially successful in ice hockey - winning numerous world championships and Olympic gold medals - volleyball, and, later, basketball. Soviet gymnasts and track-and-field athletes (male and fe­male), weight lifters, wrestlers, and boxers were consistently among the best in the world. Even since the collapse of the Soviet empire, Russian athletes have continued to dominate international competition in these areas.

As in most of the world, football (soccer) enjoys wide popu­larity in Russia. At the centre of the country's proud tradition is

LEV YASHIN (i929-90) Russian footballer

Lev Yashin was considered by many to be the greatest goalkeeper in the history of soccer. He played his first football game for Moscow Dynamo in 1953 and remained with the club until his retirement in 1971. During that time Dynamo won five league titles and three cups. He also enjoyed considerable success with the Soviet national team, helping the team win the gold medal at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, and claim the first-ever European Championship in I960. At the World Cup Yashin was the keeper for Soviet runs to the quarterfinals in 1958 and 1962, as well as for the team's fourth-place finish in 1966,

Throughout his career Yashin collected nicknames such as "black panther", "black spider", and "black octopus" because of his black uniform and his innovative style of play. He was one of the first keepers to dominate the entire penalty area, and on the goal line he was capable of acrobatic saves. In his career he recorded 207 shutouts and 150 penalty saves. In 1963 he was named European Footballer of the Year, the only time a keeper has won the award.

legendary goalkeeper Lev Yashin, whose spectacular play in the 1956 Olympics helped Russia capture the gold medal. Today there are three professional divisions for men, and the sport is also growing in popularity among women.

Ice hockey was introduced to Russia only during the Soviet era, yet the national team soon dominated international competitions. The Soviet squad claimed more than twenty

world championships between 1954 and 1991. The success of the national team can be attributed to both the Soviet player-development system and the leadership of coach Ana- toly Tarasov, who created the innovative team passing style characteristic of Soviet hockey. Goalkeeper Vladislav Tretyak (the first Soviet player inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto) and defender Vyacheslav Fetisov - who was among the first players allowed by the Soviet authorities to play in the North American National Hockey League (NHL) - were two of the finest players in those great Soviet teams. Although Russia's top professional league is quite popular, many of the best Russian players now ply their trade in the NHL.

The first Russian world chess champion was Alexander Alekhine, who left Russia after the 1917 Revolution. Un­daunted by Alekhine's departure, the Soviet Union was able to produce top-ranked players by funding chess schools to find and train talented children. The best of these students were then supported by the state - they were the first chess profes­sionals - at a time when no one in the West could make a living wage from chess alone. From 1948 Soviet and Russian grand masters, including Mikhail Botvjnnik, Vasily Smyslov, Boris Spassky, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, and Vladimir Kramnik, held the title of world champion almost continu­ously. During the same period, three Russian women reigned as women's world champion: Lyudmila Rudenko, Olga Rubt- sova, and Elizaveta Bykova.

On the amateur level, the lack of facilities and equipment has prevented many average Russian citizens from participat­ing in sporting activities, but jogging, football, and fishing are popular pastimes, and no doubt the sporting scene will change as the twenty-first century progresses.

GARRY KASPAROV (b. 1963)

Russian chess master and politician

Kasparov was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and began playing chess at the age of six. He became an international grandmaster following his victory in the 1980 World Junior (under 20) Championship. In 1984-5 Kasparov met world champion Anatoly Karpov in a match that was aborted after five months of play; in late 1985 Kasparov won a 24-game return match 13-1 I. The International Chess Federation (FIDE) stripped him of his title in 1993 in a conflict over the venue for a championship match, but the rest of the chess world still accepted him as champion. In 1996 Kasparov defeated IBM's custom-built chess computer Deep Blue in a match that attracted worldwide attention. In a 1997 rematch an upgraded Deep Blue prevailed. In 2000 Kasparov lost a 16-game championship match to Vladimir Kramnik of Russia.

Kasparov retired from competitive chess in 2005, though not from involvement in chess. In particular, he produced an acclaimed series of books, Kasparov on My Great Predecessors (2003-6), covering many of the game's great players. He also kept in the public eye with his decision in 2005 to start a political organization, the United Civil Front, to oppose Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2006 Kasparov was one of the prime movers behind a broad coalition of political parties that formed the Other Russia, a group held together by only one goal: ousting Putin from power. In 2007, following several protest marches organized by the coalition in

which Kasparov and other participants were arrested, the Other Russia chose Kasparov as its candidate for the 2008 presidential election but was unable to nominate him by the deadline.

Religion

The rebirth of religion is another dimension of the change in lifestyles of the new Russia. Religious institutions have filled the vacuum created by the downfall of communist ideology, and religious festivities are now once again a regular feature of popular culture. Moreover, for believers and non-believers alike, the Russian Orthodox Church - for nearly a thousand years the country's dominant religious institution - has been a major influence throughout the country's history, not only in relation to religious belief and practice, but in creating and maintaining cultural and national identity. Today Russian Orthodoxy is still the country's largest religious denomination, constituting about half of all total congregations, and is also the largest independent Eastern Orthodox Church in the world; its membership is estimated at more than 85 million people. Yet despite the revival of religious practices since the late 1980s, the non-religious still constitute an overwhelming majority of the population.

Christianity was introduced into the East Slavic state of Kievan Rus by Greek missionaries from Byzantium in the ninth century, but it was the baptism of Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, in 988 that propelled Russia from paganism to Chris­tianity. This led to the adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet and to centuries of alignment with Byzantine culture and traditions.

Under Vladimir's successors, and until 1448, the Russian church was headed by the metropolitans of Kiev and formed a metropolitanate of the Byzantine patriarchate; thereafter the Russian bishops elected their own patriarch without recourse to Constantinople, and the Russian church was thenceforth independent.

Just as in the arts, the fate of the religious institutions ebbed and flowed according to changing political climate. In the twentieth century, and particularly under Soviet rule, periods of persecution and repression were followed by brief interludes of revival and expansion. Although the constitution of the Soviet Union nominally guaranteed religious freedom, reli­gious activities were greatly constrained, and membership of religious organizations was considered incompatible with membership of the Communist Party. When the Soviets first came to power they soon declared the separation of church and state, and nationalized all church-held lands. These administrative measures were followed by brutal state- sanctioned persecutions that included the wholesale destruc­tion of churches, and the arrest and execution of many clerics. The Russian Orthodox Church was further weakened in 1922, when the Renovated Church, a reform movement supported by the Soviet government, brought division among clergy and faithful.

In 1943, benefiting from the sudden reversal of Joseph Stalin's policies toward religion, Russian Orthodoxy under­went a resurrection: a new patriarch was elected, theological schools were opened, and thousands of churches began to function. Between 1945 and 1959 the official organization of the church was greatly expanded, although individual mem­bers of the clergy were occasionally arrested and exiled. The number of open churches reached 25,000. But a new and widespread persecution of the church was subsequently in­stituted under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Then, beginning in the late 1980s, under Mikhail Gorbachev, the new political and social freedoms resulted in many church buildings being returned to the church, to be restored by local parishioners. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 made religious freedom a reality, and revealed that large sections of the population had continued to practise a variety of faiths. Indeed, Russian nationalists who emerged from the 1990s identified the Russian Orthodox Church as a major element of Russian culture. Tsar Nicholas П, the Rus­sian emperor who had been murdered by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution of 1917, and members of his family were canonized by the church in 2000.

Other Christian denominations are much smaller and in­clude the Old Believers, who separated from the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century, and Baptist and Evangelical groups. Catholics, both Western rite (Roman) and Eastern rite (Uniate), and Lutherans were numerous in the former Soviet Union but lived mainly outside present-day Russia, where there are few adherents. Muslims constitute Russia's second-largest religious group. In 1997 legislation was enacted that constrained denominations outside five "tra­ditional" religions - Russian Orthodoxy, several other Chris­tian denominations, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism - restricting the activities for at least fifteen years of groups not registered in the country. For example, groups not meeting this requirement at the time the law was implemented (such as Roman Catholics and Mormons) were unable to operate educational institutions or disseminate religious literature.

Although there is some degree of correlation between lan­guage and religion, the two do nor correspond entirely. Slavs are overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian, Turkic speakers are predominantly Muslim, although several Turkic groups in Russia are not. For example, Christianity predominates among the Chuvash, Buddhism prevails among large numbers of Altai, Khakass, and Tuvans, and many Turkic speakers east of the Yenisey have retained their shamanistic beliefs (though some have converted to Christianity). Buddhism is common among the Mongolian-speaking Buryat and Kalmyk.

Jews long suffered discrimination in Russia, including purges in the nineteenth century, repression under the regime of Joseph Stalin, and Nazi atrocities on Russian soil during the Second World War. Beginning with Gorbachev's reformist policies in the 1980s, Jewish emigration to Israel and elsewhere was permitted on an increasing scale, and the number of Jews living in Russia (and all parts of the former Soviet Union) has de­creased. Prior to the break-up of the Soviet Union, about one- third of its Jewish population lived in Russia (though many did not practise Judaism), and now about one-tenth of all Jews in Russia reside in Moscow. In the 1930s the Soviet government established Yevreyskaya in the far east as a Jewish autonomous province, though by the end of the twentieth century only about 5 per cent of the province's population was Jewish.

Social Issues

Some of Russia's most pressing social problems have been inherited from the Soviet and earlier past. Others are more recent developments, fostered by the speed of change and economic collapse that followed the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Public health is among the most serious social concerns. During much of the Soviet period, when social welfare pro­grammes were funded by the central government, advances in health care and material well-being led to a decline in mor­tality, the control or eradication of the more dangerous infectious diseases, and an increase in the average lifespan. From the 1990s a major portion of the public welfare budget continued to be directed into free medical service, training, pensions, and scholarships with the aim of improving the material and social conditions of workers in Russia, but employer-based social insurance and pension funds, to which workers contributed, were also introduced.

Nevertheless, after 1991 public health deteriorated dra­matically. The death rate reached its highest level of the twentieth century (excluding wartime) in the 1990s. Life expectancy fell dramatically (though it began to rise again by the end of the decade), and infectious diseases that had been under control spread again. In addition, the country suffered high rates of cancer, tuberculosis, and heart disease. Various social, ecological, and economic factors underlay these developments, including funding and medicine shortages, adequately paid and trained medical personnel (for example, many medical schools lack sufficient supplies and instruc­tors), poor intensive and emergency care, the limited devel­opment of specialized services such as maternity and hospice care, contaminated food and drinking water, duress caused by economic dislocation, poor nutrition, contact with toxic substances in the workplace, and high rates of alcohol and tobacco consumption. Air pollution in heavily industrialized areas has led to relatively high rates of lung cancer in these regions, and high incidences of stomach cancer have oc­curred in regions where consumption of carbohydrates is high and intake of fruits, vegetables, milk, and animal proteins is low.

Alcoholism has long been a severe public health problem in Russia. At the beginning of the twenty-first century it was estimated that some one-third of men and one-sixth of women were addicted to alcohol. The problem is particularly acute in rural areas and among the Evenk, Sakha, Koryak, and Nenets peoples in Russia's northern regions. Widespread alcoholism has its origins in the Soviet-era "vodka-based economy", which countered shortages in the supply of food and consumer goods with the production of vodka, a non-perishable product that was easily transportable. The government has sponsored media campaigns to promote healthy living and imposed strict tax regulations aimed at reducing the profitability of vodka producers; in addition, group-therapy sessions have spread. There have also been proposals to prohibit the sale of hard liquors in the regions with the highest rates of alcoholism.

Housing

Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, nearly all the housing stock of urban areas was owned by the state. Indeed, private property was prohibited in urban areas, and in rural areas the size of private homes was strictly limited. High-rise apartment buildings with a very unpretentious architecture made up the bulk of the stock. Local authorities had charge of renting arrangements, and in "company towns" the manage­ment of state enterprises was given this responsibility. Rental payments were kept extremely low and, in most cases, were not enough to pay maintenance costs. Deterioration of hous­ing was rapid and vandalism widespread. In addition, many apartments were shared by tenants, with joint-access kitchens and bathrooms, and the space of the average apartment in

Russia was about one-third to one-half the size of those found in western Europe.

The housing sector underwent vigorous privatization in the 1990s, and there was a decline in state-supported construc­tion. Many renters were offered free title to their units, though many older Russians decided to forgo the necessary paper­work and continued to rent. Nevertheless, by the mid-1990s more than half of Russia's housing was privately owned, with the remainder administered by municipal authorities. Condi­tions improved considerably in owner-occupied housing, as the owners in apartment buildings were able to ensure the enforcement of maintenance rules, but public housing, owing to a lack of funds from local authorities, continued to deteri­orate.

In the 1990s many of the housing shortages characteristic of the Soviet period disappeared, and the floor space of homes per person steadily increased, largely as the result of a con­struction boom for private homes. For example, the construc­tion of private housing tripled in urban areas and nearly doubled in the rural areas. However, there were sharp declines in the construction of public housing, particularly in rural areas.

Education

Education in the Soviet Union was highly centralized, w^rith the state owning and operating nearly every school. The curricu­lum was rigid, and the system aimed to indoctrinate students in the communist system. As with many aspects of the Soviet system, schools were often forced to operate in crowded facilities and with limited resources. With democratization there was widespread support for educational reforms. In 1992 the federal government passed legislation enabling re­gions where non-Russians predominated to exercise some degree of autonomy in education, but diplomas can still be conferred only in the Russian, Bashkir, and Tatar languages, and the federal government has responsibility for designing and distributing textbooks, licensing teachers, and setting the requirements for instruction in the Russian language, sciences, and mathematics. School finance and the humanities, history, and social science curricula are entrusted to regional author­ities.

Pre-school education in Russia is very well developed; some four-fifths of children aged three to six attend creches or kindergartens. Schooling is compulsory for nine years. It starts from the age of seven (in some areas from six) and leads to a basic general education certificate. An additional two or three years of schooling are required for the secondary-level certi­ficate, and some seven-eighths of Russian students continue their education past this level. Non-Russian schoolchildren are taught in their own language, but Russian is a compulsory subject at the secondary level.

Admission to an institute of higher education is selective and highly competitive. First-degree courses usually take five years. Higher education is conducted almost entirely in Russian, although there are a few institutions, mainly in the minority republics, where the local language is also used.

Russia's oldest university is Moscow State University, which was founded in 1755. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Russian universities in Moscow, St Peters­burg, and Kazan produced world-class scholars, notably the mathematician Nikolay Lobachevsky and the chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev. Although universities suffered severely during the purges of the Stalinist regime, a number have continued to provide high-quality education, particularly in the sciences. In addition to Moscow State University, the most important institutions include St Petersburg State University (founded 1819) and Novosibirsk State University (1959).

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the quantity and diversity of universities and institutes have undergone unpre­cedented expansion. In 1991 the country had some 500 institutions of higher education, all of which were controlled by the state. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the number of state schools had increased by nearly one-fifth, though many suffered from inadequate state funding, dated equipment, and overcrowding. The state schools were joined by more than 300 private colleges and universities, which were all established after 1994. Licensed by the state, these schools have generally enjoyed better funding than the state schools; however, they have been very costly and have served mainly Russia's new middle class.

PART 5

PLACES

Moscow

12

THE MAJOR SITES TO VISIT

Moscow

The capital of the Russian Federation, Moscow today is not Only the country's industrial, cultural, scientific, and educa­tional capita] and political centre, but the most populous city in Russia, with over 10 million inhabitants. For more than 600 years the city has also been the spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Moscow is an upbeat, vibrant, and sometimes wearisome city. Much of Moscow was reconstructed after it was occupied by the French under Napoleon I in 1812 and almost entirely destroyed by fire. Since then, Moscow has frequently been refurbished and modernized, and continues to experience rapid social change. Russia's Soviet past collides with its capitalist present everywhere in the country, but nowhere is this contrast more visible than in Moscow. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's Mausoleum remains intact, as do many dreary five-storey apartment buildings from the era of Nikita

Khrushchev's rule (the mid- i 950s to the mid-1960s); yet glitzy cars and western-style supermarkets, casinos, and nightclubs are equally visible. Many Orthodox churches, as well as some synagogues and mosques, have been restored, Moscow's novel theatres have reclaimed leadership in the dramatic arts, and traditional markets have been revived and expanded. These markets, which under the Soviets were known as kolkhoz (collective-farm) markets and sold mainly crafts and produce, are now more sophisticated retail establishments.

Unlike St Petersburg, Moscow is viewed as a traditional Russian city and has a well-defined city centre, marked by the Kremlin. Other characteristics of Moscow are its physical layout in radial spokes and rings that have been extended over time, its hodgepodge of architectural styles, and its historical buildings that were mainly built by Russian archi­tects. Moscow's buildings were predominantly wooden until the 1920s, when brick and stone came into use.

Climate

Moscow's climate is dominated by westerly winds from the Atlantic. Winters are long, yet significantly milder than in similar climatic regions of North America. Snow is common, beginning usually about mid-November and lasting generally until mid-March, but the city is well equipped to keep the streets clear. 1'he average January temperature is 14 F (-10 C), though there can be considerable variation; temperatures have dropped to near -45 F (—43 C). Spring is relatively brief, and the temperature rises rapidly during late April. Summers are warm, and July, the warmest month, has an average tempera­ture in the mid-60s F (about 18 C). Rainy days are not uncommon, but the summer rainfall often comes in brief, heavy downpours and thunderstorms. Autumn, like spring, is short, with rapidly falling temperatures.

Until the late 1950s there was increasing air pollution in Moscow, Smog was common, often with heavy concentrations of sulphur dioxide. A major campaign to control noxious emissions was launched, assisted greatly by a changeover from coal to natural gas as the principal fuel. Some factories that had contributed to pollution were moved out of the city. Slight improvement in Moscow's air had been marked, but since the 1980s the growing number of motor vehicles and the increase in the number of power generators have once again bolstered the concentrations of such exhaust pollutants as carbon mon­oxide and sulphur dioxide.

History

Moscow has played a vital role in Russian history. It was the capital of Muscovy (the Grand Principality of Moscow) in the late thirteenth century - hence, the people of Moscow are known as Muscovites. Gradually the princes of Moscow extended their rule over the other surrounding Russian prince­doms, and the town became the leader in the long struggle against Mongol hegemony. By the second half of the fifteenth century, especially after the annexation of Novgorod in 1478, Moscow had become the undisputed centre of a unified Russian state.

When in 1712 Peter I (the Great) transferred the capital to his new city of St Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland, Moscow was quick to recover and retained its major role in the cultural life of Russia. The eighteenth century saw the foundation of Moscow University - the first in Russia - and a medical and surgical college. Industry flourished, too, and by the time of

Napoleon's invasion in 1812 the population had grown to 275,000.

The Napoleonic invasion has become legendary: after a bitter fifteen-hour battle on August 26 (September 7, New Style) at Borodino on the approaches to Moscow, the Russian commander-in-chief, General M, L Kutuzov, evacuated both troops and civilians from the city, which was occupied by the French a week later. A fire broke out and spread rapidly, eventually destroying more than two-thirds of all the build­ings. Looting was rife. The lack of supplies and shelter and the continual harassment by Russian skirmishing forces made it impossible for Napoleon to winter in Moscow, however, and on October 7 (October 19, New Style) the French troops began their catastrophic retreat.

In 1813 a Commission for the Construction of the City of Moscow was established. It launched a great programme of rebuilding, which included a partial replanning of the city centre. Among many buildings constructed or reconstructed at this time were the Great Kremlin and Armoury palaces, the university, the Manezh (riding school), and the Bolshoi Thea­tre. Industry also expanded rapidly in this century, and the Moscow stock exchange was established. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the beginning of the railway era with the opening of the line to St Petersburg in 1851 greatly increased labour mobility, and large numbers of peasants from the villages began moving to the city. Between 1897 and 1915 Moscow yet again doubled in size, to a population of nearly 2 million.

Moscow resumed its status as capital city in March 1918 when Lenin and the Soviet government moved to Moscow. In the civil war period (1918-20), Moscow, like other Soviet cities, suffered greatly, with grave food shortages, loss of population, and reduction of industry. But in the years follow­ing the final establishment of Soviet power and peace, recovery was swift, and the city functioned as one of the main spring­boards for industrialization elsewhere in the Soviet Union. During the Second World War, the Germans in late 1941 reached the outskirts of Moscow, less than 25 miles (40 km) from the Kremlin. Many factories were evacuated, together with much of the government and most residents. From October 20 the city was declared to be in a state of siege. Its remaining inhabitants built and manned anti-tank defences while the city was bombarded from the air. A desperate counter-attack on December 6 threw the German forces back from the outskirts and saved Moscow. Recovery was quick after the war, with further growth of the city's economy. Two major events have marked the city's progress: in 1947, two years after the war's end, Moscow celebrated its 800th anni­versary, and in 1980 it hosted the Summer Olympic Games.

in the post-war period, migration to Moscow caused a housing shortage that reached grave proportions in the 1950s. Under Nikita Khrushchev a major construction pro­gramme was initiated. Much of the old housing, often single- storied and made of wood, was clearcd, and extensive new tracts of large apartment buildings sprang up around the historic core of the city. Considerable urban renewal took place in the centra) areas, and high-rise buildings now dom­inate the skyline.

As the capital of post-Soviet Russia, Moscow was at the centre of the country's historic transformation. In the decade following the Soviet collapse, many historical buildings, espe­cially churches, underwent a sweeping renovation on a scale without precedent in the city's history. Moscow is a city whose splendour continues to bedazzle.

The Sights

A map of Moscow presents a pattern of concentric rings that circle the rough triangle of the Kremlin and its rectangular extension, the Kitay-gorod, with outwardly radiating spokes connecting the rings; the whole pattern is modified by the twisting, north-west- to south-east-trending Moskva (Mos­cow) River. These rings and radiais mark the historical stages of the city's growth: successive epochs of development are traced by the Boulevard Ring and the Garden Ring (both following the line of former fortifications), the Moscow Little Ring Railway (built in part along the line of the former Kamer-Kollezhsky customs barrier), and the Moscow Ring Road.

As throughout its history, the Kremlin remains the heart of the city. It is the symbol of both Russian and (for a time) Soviet power and authority, and since 1991 it has served as the official residence of the president of the Russian Federa­tion. The Kremlin's crenellated red brick walls and its 20 towers (19 with spires) were built at the end of the fifteenth century, when a host of Italian builders arrived in Moscow at the invitation of Ivan III (the Great). One of the most important towers, the Saviour (Spasskaya) Tower, leading to Red Square, was built in 1491 by Pietro Solario, who designed most of the main towers; its belfry was added in 1624-5. The chimes of its clock are broadcast by radio as a time signal to the whole country. Also on the Red Square front is the St Nicholas (Nikolskaya) Tower, built originally in 1491 and rebuilt in 1806. The two other principal gate towers - the Trinity (Troitskaya) Tower, with a bridge and outer barbican (the Kutafya Tower), and the Borovitskaya Tower - rise from the western wall.

RED SQUARE

Large public square in central Moscow

Red Square lies north of the Moskva River, adjacent to the Kremlin, and covers some 18 acres (7.3 hectares). Dating from the late fifteenth century, it has long been a busy market area as well as a focal point in Russian history as the scene of executions, demonstrations, riots, and parades. Located around it are the State Historical Museum (1875-81), the nine-towered Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed (1554-60), the former state department store GUM, and the tomb of Lenin, The square and Kremlin were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1990.

Within the Kremlin walls is one of the most striking and beautiful architectural ensembles in the world: a combination of churches and palaces, which are open to the public and are among the city's most popular tourist attractions, and the highest offices of the state, which are surrounded by strict security. Around the centrally located Cathedral Square are grouped three magnificent cathedrals, superb examples of Russian church architecture at its height in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These and the other churches in the Kremlin ceased functioning as places of worship after the Russian Revolution of 1917, but from 1990 services recom­menced in most Kremlin churches. The Cathedral of the Assumption is the oldest, built of white stone in 1475-9 in the Italianate-Byzantine style. Its pure, simple, and beautifully proportioned lines and elegant arches are crowned by five golden domes. The Orthodox metropolitans and patriarchs of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries are buried there. Across tlie square is the Cathedral of the Annunciation, built in 1484­9 by craftsmen from Pskov (though burned in 1547, it was rebuilt in 1562-4). Its cluster of chapels is topped by golden roofs and domes. Inside are a number of early fifteenth-century icons attributed to Theophanes the Greek and to Andrey Rublyov, considered by many to be the greatest of all Russian icon painters. The third cathedral, dedicated to St Michael the Archangel, was rebuilt in 1505-8: in it are buried the princes of Moscow and the tsars of Russia (except Boris Godunov) up to the founding of St Petersburg.

Just off the square stands the splendid, soaring white bell tower of Ivan III; built in the sixteenth century and damaged in 1812, it was restored a few years later. At its foot is the enormous Tsar Bell, cast in 1733-5 bur never rung. Nearby is the Tsar Cannon, cast in 1586. Beside the gun are located the mid-seventeenth-century Cathedral of the Twelve Apostles and the adjoining Patriarchal Palace.

On the west of Cathedral Square is a group of palaces of various periods. The Palace of Facets - so called from the exterior finish of faceted, white stone squares - was built in 1487-91. Behind it is the Terem Palace of 1635-6, which incorporates several older churches, including that of the Resurrection of Lazarus, dating from 1393. Both became part of the Great Kremlin Palace, built as a royal residence in 1838­49 and formerly used for sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR; its long, yellow-washed facade dominates the river front. It is connected to the Armoury Palace, built in 1844­51 and now housing the Armoury Museum, with a large collection of treasures of the tsars. Along the north-east wall of the Kremlin are the Arsenal (1702-36), the former Senate building (1776-88), and the School for Red Commanders (1932-4), The only other Soviet-period building within the

Kremlin is the Palace of Congresses (1960-1), with a vast auditorium used for political gatherings and as a theatre.

The Kitay-gorod is a historic quarter of Moscow and a major tourist site. Within the Kitay-gorod, along the east wall of the Kremlin, lies Red Square, the ceremonial centre of the capital and the scene of holiday parades. The austere Lenin Mausoleum blends into the wall, which itself contains the graves of most of the Soviet leadership. At the southern end of Red Square is the Church of the Intercession, better known as the Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed. Built in 1554-60 to commemorate the defeat of the Tatars of Kazan and Astra­khan by Ivan IV (the Terrible), it is a unique and magnificent architectural display, each of its ten domes differing in design and colour. Along Red Square facing the Kremlin is the late nineteenth-century former State Department Store - usually called by its Russian acronym, GUM (Glavny Universality Magazin) - now a privatized shopping mall, with its long aisles, iron bridges linking the upper floors, and vast skylights. The slightly earlier State Historical Museum (1875-83) closes off the northern end of the square. In 1990 the Kremlin and Red Square areas were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Many old churches survive in the Kitay-gorod. Of particular note is the Church of the Trinity of Nikitniki (1628-34), built for the merchant Grigory Nikitnikov. Other notable churches in this quarter are the fifteenth-century Church of St Anne of the Conception and the Epiphany Cathedral (1693-6). The Kitay-gorod was for centuries the commercial centre of Mos­cow, and its narrow, crowded streets still contain former banks, the stock-exchange building, and warehouses. Many of the old buildings near the river, however, were demolished in the 1960s to make room for the massive Rossiya Hotel (completed in 1967; torn down in 2006); nevertheless, a row of buildings, including the sixteenth-century house of the Romanov boyars, the Old English Embassy, and the seven­teenth-century Monastery of the Sign, remains.

Moscow is also home to the country's national library, the Russian State Library, formerly the V. I. Lenin Library. It is notable for its extensive collection of early printed books and a collection of manuscripts that includes ancient Slavonic codices. Originally founded in 1862 as the library of the Rumyantsev Museum, it was reorganized after the Russian Revolution of 1917 under the leadership of Lenin, who had studied libraries in Russia and western Europe. Its initial collection incorporated the contents of confiscated private libraries and the Rumyantsev Museum collection. One of the largest libraries in the world, the Russian State Library contains more than 38 million printed books, periodicals, and serials and is the national book depository of Russia.

Cultural Life

Moscow has dozens of theatres. One of the most renowned is the Bolshoi Theatre, which was founded in 1825, though its present splendid building facing Theatre (formerly Sverdlov) Square dates from 1856. Also on Theatre Square is the Maly (Little) Theatre for drama. Another prestigious theatre, the Moscow Academic Art Theatre, founded as the Moscow Academic Theatre in 1898 by the actor, director, and producer Konstantin Stanislavsky and the playwright-producer Vladi­mir Nemirovich-Danchenko, was especially noted in its early days for its performances of the plays of Anton Chekhov. In the late 1980s the Moscow Academic Art Theatre split into two companies, one of which is named after Chekhov and the other after Maksim Gorky. Also of worldwide fame are the Obraztsov Puppet Theatre (formerly the State Central Puppet Theatre) and the Great Moscow State Circus, which in 1971 acquired new quarters on the Vorobyovy Hills. The repertory companies of the theatrical groups tour frequently both in Russia and abroad. There are several concert halls, notably the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall and the two halls of the conserva­tory. Moscow's orchestras have won international repute, as have a number of Moscow-based folk dance and choral ensembles.

The museums and art galleries in the capital include several of international rank. Foremost among these are the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, with a fine international collection, and the Tretyakov Gallery. The latter, which began in 1856 as the private collection of a connoisseur, Pavel Tretyakov, is note­worthy for its superb collection of icons, including several by Andrey Rublyov. Other notable museums are the Armoury Museum in the Kremlin and the State Historical Museum on Red Square. The Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War) is part of the sprawling memorial site at Poklonnaya Hill that opened in 1995.

Beginning in the late 1980s with the Soviet policy of glasnost and continuing with the Russian successor government in the early 1990s, religious repression gave way to policies endors­ing religious freedom, and houses of worship in Moscow underwent massive and pervasive renovation and returned to use. The Russian Orthodox Church reopened its network of museums for the first time since the early 1900s, and pedestrian routes created around Moscow's greatest sites are intended to increase tourism.

The Luzhniki Park complex is the leading Moscow facility for sports and was one of the main arenas for the 1980

Olympic Games. The Luzhniki Stadium is flanked by a smaller arena, a swimming pool, and the indoor Sports Palace. There are many stadiums and swimming pools in the area, including some heated open-air pools that are in use year-round. In addition, there are a large number of football fields, gymna­siums, and volleyball and basketball courts; most of these are attached to individual places of work or to sports clubs. Moscow has several first-division football teams that now have corporate sponsors but whose origins date from the 1920s, when they were affiliated with powerful institutions of communist society: Dynamo (tied to the KGB), CSKA (the army's team), Lokomotiv (representing railway workers), and the defiantly independent Spartak (once only loosely linked to a food producers' cooperative but now controlled by LUKOIL, a Russian oil giant).

Outside the Garden Ring, Moscow is well endowed with parks and open spaces. Gorky Central Park of Culture along the right bank of the Moscow River is the closest to the centre and, with its amusement park, is very popular. On the east side Izmaylovsky Park is a large green area, covering nearly 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares). To the north-east is the more formal Sokolniki Park, which leads to an extensive tract of forest called Losiny Ostrov ("Moose Island"). North of the city centre are the Botanical Gardens of the Academy of Sciences, one of several such gardens in the city, and the grounds of the Moscow K. A. Timiryazev Agricultural Academy. Bittsevsky Park, also of considerable size, has been established adjacent to the Ring Road south of the city centre. Moscow Zoo, one of the world's leading zoos, is a popular attraction west of the city centre. The Khimki Reservoir, just north-west of Moscow, is used for boating and aquatic sports, but even more popular are the other reservoirs to the north, just outside Greater Moscow.

The surrounding forest-park zone provides extensive space for recreation,

St Petersburg

St Petersburg is the second largest city of Russia and one of the world's major cities. It has played a vital role in Russian history since its founding in 1703 - for two centuries (1712-1918) it was the capital of the Russian empire. The city is remembered as the scene of the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and for its fierce defence while besieged during the Second World War. Architecturally, it ranks as one of the most splendid and congenial cities of Europe. Its historic district was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1990.

An important port, St Petersburg is situated in the extreme north-west of Russia, about 400 miles north-west of Moscow and only about 7 south of the Arctic Circle. Greater St Petersburg - the city itself with its satellite towns - forms a horseshoe shape around the head of the Gulf of Finland and includes the island of Kotlin in the gulf. Its population is about 4.5 million.

St Petersburg is rich in cultural, historical, and architectural landmarks. Founded by Peter I as Russia's "window on Europe", it bears the unofficial status of Russia's cultural capital and most European city, a distinction that it strives to retain in its perennial competition with Moscow. The city has three distinctive characteristics - first, its harmonious mix of western European and Russian architecture; second, its lack of an unequivocal city centre; and third, its many waterways. The short but full-flowing tributaries and canals of the Neva

River that stretch to the Baltic coast are inseparable from St Petersburg's panorama, and the bridges and natural canals of the river have earned the city the nickname "the Venice of the North". Because of St Petersburg's northerly location, the city enjoys the "white nights" from June 11 to July 2, when daylight extends to nearly nineteen hours - another of St Petersburg's most acclaimed characteristics, duly celebrated with a variety of festivals organized by the Mariinsky and Hermitage theatres and the Rimsky-Korsakov St Petersburg State Conservatory.

Climate

The mitigating effect of the Atlantic Ocean provides St Peters­burg with a milder climate than might be expected for its far northern site. Nevertheless, winters are rather cold, with a mean January temperature of about 21 F (-6 C), a few degrees warmer than that for Moscow. Winter temperatures can drop below —40 F (-40 C), however. Snow cover lasts on average about 132 days. The Neva begins to freeze normally in about mid-November, and the ice is solid by the start of December; break-up begins in mid-April and is usually completed by the end of the month. Summers, the wettest period, are moderately warm, with an average temperature of 65 F (18 C) in July.

The city's low and originally marshy site has left it vulner­able to flooding, especially in the autumn, when strong cy­clonic winds drive gulf waters upstream, and also at the time of the spring thaw. Exceptionally severe inundations occurred in 1777,1824, and 1924. To control the destructive floodwaters, the city built in the 1980s a dyke, 18 miles (29 km) long, across the Gulf of Finland. A number of canals have also been cut to assist drainage.

History

The area of the current city of St Petersburg was settled as early as the eighth century, but it was not until 1703 that Peter I laid the foundation stones for the Peter-Paul Fortress on Zayachy Island. This date is taken as the founding date of St Petersburg. In the spring of the following year, Peter established the fortress of Kronshlot (later Kronshtadt), on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland, to protect the approaches to the delta. At the same time, he founded the Admiralty shipyard on the riverbank opposite the Peter-Paul Fortress.

Although the first dwellings were single-storied and made of wood, it was not long before stone buildings were erected. The city was planned as an imposing capital, on a regular street pattern, with spacious squares and broad avenues radiating out from the Admiralty. Architects, craftsmen, and artisans were brought from all over Russia and from many foreign countries to construct and embellish the new town.

The city's political and cultural importance swiftly rose in 1712 when it was established as the capital of Russia, in preference to Moscow, Forced immigration of the noble and merchant classes led to the building of private palaces and government buildings: among the earliest were the Ex­change (now the Naval Museum), the Naval Customs House (now the Pushkin House, or Institute of Russian Literature), and marine hospital. In addition to the con­struction of a harbour - which led as early as 1726 to St Petersburg handling 90 per cent of Russia's foreign trade - work began on the Vyshnevolotsky Canal in the Valdai Hills, the first link in a chain that by 1709 gave the capital a direct water route to central Russia and all of the Volga River basin.

Within its grand architectural setting and as the permanent residence of the imperial court, cultural life developed and flourished. The University of St Petersburg was founded in 1724. In 1773 the Institute of Mines was established. Many of the most celebrated names in Russia in the spheres of learning, science, and the arts arc associated with the city: Mikhail V. Lomonosov, Dmitry Mendeleyev, Ivan Pavlov, Aleksandr Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, among others. Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment was set in the city, and the buildings described in the novel are a focus of tourism. As early as 1738 the first ballet school in Russia was opened in St Petersburg; in the nineteenth century, under Marius Petipa, the Russian ballet rose to worldwide renown and produced such dancers as Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, and Anna Pavlova. In 1862 the first conservatory of music in Russia opened its doors, and there the premieres of works by Pyotr llyich Tchaikovsky, Nikolay Ritnsky-Korsakov, Sergey Rach- maninov, and other composers were performed.

The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 brought an upsurge of patriotic fervour centred on the tsar. The Germanic form of the city's name was changed to its Russian version, Petrograd. But with the fail of the imperial Romanov dynasty during the subsequent 1917 Revolution, the city's destiny was inevitably at stake, and Moscow became capital again the following year. In 1924, following Lenin's death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad, as St Petersburg was known until 1991. Much of the initial burden of developing the national economy fell on Leningrad and its established industrial plant and workforce, which by 1939 was responsible for 11 per cent of all Soviet industrial output. Then, in the Second World War, came destruction. The city was one of the initial targets of the German invasion in 1941; by September of that year, German troops were on the outskirts of the city and had cut off communication with the rest of the Soviet Union, while Finnish troops advanced from the north. Many of the inhabitants and nearly three-fourths of the industrial plant were evacuated eastward ahead of the German advance. The remainder of the population and the garrison then began to endure what has become known as the 900-day siege; the German blockade in fact lasted 872 days, from September 8,1941, to January 27, 1944, Leningrad put up a desperate and courageous resistance in the face of many assaults, constant artillery and air bombard­ment, and appalling suffering from shortages of supplies. An estimated 660,000 people died, a very high proportion from scurvy and starvation. In particular, the exceptionally bitter winter of 1941-2, when temperatures fell to -40 F (^40 C), was one of extreme hardship and loss of life. Not until the 1960s did the city regain its pre-war size of 3 million inhabitants; by the 1980s the population had passed the 4 million mark.

It was only in the 1970s that the need to preserve the city's unique cultural heritage was fully recognized. City planners then pioneered new forms of industriai administration, drawing on the city's strength as a scientific and technical centre. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought further changes, some of which were positive - new cafйs and restaurants were opened, bridges and landmarks were illuminated, and cultural venues were constructed. On the other hand, homeless people and beggars, never a feature of the city in late Soviet decades, became fairly widespread, and the crime rate increased significantly.

The Sights

In lieu of a distinctive city centre on the standard Russian medieval model (epitomized by Moscow), St Petersburg's main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt (avenue), particularly the stretch running from the Admiralty to the Moscow Railway Terminal, is considered the city's centre. Central St Petersburg is divided into four sections by the Neva River and its dis­tributaries. The Admiralty Side lies along the left (south) bank of the Neva itself, at this point called the Bolshaya (Great) Neva. Between the Bolshaya Neva and the river's other main arm, the Malaya (Little) Neva, is Vasilyevsky Island, one of the first areas of the city to be developed. The Malaya Neva and the river's extreme right (north) distributary, the Bolshaya Nevka, enclose a group of islands known as the Petrograd Side, while east of the Bolshaya Nevka and north of the Neva proper lies the Vyborg Side.

As the city grew, it displayed a remarkable richness of architecture and harmony of style. Initially the style was one of simple but elegant restraint, represented in the cathedral of the Peter-Paul Fortress and in the Summer Palace. In the mid-eighteenth century an indelible stamp was put on the city's appearance by the architects Bartolomeo F. Rastrelli, Savva I. Chevakinsky, and Vasily P. Stasov, working in the Russian baroque style, which combined clear-cut, even austere lines with richness of decoration and use of colour. To this period belong the Winter Palace, the Smolny Convent, and the Vorontsov palace, among others; outside the city were built the summer palaces of Peterhof (now Petrodvorets) and of Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin). After a transitional period dominated by the architecture of Jean-Baptiste M. Vallin de la Mothe and Aleksandr Kokorinov, toward the end of the eighteenth century a pure neoclassical style emerged under the architects Giacomo Quarenghi, Carlo Rossi, Andrey Voroni- khin, and others. The Kazan and St Isaac's cathedrals, the Smolny Institute, the new Admiralty, the Senate, and the

Mikhaylovsky Palace (now the State Russian Museum) are representative of the splendid buildings of this period.

The Admiralty Side formed the nucleus of Peter's original city, and while it has been reconstructed over the years, it has retained much of the original layout and encompasses some of the city's principal sights: the elegant spire of the Admiralty itself, topped by a weather vane in the form of a ship; the Winter Palace and Hermitage; the famous equestrian statue of Peter, known as the Bronze Horseman, created in 1782 by Etienne Falconet; St Isaac's Cathedral, one of the largest domed buildings in the world, visible all over St Petersburg; the Nevsky Prospekt thoroughfare, with its grand Stroganov, Shuvalov, and Anichkov palaces and grand churches; the Summer Garden and Summer Palace; and, intersecting with its radial avenues, the natural channels and canals that so distinguish the city.

The Winter Palace rises like a huge and massive rectangle between Palace Square and the river. The former principal residence of the tsars, the present structure, a baroque master­piece, was built between 1754 and 1762 by Bartolomeo F, Rastrelli. Both the exterior and the interior of the palace were designed in dazzlingly luxurious style. In 1837 the building was destroyed by fire, and only the adjoining Hermitage survived; the Winter Palace was recreated in 1839 almost exactly according to Rastreili's plans. The striking appearance of the palace is highlighted by white columns against a green background, with golden stucco mouldings; 176 sculptured figures line the roof. The whole complex, now called the Hermitage, or State Hermitage Museum, is a treasury of mostly western European painting and sculpture, an art col­lection of worldwide significance that originated in 1764 as the private holdings of Tsarina Catherine II. The Hermitage was opened to the public in 1852, and following the October Revolution of 1917 the imperial collections became public property. The Summer Garden, founded on an island in 1704, has parks and gardens that by the end of the eighteenth century contained more than 250 statues and busts, mostly the work of Venetian masters. In the north-eastern portion of the garden stands the Summer Palace, Peter's first building project in the city, erected in 1710-14 in early Russian baroque style and designed by Domenico Trezzini. The Neva embankment is fronted by a fence (1784), the iron grille of which is reputed to be among the world's finest examples of wrought ironwork. So light and delicate is its design that the grillwork almost seems to be suspended in air.

Other city landmarks include the squat, horizontal Peter- Paul Fortress and, soaring above it, the slender, arrow-like spire of the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul. The cathedral was built in 1712—33 by Trezzini, and the tsars and tsarinas of Russia from the time of Peter (except for Peter II and Nicholas II) are buried here. Trezzini also designed St Peter's (Petrovsky) Gate (1718) as the eastern entrance to the fortress. Just to the east of the Peter-Paul Fortress, where the Bolshaya Nevka begins, the cruiser Aurora is permanently moored as a museum and training vessel for the Naval College. It was the Aurora that in 1917 fired the blank shot that served as the signal to storm the Winter Palace during the October Revolution. Also associated with the 1917 Revolution is one of the most famous features of the Vyborg Side, the Finland Railway Station, which faces the Admiralty Side across the Neva. In April 1917 Lenin returned to Russia via this station and made here his initial pronouncement of a new course that would bring the Bolsheviks to power.

Further Afield

The most famous of the communities around St Petersburg is Petrodvorets (called Peterhof before 1944 and still popularly called by this name}, whose unique garden-park setting, stretching in terraces rising above the Gulf of Finland, contains representative works from two centuries of Russian architec­tural and park styles. The Great Palace, the former residence of Peter I, stands at the edge of the second terrace, its bright yellow walls contrasting with white stucco decorations and the gilt domes of its lateral wings. Built in the baroque style (1714­28), it was reconstructed and expanded by Rastrelli from the mid-1740s to the mid-1750s. On the north the building commands a view of the Grand Cascade, a grandiose structure including a grotto, 64 fountains, and two cascading staircases which lead to an enormous semicircular basin containing a giant statue of Samson wrestling with a lion. This statue, symbolizing the military glory of Russia, is a copy of the original statue, which was carried off by the Nazis during the Second World War. In fact, much of the town's treasure was plundered, and this magnificent vista becomes all the more remarkable when it is remembered that much of it is a post- Second World War restoration.

Another remarkable site is the town of Pushkin (called Tsarskoye Selo before 1917, Detskoye Selo in 1918-37), which arose in the early eighteenth century as one of the tsarist residences. The Catherine Palace (1717—23; enlarged by Aleksey V. Kvasov and Chevakinsky, 1743-8; rebuilt by Rastrelli, 1752—7) is notable for its dimensions, the beauty and majesty of its form, and the wealth of its sculptural decoration. The golden suite of splendid halls (including the Amber Room) exemplifies Russian baroque at its peak. The community is also the site of the Chinese Village (1782-96) in Alexander

Park and the gallery (1780-90) named after its architect, Charles Cameron, the terraces of which contain more than 50 husts of figures from ancient Greek and Roman history. The Lycйe, a school for the offspring of the nobility, had the great Pushkin as a student, and a famous statue of the poet stands near the town's Egyptian Gates. The town suffered severe damage during the German onslaught, but has been restored.

Culture

In addition to its rich architectural heritage, St Petersburg boasts numerous outstanding cultural institutions, which re­main one of its enduring attractions. It has many large and grand, as well as small but reputable, theatres and auditor­iums. The Mariinsky Theatre (called the Kirov State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet during the Soviet period) has long enjoyed an international reputation, and its resident company is frequently on tour abroad. Other important venues are the Maly, Tovstonogov, Pushkin, and Musical Comedy theatres. The largest of several concert halls is the October Great Concert Hall, which seats some 4,000 people. The city's musical tradition has been enhanced by the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory.

Notable museums include the Hermitage (see above) and the State Russian Museum, both of international prominence. The latter museum traces the history of Russian art from the tenth century to the present.

There are a large number of libraries in the city, headed by the Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library on Nevsky Prospekt, established in 1795; of all the libraries in Russia, it is second only to Moscow's Russian State Library, Another important specialized collection is the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) on Vasilyevsky Island.

St Petersburg has abundant recreational facilities and green spaces for such a large city. Among the notable stadiums in the area is Kirov Stadium, Other opportunities for outdoor re­creation are provided by the Kirov Park of Culture and Rest, the zoo, the botanical gardens, and numerous other smaller parks and gardens.

Novgorod

Novgorod, in north-western Russia, long flourished as one of the greatest trading centres of eastern Europe, with links by river routes to the Baltic, Byzantium, Central Asia, and all parts of European Russia. Trade with the Hanseatic League was considerable, since Novgorod was the limit of Hanseatic trade into Russia. Prosperity was based upon furs obtained in the forests of northern Russia, much of which came under Novgorod's control.

During the twelfth century, Novgorod was engaged in prolonged struggles with the princes of Suzdal and gained victories in 1169 and 1216. Although the town avoided destruction in the great Tatar invasion of 1238-40, Tatar suzerainty was acknowledged. Under Alexander Nevsky, Prince of Vladimir, Novgorod's defenders repulsed attacks by the Swedes on the Neva River in 1240 and by the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus in 1242. During the four­teenth and fifteenth centuries, Novgorod was involved in a long, bitter struggle for supremacy with Moscow, and fre­quently sought help from Lithuania. Although the city sur­vived Muscovite onslaughts in 1332 and again in 1386 by

Dmitry Donskoy, it was defeated by Vasily II in 1456. It continued to oppose Moscow and again sought Lithuanian assistance, but in 1471 Ivan III defeated Novgorod and an­nexed much of its northern territories, finally forcing the city to recognize Moscow's sovereignty in 1478. Opposition by its citizens to Moscow continued until Ivan IV in 1570 massacrcd many of them and deported the survivors. In 1611 Novgorod was captured by the Swedes, who held it for eight years. From Peter the Great's reign (1682-1725) the city declined in im­portance, although it was made a provincial seat in 1727.

During the Second World War, Novgorod suffered heavy damage, but the many historic buildings were subsequently restored. These include the kremlin (fortress) on the left bank of the Volkhov (the Sofiyskaya Storona).Itwas first built of wood in 1044, and its first stone walls date from the fourteenth century. Within the kremlin the St Sofia Cathedral, built in 1045—50 on the site of an earlier wooden church, is one of the finest examples of early Russian architecture, with magnificent bronze doors from the twelfth century. The Granite Palace (1433), the bell tower (1443), and the St Sergey Chapel date from the fifteenth century. The Chapel of St Andrew Stratilata was built in the seventeenth century. On the other side of the Volkhov (the Torgovaya Storona) stands the Cathedral of St Nicholas, dating from 1113, In and around Novgorod are many other surviving churches, including the twelfth-century cathedrals of the Nativity ofOurLadyandofSt George, the fourteenth-century churches of the Transfiguration and of St Theodore Stratilata, and the se­venteenth-century Znamensky Cathedral.

Modern Novgorod is important as a tourist centre and as a major producer of chemical fertilizers. It also has metal and woodworking industries. Its population stands at more than 200,000.

Murmansk

Murmansk is a small city by modern standards - with a population of only about 350,000 - but is the largest city in the world north of the Arctic Circle. Its name, appropriately, is said to derive from the local Sami word murman, meaning "the edge of the earth".

Nor does the town have a long history. It was founded in 1915 as Romanov-na-Murmane, after Russia's then imperial royal dynasty. It functioned during the First World War as a supply port and in 1918 as a base for the British, French, and American expeditionary forces against the Bolsheviks. In the Second World War Murmansk served as the main port for Anglo-American convoys carrying war supplies to the Soviet Union through the Arctic Ocean. Its military and naval func­tions continue to this day.

One of the town's major assets is its ice-free harbour, which makes it Russia's only port with unrestricted access to the Atlantic and world sea routes. From December to May it replaces icebound St Petersburg as the major port of the north-west. This is why today the town is an important fishing port - its fish-processing plant is one of the largest in Europe - and most of its industry related to the sea and seafaring: fishing, fish processing, and shipbuilding. It is also home to a research institute of marine fisheries and oceanography.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Mur­mansk's economy suffered, as major industries were unprof­itable under market economy conditions, and most fishing vessels were contracted out to Norwegian and other foreign companies. As a result, many people left the city, and in the 1990s the city's population dropped by more than one-fourth, though by the early twenty-first century the city had made a successful transition to a market economy.

Today tourism is on an upward trend in Murmansk and the surrounding area, though the climate tends to restrict visitors to the summer months, when, thanks to the Arctic location, almost continuous daylight can be enjoyed (the reverse of course is true in winter). With the region's mountains, lakes, and abundant rivers, sport and ecological tourism are the main sectors, offering fishing, hunting, mountaineering, skiing, walking, and mushroom- and berry-gathering. People are also drawn to the region to explore its minera logical deposits, and excursions are available to view the amethyst deposits of the Tersky Coast, among many others.

Volgograd

Volgograd, the administrative centre of the Volgograd region in south-western Russia, lies on the Volga River, It was founded as the fortress of Tsaritsyn in 1589 to protect newly acquired Russian territory along the river.

Like several other cities in the early twentieth century, Tsaritsyn had its name changed for political reasons: during the Russian Civil War (1918-20) Joseph Stalin organized the city's defence in a major battle against the White armies, and in 1925 the city was renamed in his honour. In the Second World War the infamous battle of Stalingrad proved to be a turning point in the war.

The city was totally rebuilt after the war, and new apart­ment buildings and factories spread far out along the river. The University of Volgograd was opened in 1980, and the modern city has a population of just under 1 million. Its current name was adopted in 1961, after the denunciation of Stalin.

THE BATTLE OF STALINGRAD, 1942-3

From the summer of 1942 to February 2, 1943, the German army made an unsuccessful assault on the city, marking the farthest extent of the German advance into the Soviet Union. As a major industria! centre, Stalingrad was an important prize in itseif, and control of the city would have cut Soviet transport links with southern Russia via the Volga River. The German campaign against Stalingrad also served to anchor the northern flank of the larger German drive into the oilfields of the Caucasus,

Under some of the harshest conditions of the entire war, the German 6th Army under Friedrich Paulus continued its attack until, faced with the stiff resistance of the Soviet 62nd Army under General Vasily I. Chuikov, the onset of the notorious Russian winter, the increasing difficulty of renewing supplies, and the incessant street fighting, it was eventually forced {against Hitler's express command) to surrender. But the losses were immense, on all sides: the Soviets recovered 250,000 German and Romanian corpses in and around Stalingrad, and total Axis losses (Germans, Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians) are believed to have been 800,000 dead. Official Russian military historians estimate that 1,100,000 Soviet soldiers lost their lives in the campaign to defend the city.

The modern city has numerous sites of historical and architectural interest, including the Volgograd Fine Arts Mu­seum and the State Panoramic Museum. The former, founded in 1960, shows primarily work by Russian artists, though it

also houses collections of European art from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The State Panoramic Museum offers a panorama of the battle of Stalingrad, dioramas, and numer­ous exhibits relating to the battle, including the tunic of Marshal Zhukov - who oversaw the defence of Stalingrad and planned and directed the successful Russian counter- offensive - and the sword of honour presented by King George VI of Britain to the citizens of Stalingrad in 1943. There are also artefacts relating to other areas of the city's military history.

Siberia

Irrevocably linked since the twentieth century with the Soviet Gulag, the name Siberia conjures up grim images of exile, labour camps, and suffering; but today, though the population remains sparse compared with the pattern in the rest of Russia, the land's rich mineral resources - notably its deposits of coal, petroleum, natural gas, diamonds, iron ore, and gold - are a source of wealth and labour, as are the manufacture of steel, aluminium, and machinery, and agriculture is practised in the more southerly regions, where wheat, rye, oats, and even sunflowers are grown.

The name "Siberia" may be derived from the Tatar term for "sleeping land", perhaps an allusion to its unmitigatedly harsh climate. Russian occupation began in 1581 with a Cossack expedition that overthrew the small khanate of Sibir. During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Russian trappers and fur traders and Cossack explorers penetrated throughout Siberia to the Bering Sea. With the decline of the fur trade in the eighteenth century, the mining of silver and other metals became the main economic activity in Siberia. Though a trickle of runaway serfs and the forced exile of a number of criminals and political prisoners added to the population of the region over the years, larger-scale settlement did not begin until the building of the Trans- Siberian Railway (1891-1905).

Growth continued in the Joseph Stalin era. From the first Soviet Five-Year Plan (1928-32), industrial expansion was considerable, with coal-mining and iron-and-steel com­plexes begun in the Kuznetsk Coal Basin and along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway, partly through the use of forced labour. Forced-labour camps spread throughout Si­beria during the 1930s, the most important being the camp complexes in the extreme north-east and along the lower Yenisey River, whose inmates were used mostly in mining operations. During the Second World War, owing to the evacuation of many factories from the western portions of the Soviet Union, Siberia (together with the Urals) became the industrial backbone of the Soviet war effort for a few years. Agriculture, by contrast, suffered greatly from col­lectivization in 1930-3 and was neglected until the Virgin Lands Campaign of 1954-6, when south-western Siberia (including northern Kazakhstan) was the principal area to be opened to cultivation.

The late 1950s and 1960s saw major industrial development take place, notably the opening up of large oil and natural gas fields in western Siberia and the construction of giant hydro­electric stations at locations along the Angara, Yenisey, and Ob rivers. A network of oil and gas pipelines was built between the new fields and the Urals, and new industries were also established, such as aluminium refining and cellulose pulp making. The construction of the BAM (Baikal-Amur Main

Line) railway between Ust-Kut, on the Lena River, and Komsomolsk-na-Amure, on the Amur, covering a distance of 2,000 miles (3,200 km), was completed in 1980.

The Trans-Siberian Railway

The Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest single rail system in Russia, stretching from Moscow eastwards for 5,778 miles (9,198 km) to Vladivostok, or on to the port station of Na­khodka beyond Vladivostok, a total distance of 5,867 miles (9,441 km). Today a major tourist attraction, the Trans- Siberian played a significant role in the economic, military, and imperial history of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union.

Historically, the completion of the railway marked the turn­ing point in the history of Siberia, opening up vast areas to exploitation, settlement, and industrialization. Construction began in 1891, with the Russians initially securing Chinese permission to build a line directly across Manchuria (the Chinese Eastern Railway) from the Transbaikal region to Vladivostok, However, with the outbreak of the Russo- Japanese War of 1904-5, Russia feared Japan's possible take­over of Manchuria, and so proceeded to build a longer and more difficult alternative route, the Amur Railway, through to Vladivostok; this line was completed in 1916. The original Trans-Siberian Railway thus had two completion dates: in 1904 all the sections from Moscow to Vladivostok were linked and completed, running through Manchuria; in 1916 there was finally a Trans-Siberian Railway wholly within Russian terri­tory.

There are four primary routes that may be taken. The main Trans-Siberian line runs from Moscow, Before reaching

The Trans-Siberian Railway

RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR (Н904-5)

Conflict between Russia and Japan over territorial expansion in East Asia

After Russia leased the strategically important Port Arthur (now Lushun, China) and expanded into Manchuria (north­eastern China), it faced the increasing power of japan. When Russia reneged on its agreement with Japan to withdraw troops from Manchuria, the Japanese fleet attacked the Russia naval squadron at Port Arthur and began a siege of the city in February 1904. Japanese land forces cut the Russian army off from coming to aid Port Arthur and pushed it back to Mukden (now Shenyang). The reinforced Russian army took the offensive in October, but poor military leadership blunted its effectiveness.

After the long Japanese siege of Port Arthur, in January 1905 the corrupt Russian commander surrendered the garrison without consulting his officers, despite adequate stores and ammunition for its continued defence. Heavy fighting around Mukden ended in March 1905 with the withdrawal of Russian troops under Aleksey Kuropatkin. The decisive naval battle of Tsushima gave the Japanese the upper hand and brought Russia to the peace table. With the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth, Russia abandoned its expansionist policy in eastern Asia, and Japan gained effective control of Korea and much of Manchuria.

Siberia it passes through the historic city of Yaroslavl on the Volga, Perm on the Kama River, and Yekaterinburg on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, and in Siberia it takes in the industrial cities of Irkutsk and Khabarovsk before terrnin-

ating in Vladivostok at the extreme south-eastern tip of Russia. The Trans-Manchurian line runs alongside the Trans-Siberian as far as Tarskaya, east of Lake Baikal, and then diverts south­east into China, progressing down to Beijing, the Chinese capital. The Trans-Mongolian and Trans-Siberian lines run side by side as far as Ulan-Ude, at the confluence of the Selenga and Uda rivers, but the Trans-Mongolian line then continues south to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, and eventually terminates in Beijing. The fourth and most recent addition to the railway, the Baikal-Amur Main Line - completed as an alternative to the primary Trans-Siberian line - diverges from the main route several hundred miles west of Lake Baikal, passing the lake at its northernmost shore. Its eastern terminus is at Sovetskaya Gavan, on the Pacific.

Travellers who take the full rail trip on the passenger train Rossiya from Moscow to Nakhodka (including a compulsory overnight stay in Khabarovsk) will spend about eight days on board. There are nearly 1,000 stations — one every 6 miles (10 km) — along the main route. Numerous fascinating Russian cities and towns can be seen and visited along the route.

Yaroslavl

The city of Yaroslavl lies on the right bank of the Volga River, 175 miles (282 km) north-east of Moscow. Believed to have been founded in 1010 by Prince Yaroslav the Wise, it served as the capital of an independent principality from 1218 until 1471, when it came under the rule of Moscow. Yaroslavl was sacked by the Tatars in 1238 and by Ivan I Kalita in 1332, and was captured by Novgorod in 1371, but on each occasion its recovery was swift. The opening of trade with the West during tlie sixteenth century brought prosperity to the town, which occupies a fortunate position at the intersection of the great Volga River and Moscow-Arkhangelsk trade routes. The Yaroslavl Great Manufactory, one of the earliest and largest textile mills in Russia, was established in 1722, and by the late eighteenth century Yaroslavl had become an important in­dustrial centre, which it remains to this day.

There are many fine churches in Yaroslavl, including the Transfiguration Cathedral (1505-16) of the Saviour Monas­tery. The churches of Elijah the Prophet, Nikola Nadein, and St John the Baptist all date from the seventeenth century. The historical centre of Yaroslavl was awarded World Heritage Site status by UNESCO in 2005.

Perm

Perm's position on the navigable Kama River, leading to the Volga, and on the Great Siberian Highway (established in 1783) across the Ural Mountains helped it become an important trade and manufacturing centre; copper-smelting was once carried out there. Perm grew considerably as industrialization proceeded in the Urals during the Soviet period.

Modern Perm, with a population of just over 1 million, is the administrative centre of the Perm region in western Russia. The city, which extends for approximately 30 miles (50 km) along the high river-banks, is still a major railway hub and one of the chief industrial centres of the Urals region. Its diversified metallurgical and engineering industries produce equipment and machine tools for the petroleum and coal industries, as well as agricultural machinery. A major petroleum refinery uses oil transported by pipeline from the West Siberian oil­fields, and the city's large chemical industry makes fertilizers and dyes.

Perm is a thriving cultural centre, with a university (the A. M. Gorky State University was established in 1916) and numerous theatres, including a puppet theatre. The P. I. Tchaikovsky Perm State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre was founded in Russia's imperial past, and today the ballet company enjoys an international reputation and tours regu­larly. The Perm State Art Gallery, founded in 1922, has both local and international collections, exhibiting Perm wooden sculpture and work by classical and contemporary Russian artists, as well as pictures of the Italian, Dutch, and French schools of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The city offers many other opportunities for entertainment, from clas­sical musical concerts (with the Philharmonic Orchestra), to folk concerts and folk dance, ice and circus shows, and many sporting events.

Yekaterinburg

Yekaterinburg lies along the Iset River, a tributary of the Tobol River, slightly east of the border between Europe and Asia, on the slopes of the Urals.

In 1723 a settlement on the site of an ironworks was named Yekaterinburg in honour of Catherine I, the wife of Peter I. The town grew as the administrative centre for all the iron­works of the Urals region, and its importance increased after 1783 when the Great Siberian Highway was built through it. After 1878 the Trans-Siberian Railway linked the city with Siberia. After the October Revolution of 1917, Yekaterinburg achieved notoriety as the scene of the execution of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family in July 1918. In 1924 it was renamed Sverdlovsk in honour of the Bolshevik leader Yakov M, Sverdlov, but the city reverted to its original name in 1991.

Modern Yekaterinburg is one of the major industrial centres of Russia. The city, laid out on a regular gridiron pattern, sprawls across the valley of the Iset - there dammed to form a series of small lakes - and the low surrounding hills. Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president of Russia, was educated and spent much of his political career in the city.

Omsk

Omsk is another modern Russian city that owes its develop­ment primarily to the existence of the Trans-Siberian Railway and to its proximity to Siberia's mineral resources. Omsk is located in west-central Russia, on the lrtysh River at its junction with the Om. A settlement was founded in 1716 as a stronghold at the eastern end of the Ishim fortified line between the Tobol and the lrtysh: it developed as an agricul­tural centre and became a city in 1804. Its military function as headquarters of the Siberian Cossacks lasted until the late nineteenth century. In 1918-19 Omsk was the seat of the anti- Bolshevik government of Admiral Kolchak.

The building of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the 1890s and Omsk's position as a trans-shipment point on the lrtysh led to rapid commercial growth. Industrial growth was given great impetus during the Second World War, since when its popula­tion has more than trebled. Pipelines from the Volga-Urals and West Siberian oilfields supply the refinery and petrochem­ical industry, which makes synthetic rubber and tyres.

Engineering, especially the production of agricultural ma­chinery, also dominates a wide range of industry. Other industries include the manufacture of cotton and woollen textiles, cord, footwear, and leather goods, and food proces­sing, Timber working is also carried out. Among the cultural and educational facilities of Omsk are agricultural, engineer­ing, medical, and veterinary institutes and other research and higher educational establishments. The city's population today reaches just over 1 million,

Novosibirsk

Novosibirsk is today the largest city in Siberia (with a popula­tion of nearly 1.5 million), and a major manufacturing and industrial centre as well as a communications hub. It is the chief city of western Siberia.

The city developed when the village of Krivoshchekovo on the left bank of the River Ob was chosen as the crossing point for the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1893. The settlement was then known variously as Gusevka or Aleksandrovsky, but in 1895 it was renamed Novonikolayevsk in honour of the accession of Nicholas II; in 1925 it was renamed again, this time as Novosibirsk, meaning "New Siberia". Its expansion was due partly to its strategic importance for communications and partly to its proximity to Siberia's vast natural resources, in particular the Kuznetsk coalfield to the east.

As the region's principal cultural and educational centre, Novosibirsk has an opera and ballet theatre, botanical gar­dens, an art gallery, and museums, as well as a symphony orchestra. There are also some two dozen institutions of higher learning, including the Novosibirsk State University, founded in 1959. With the large number of educational institutions, the proportion of students enrolled in higher education in the city is among the highest in Russia. The university and a number of these institutes are located in the satellite town of Akadem- gorodok, which since the 1960s has comprised Russia's largest cluster of basic science research institutes and personnel out­side Moscow and St Petersburg. Most of these institutes belong to the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. During the 1990s many scientists left the area and relocated outside Russia, though some of these researchers remained affiliated with their home institutions.

Irkutsk

The city of Irkutsk is the administrative centre of the Irkutsk region and an important cultural centre for eastern Siberia, in the Russian far east. Irkutsk lies along the Angara River at its confluence with the Irkut River. It was founded as a wintering camp in 1652, during the first Russian colonization of the area; a fort was built in 1661, and Irkutsk rapidly became the main centre of the region and of the Russian trade route to China and Mongolia. It acquired town status in 1686. Its importance grew after the coming of the Trans-Siberian Rail­way in 1898.

Modern Irkutsk, with a population of just over half a million, is one of the major industrial cities of Siberia and is especially noted for a wide range of engineering products. There are railway, aircraft, ship, and vehicle repair yards. Other industries include mica processing and consumer-goods manufacture. The Irkutsk hydroelectric station on the Angara River is within the city; its reservoir extends back to include Lake Baikal.

The city's attractions include its pleasing embankments along the river and many surviving wooden houses on its tree-lined streets, as well as its proximity to Lake Baikal, now a popular tourist destination. The Irkutsk State University (1918) and the Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences are among the city's many teaching and research institutes.

Ulan-Ude

The capital of the Buryatiya republic, east-central Russia, Ulan-Ude lies in a deep valley between the Khamar-Daban and Tsagan-Daban mountain ranges. The wintering camp of Udinskoye, established there in 1666, became the town of Verkhne-Udinsk in 1783; it was renamed Ulan-Ude in 1934.

The city's development was greatly stimulated when the Trans-Siberian Railway reached it in 1900 and later by the construction of the branch line to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia in 1949 - a branch extended to Beijing in 1956. Ulan-Ude's role as a major rail junction led to the establishment of large locomotive and carriage repair works.

Khabarovsk

The city of Khabarovsk is the administrative centre of the Khabarovsk territory, in far eastern Russia. It lies along the Amur River just below its confluence with the Ussuri. The town was named after the Russian explorer Yerofey Khabar- ov, who made several expeditions to the Amur River basin in the mid-seventeenth century. The modern city was founded in 1858 as a military outpost. Its nodal position at the point at which the Trans-Siberian Railway crosses the Amur made it an important focus of the Russian far east, and at one time it administered the entire area to the Bering Strait.

Modern Khabarovsk, with a population of about 600,000, spreads across a series of small valleys and ridges perpendicular to the Amur, The city has an attractive water­front park and esplanade and a mixture of modern apartment blocks, factories, and old, one-storey wooden houses. It is a major industrial centre, with most enterprises located in the upstream district: they include a wide range of engineering and machine-building industries, oil refining, timber working, and furniture making, and many light industries. There are poly­technic, agricultural, medical, teacher-training, and railway- engineering institutes, and several scientific-research establish­ments. The city also boasts a number of theatres (including a puppet theatre), museums, picture galleries, and parks, and the Bolshekhekhtsirsky State Nature Reserve is nearby.

Vladivostok

Vladivostok is a seaport and the administrative centre of the Primorsky territory, in extreme south-eastern Russia. It is located around Zolotoy Rog ("Golden Horn Bay") on the western side of a peninsula that separates the Amur and Ussuri bays on the Sea of Japan, The town was founded in 1860 as a Russian military outpost and was named Vladivostok (vari­ously interpreted as "Rule the East", "Lord of the East", or "Conqueror of the East"). Its forward position in the extreme south of the Russian far east inevitably led to a major role as a port and naval base. In 1872 the main Russian naval base on the Pacific was transferred there, and thereafter Vladivostok began to grow. In 1880 city status was conferred on it. The city also grew in importance after the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria to Chita (completed in 1903), which gave Vladivostok a more direct rail connection to the rest of the Russian Empire. Today traces of this nineteenth-century heritage can still be found in the wooden architecture of that period, the old and the modern juxtaposed in many of the city's streets.

During the First World War, Vladivostok was the chief Pacific entry port for military supplies and railway equipment sent to Russia from the United States. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the city was occupied in 1918 by foreign, mostly Japanese, troops, the last of whom were not withdrawn until 1922. The anti-revolutionary forces in Vla­divostok promptly collapsed, and Soviet power was estab­lished in the region.

During the Soviet period Vladivostok remained the home of the Pacific Fleet, which was greatly enlarged in the decades after the Second World War. Vladivostok's military import­ance was such that it was closed to foreign shipping and other contacts from the late 1950s until the waning days of Soviet power in 1990. Its chief role as a commercial port subse­quently re-emerged, both as a link to other Russian ports of the far east and as a port of entry for consumer goods from China, Japan, and other countries. The port is the eastern terminus of the Northern Sea Route along Russia's Arctic seaboard from Murmansk, and is the principal supply base for the Arctic ports cast of Cape Chelyuskin.

The industrial base of Vladivostok was much diversified during the Soviet period. In addition to large ship-repair yards, there are railway workshops and a plant for the manufacture of mining equipment. Light industry includes instrument and radio factories, timber-working enterprises (notably those producing furniture and veneer), a china ware works, and manufacturers of pharmaceutical products. Food industries are also important. In the 1990s, in the post-Soviet period, most industry declined, with the exception of food processing. Mechanical engineering continues to be important. A railroad town, Vladivostok is the eastern terminus of the Trans- Siberian Railway. The city also has an airport.

Vladivostok is the chief educational and cultural centre of the Russian far east. It is the site of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Far Eastern State Uni­versity (founded 1920), and medical, art education, polytech­nic, trade, and marine-engineering institutes - not surprisingly, students make up a significant proportion of the city's total population. The city's lively cultural life is also well served, with a symphony orchestra, theatres, galleries, and museums, including the V. K. Arsenyev Museum, devoted to regional lore, the Pacific Fleet History Museum, the Museum of Fishery and Oceanography, and an aquarium. Off the coast of Vladi­vostok is the Far East Marine Biosphere Reserve, an important area of marine biodiversity.

Sakhalin Island

Sakhalin Island lies off Russia's far-eastern coast, between the Tatar Strait and the Sea of Okhotsk, north of the Japanese island of Hokkaido. It may seem an unlikely place to visit, and indeed until the collapse of the Soviet Union foreigners were forbidden to do so. But today tourism is rapidly expanding, thanks largely to massive foreign investment in the island's offshore gas and oil resources.

The island was first settled by Japanese fishermen along its southern coasts; the first Russians arrived only in 1853. By an agreement of 1855 Russia and Japan shared control of the island, but in 1875 Russia acquired all Sakhalin in exchange for the Kuril Islands; it was then that the island soon gained notoriety as a Russian penal colony, where conditions were said to be among the harshest in the country. In 1945 the Soviet Union regained the southern half of the island, territory that Russia had lost in 1905 as a result of the Russo-Japanese War, and at the end of the Second World War Sakhalin's entire Japanese population was eventually repatriated,

Sakhalin is 589 miles (948 km) long from north to south and about 100 miles (160 km) wide, covering 29,500 square miles (76,400 square km). The landscape is wild and largely un­spoiled: the vegetation ranges from tundra and stunted forests of birch and willow in the north to dense deciduous forest in the south. Fishing is plentiful. Though there is a lowland plain in the north, most of the land is mountainous, reaching 5,279 feet (1,609 m) at Mount Lopatin, and snowboarding has become a tourist attraction. Other than the capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, there are no major towns; the town of Neftegorsk was largely destroyed in a major earthquake in 1995.

For devotees of the author and playwright Anton Chekhov the island has another fascination. In early 1890 Chekhov suddenly decided to escape the irritations of urban intellectual life by undertaking a one-man sociological expedition to the island. Chekhov's journey there was a long and hazardous ordeal by carriage and riverboat. After arriving unscathed, studying local conditions, and conducting a census of the islanders, he returned to publish his findings as a research thesis, which retains an honoured place in the annals of Russian penology: The Island of Sakhalin (1893—4).

INDEX

Note: Where more than one page reference is listed against a subject, page references in bold indicate significant treatment of the subject.

Abkhazia 129

abstract art 19Л-9, 204, 205 Acmeists 159, 163 Afghanistan, invasion (1979) 89 agitki newsreels 208-9 agitprop 62, 208-9 agriculture 7, 22, 23, 26-7, 241, 243­4, 2S4 Brezhnev era 91 failures 59-60, 67-8, 83, 97 Krushchev era 83, 84, 85 Siberia 304, 305

see also collectivization; kolkhozy, sovkhozy Akademgorodok 313-14 Akhmatova, Anna 15, 157, 159, 163

Akvarium (rock band) 192-3 alcohol 6, 269, 270 Alekhine, Alexander 263, 264-5 Alexander 11 (1818-81) 34, 38, 39,

120, 145, 149-50 Alexander 111 (1845-94) 40 Alexandra, Tsaritsa 41 Ail-Union Communist Party 56 All-Union State Institute of

Cinematography 2Ь8-9, 211-12 alphabet, Cyrillic 265 Andropov, Yuri V. 85, 94

Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972) 123

anti-Semitism xiii, 78, 168 Aral Sea 242 aristocracy ix, xiv, xv armaments industry 247-8 armed forces 10-11, 81, 124,233,

238-9 Armenia 56, 117, 239 arms exports 124, 126, 248 arms race xь, 86, 87, 87-8, 93-4 army 73, 236 arts 15, 62, 135-42 repression 72, 157-8, 161^1, 168,

169, 188 see also ballet; cinema; literature; music; socialist realism; theatre; visual arts Aurora (cruiser) 296 autocratic rule 14, 33^1, 34-5, 38, 39 Azerbaijan 56, 100, 117, 239

Baikal, Lake 20, 314 Baikal-Amur Main Line 248, 305-6, 309

Bakst, Lйon 201, 223, 223-4 Balanchine, George 224, 225 ballet xvii, 220-5,226,227, 292, 311, 313

designs for 196, 197, 201, 223, 223-4

see also Diaghilev; Khachatunan; Prokofiev; Stravinsky; Tchaikovsky Ballets Russes 178,181, 196, 197,

201,220, 221-5 Baltic states x, 77, 100, 117, 118 banks 242, 250-1, 254 barter 58, 59, 114

Battleship Potemkin (film, Eisenstein,

1925) 209-10 Bauhaus school 63, 198, 205, 206 Belarus 117, 118, 239, 252 Bel in sky, Vissarion 149 Beria, Lavrenty 78 Berlin Wall 86 birth rate xviii, 5, 29 Bolsheviks 44, 46, 47-50, 54, 60, 62^1

see a ho Civil War; Lenin; New Economic Policy; War Communism Bolshoi Theatre 180, 225, 226, 280, 286

Bonaparte, Napoleon 20, 277, 280 boreal forest 21-2 Borodin, Aleksandr 174, 175, 177 Borodino (battle, 1812) 280 boyars 34, 35, 144, 146 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918) 45, 50

Brezhnev, Leonid (1906-82) 85, 89, 90, 94

Brezhnev era (1964-82) 89-94, 169,

256,267 Britain 52, 53, 55, 56 Brodsky, lsaak 199 Brodsky, Joseph 166, 168, 169 Bronshtein, Lev Davidovich see

Trotsky Buddhism 267, 268 Bulgakov, Mikhai! 167, 167-8 Bulganin, Nikolay 83 Bunin, Ivan 157, 166 bureaucracy xviii, 58, 81, 89, 253 bureaucrats 95, 96, 97, 236 Bush, George H. W. xi Bush, George W. 123

Bvzantine influences 135, 136, 265 calendar 43, 138-9 canals 70, 248, 289-90, 291, 295 Caspian Sea 245, 259 Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed

[Moscow) 137,283, 285 Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul (St

Petersburg) 296 Catherine II (Catherine the Great,

1729-96) 34, 38, 120, 295 caviar 245, 257, 258-9 censorship 62 arts 141, 147, 161, 162^4, 171, 212, 214

Central Committee 48, 50,54, 82, 95,

99, 108 Chagall, Marc 199-203 Chechnya xviii, 23, 76, 105, 116-17,

121-2, 124, 131 Cheka 51-2, 64, 129-30 Chekhov, Anton 15, 155-6, 215-Н6,

319

chemical industry 90, 240, 247, 300 Chernenko, Konstantin 94 Chernobyl accident (1986) 242, 246 Chernomyrdin, Viktor (b. 1938) 107,

108, 109-10, 110 chess 263-5

China 80, 255, 309, 317

relations with 83, 87, 93, 119, 123 Christianity 116, 265-8

see also Russian Orthodox Church churches xiv, 136, 278, 283-4, 285,

310 Churchill, Winston 52, 78 cinema xvii, 63, 207-13

CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) 14-15, 95, 117, 118-19, 239

Civil War (1918-20) ix, xi, 45, 50-6, 209, 280-1, 302 Trotsky's role 48 War Communism 58-60 class xv-xvi

climate ix, 13, 14,16,20-1,21,22,23

Siberia 20, 304 coal 8, 245-6, 304 Cold War 14, 79-80, 86, 93-4, 99­100, 120, 239 collectivc farms (kolkhozy) 26-7, 66­8, 241, 244 collectivization ix, 58, 62, 66-8, 74, 75, 305

Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance} 252 Comintern (Third International) 57 Committee for State Security see KGB Commonwealth of Independent States

see CIS communications 10 communism 119

collapse x—xi, 15 Communist Party of the Russian

Federation 110, 237 Communist Party of the Soviet Union

see CPSU Congress of People's Deputies 106,

108, 231-2, 232 Constantinople 39, 136, 264 constitution 56, 99, 106, 107-9, 232-4

constructivism 63, 195, 198-9 consumer goods 90, 257, 317 corruption 89, 91, 94, 242

post-Soviet xviii, 101, 105, 116,242 Council for Mutual Hconomic

Assistance see Comecon counterculture 92-3, 192-3 CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) 46, 56, 89, 108, 231-2, 236,253 dissolution 46, 102, 103, 110, 237 Gorbachev and 46, 95, 96 purges 73 and religion 266 weakened xiv, 46, 99 crime xvii, 6, 116, 293 organized crime 111-12, 131, 240, 242

Crimean War 39, 145 cruiser Aurora 296 Cuban missile crisis (1962) 83, 87 culture 62-4, 135-42 control of 141-2, 173, 187, 188, 207-8

see also ballet; cinema; folk culture; literature; music; religion; theatre; visual arts

Cyrillic alphabet 265 Czechoslovakia 90, 100

de-Stalinization 83, 85, 88, 170 defence expenditure 91, 99-100 "delayed" literature 166 democracy 88 democratization 98, 100 demography 4, Ĵ Denildn, Anton 53 detente 82, 89, 90

Diaghilev, Sergey 178, 181, 196, 197,

201, 221-5 dissidence 62, 74, 192-3 Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak) 161, 166, 171

Donets Basin (Donbass) 28, 245 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 15, 143, 149,

151, 152, 219, 292 drinks 259-60 Duma see State Duma Dzhugashvili, losif Vissarionovich see Stalin

East Germany 86, 100 Eastern Europe x annexation 54—5, 79 democratization 95, 100 economic crises 1920 59

1980s 97-8, 250

1990s xvi, 100,105,112-13,118,259 economic decline 91, 99-100 economic development x, 27, 88, 127, 254-5

economic reforms xv, 96-8,105,112­16, 126-7, 241-3 economy 6-9,15,89-91,240-3,254-5 see also agriculture; economic reforms; finance; industry; labour; power stations; resources; service sector; taxes;

telecommunications; trade; transport education xvii, 5-6, 10, 62, 63, 91,

257, 271-3 Eisenstein, Sergey 209-10, 211 elections 95,107,109,126,127,231­2, 236

presidential 105, 121, 236-7 Soviet-era 231-2, 236 electricity 8, 240, 246, 247 emancipation of serfs 145, 147, 149­50, 280

emigre literature 165-6, 166, 168, 169, 170

emigres 63, 173, 180-1, 181-2, 185,

199-200 energy 8, 240, 245-6, 247 Engels, Fried rich 45 environmental belts 21-3 environmental degradation 242-3, 245 Estonia 77, 117

ethnic groups 13-14, 23-5, 45, 74,

76-7, 88, 116-17 European Union x, 119, 252 everyday life xvi, 256-7

see also drinks; education; festivals; food; housing; religion; social issues; sport experimental theatre 218-19

facts and figures 3-11

famines 59-60, 68

farming see agriculture

February Revolution (1917) 40-3, 47,

158, 289 Federal Assembly 109, 233 federal districts 234-5 Federal Security Service see FSB Federation Council 233, 238 festivals 257, 258, 260-1 film xvii, 63, 207-13 finance 249-51

financial crises 242, 250, 250-1 Finland 42, 47, 54, 56, 77 First World War (1914-18) 40, 44, 207, 292, 317 withdrawal from 45, 50 fishing 7, 244-5, 319 The Five (composers) 177 Five-Year Plans 54, 66, 69, 70, 305 Fokine, Michel 221, 222, 223-4 folk art 195

folk culture 142, 221, 311 festivals 257, 258, 260-1 influence of 141, 146, 177, 178, 181-2, 189 folk music 191-2 folktales 146, 177, 178 food 10, 257-9, 260-1 football {soccer) 261-2, 288 foreign direct investment 126, 242, 249, 255

foreign policy 100-1, 118-19, 123-4

forestry 244

Formalism 140

France 52, 56

free market xv, xvii, 105

free press 124

freedoms, personal 71-2

French language 139, 146

FSB (Federal Security Service) 120,

121, 129-31 Futurists 63, 159-60, 161

G-8 (Group of Eight) xii, 252 Gaidar, Yegor 108, 110 gas 8, 14, 108, 240, 246, 247, 304 exports 90, 126, 252 income from xvii, 90, 114 pipelines 305 Gazprom 108, 128 geographical features (map) 13 Georgia xi, 42, 56, 100, 117, 129, 239

German-Soviet Non- Aggress ion Pact

(1939) 54 Germany 96, 100, 252 armistice and Treaty of Brest- Litovsk (1917, 1918) 45, 50 see also Second World War glasnost ("openness") xiii, 94, 95, 97,

98, 171,212, 256, 287 Glavny Universality Magazin see GUM

Glinka, Mikhail 141, 174 Godunov, Boris (c. 1551-1605) 33, 36, 284

Gogol, Nikolav 15, 141, 149, 150,

177, 214 ' Golden Horde 34 Goncharov, Ivan 148, 153 Goncbarova, Natalya 195, 196, 197, 223

Gorbachev, Mikhail (b. 1931) x, xi, 88, 94, 95-6, 108, 158 attempted coup against (1991) xi,

102-3, 104, 105, 130, 232 reforms 46, 92, 94-6, 142, 268 and Yeltsin xiii, 101-2, 103, 105 see also glasnost-, perestroika Gorbachev era (1985-91) 94-102, 267

Gorky (city, now Nizhny Novgorod)

27, 92, 93 Gorky, Maksim 15, 148, 156, 157,

165,287 governance 231-2 Grand Principality of Moscow see Muscovy

Group of Eight (G-8) xii, 252 Grozny (Chechnya) 117, 122 Ŭulag xviii, 67,74-6, 92,168-9, 169­71, 304, 305 Gulag Archipelago, The (Solzhenitsyn)

75, 76, 92, 170-1 GUM {Glavny Universally Magazi«)

xviii, 283, 285 Gumilyov, Nikolay 157, 159, 163

health 10, 268-9

health care xvii, 10, 91, 233, 257, 268-9

Hermitage (St Petersburg) 73, 295,

295-6, 298 higher education 10, 38, 91, 272-3, 313-14, 663 see also universities Hitler, Adolf 57, 77, 78, 80, 202, 303 Horowitz, Vladimir 185 housing xvi, 91, 113, 233,27(M, 281 Hungary 39, 83, 85, 86, 100 hydroelectricity 70, 246, 247, 314

ice hockey 261, 262-3 icon painting 137, 138 IMF (International Monetary Fund)

114, 115 India 119, 123, 255 industrialization 26, 27, 62, 240, 281

Stalin era 66, 69-71, 80, 305-6 industry 7-8,38,113-14,126,247-8, 254,312 state intervention 242 inflation 15, 59, 1 13, 114, 241 inland waterways 70, 248, 289-90,

290, 291, 295 intelligence services 120, 121, 122, 131, 141,236, 240 see also FSB; KGB intelligentsia 38, 72, 93, 151, 238 International Monetary Fund see IMF Internet xviii, 10, 249 Iran 119, 123 Iraq 119, 123

Irkutsk 14, 28, 308, 314-15 iron industry 246, 304, 311 Islam 64, 116, 267, 268 "Itinerants" 194

[van Ш ((van the Great, 1440-1505)

33, 34, 282, 300 Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible, 1530-84)

33, 35, 285, 300 hvestiya ("News") 84-5, 142

Jack of Diamonds group 195, 196 Japan 93, 96, 317, 319

Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) 41, 306, 308, 319 jazz 192

Jews 42, 53, 64, 65, 78, 268 Judaism 267

judicial bodies xviii, 233, 235-6

Kandinsky, Vasily 195, 197-8, 199, 203-6

Karsavina, Tamara 223, 292 Kasparov, Garry 263, 264-5 Kazakhstan 74,76,85,117,118,239, 252, 305

Kerensky, Aleksandr (1881-1970) 44 KGB (Committee for State Security)

102, 120, 121, 129-31, 240 Khabarov, Ycrofey 315 Khabarovsk 28, 308, 309, 315-16 Khachaturian, Aram 185, 189 Khlebnikov, Velimir 159 Khrushchev, Nikita (1894-1971) 82­3, 84, 88, 90, 92 denunciation of Stalin 55, 72, 83, 85, 168

de-Stalinization 83, 85, 88, 170 Khrushchev era (1953-64) 82-8,267, 277-8, 281

Kievan Rus 24, 33, 135, 136, 265

Kirov, Sergey 72, 73

Kirov Theatre see Mariinsky Theatre

Kitay-gorod (Moscow) 282, 285-6

Kochno, Boris 225

Kohl, Helmut xi

Kolchak, Admiral Aleksandr 53, 312 kolkhozy (collective farms) 26-7, 66­8, 67

Korean War (1950-3) 80 Kosygin, Alexsey 89, 94 Kramnik, Vladimir 263, 264 Kremlin (Moscow) 125, 136, 278,

280, 282-5 Kronshtadt 60, 291 Krupskaya, Nadezhda 44, 208 kulaks 66-7, 70 Kuleshov, Lev 209 Kutuzov, General Mikhail I. 280 Kuznetsk Basin (Kuzbass) 28, 245,

305,313 kvass 258, 260 Kyrgyzstan 117, 239

labour camps see Gulag labour relations 71, 253^1 language 23-5, 267-8, 272 French 139, 146 Russian xv, 139, 140, 148 teaching of French 93 Larionov, Mikhail 195, 196, 197 Latvia 77, 117 legal system 111, 235-6, 242 Lenin Mausoleum (Moscow) xviii,

277, 283, 285 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870­1 924) 44-5, 46-7, 48, 51, 53, 57, 296 attempt on life 52 Bolshevik government 49-50 and cinema 208 death 54, 64-5, 292 paintings of 199 re-evaluated 120 and religions 64 see also Bolsheviks Leningrad siege of (1941 -4) 289, 292-3 see also St Petersburg

Liberal Democratic Party xiii-xiv, 110, 237

life expectancy 5, 15, 28, 111, 269 Ligachev, Yegor 99 Lissitzky, El 197-8, 199 literary culture 139-41 literature 15, 62, 88, 143-4 1890s to 1917 158-60 folk influences 141, 177 "for the drawer" 166, 167-8 nineteenth-century 144-57 post-Revolution 157-8, 160-72 Lithuania 77, 101, 117 living standards 88, 91, 115-16 Lobachevsky, Nikolay 272 local government 235, 243, 270, 271 Lomonosov, Mikhail 139, 140, 292

Makhno, Nestor 52 Malenkov, Georgy M. 84-5 Malevich, Kasimir 195-7, 198 Manchuria 306, 308, 316 Mandelshtam, Osip 73, 157, 159, 162 Mariinsky Theatre (formerly Kirov Theatre, St Petersburg) 220-1, 222, 223, 225, 290, 298 market economv, transition to 112-13 Marx, Karl 44, 45 Marxism-Leninism 44, 119 Massine, Lйonide 224 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 15, 63, 159­60

media xviii, 62, 98, 124, 142 media tycoons 121, 124 medical services 91, 111, 253 Medvedev, Dmitry (b. 1965) xv, 121,

127, 128-9 Mendeleyev, Dmitry 272, 292 Mcnshcviks 42, 46, 48, 50, 51 Metternich, Prince Klemens von 15 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 215, 217-18 Michael, Tsar (1596-1645) 36 middle class xviii, 15, 256-7, 273 migrations 14,26,28-9,70,268,280, 281

military-industrial complex 89, 90 mineral resources 7 modernism, in music 181, 186 modernization xiii, xvii, 96

Moldova 117, 239 money xv-xvi, 58, 59 Mongol invasions 24, 33, 136, 299 montage 63, 209-11 Moscow xv, xviii, 4, 14, 24, 27, 256, 276-8 climate 278-9 cultural life 278, 286-9 history 277, 279-81 local government 235 siege of (1941) 77, 281 sights 282-6 Moscow Academic Art Theatre 215­16, 286

Moscow Academy of Fine Arts 205 Moscow State Circus 220, 287 Moscow State University 272, 273, 279

Murmansk 244, 30Н-2, 317 Muscovy 33, 136-7, 144, 279 music 15, 175-6 control of 183-5, 186-7, 187-8, 189

folk influences 141, 181-2, 189 folk music 191-2 late- and post-Soviet 190-3 nineteenth-century 174—8 pop 92-3, 192 rock 92-3, 192-3 twentieth-century 178-89 Muslims 64, 267, 268 Mussorgsky, Modest 141, 174, 177 mysticism 158, 174, 178-9, 183, 218

Nabokov, Vladimir 165, 166, 171 Nagy, Imre 83, 85 Napoleon I 20, 277, 280 nationalism x, xvii, 100, 101-2, 174, 175, 178

nationality policies 45, 56, 76-7, 84, 100

nationalization 58 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) x, 80, 86, 100, 118-19, 123, 129, 239 natural gas see gas navy 316, 317 "Near-Abroad" 116-18

Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir

286

New Economic Policy (1921-8) 60-2, 66

newspapers 10, 62, 84, 85, 142 Nicholas 1 (1796-1855) 39, 147 Nicholas II (1868-1918) xv, 34, 41, 120, 267, 296, 313 and 1905 Revolution 40, 42 execution (1918) 51-2, 120, 311 Nijinska, Bronislawa 224, 225 Nijinsky, Vasiav 221, 223, 224, 292 Nizhny Novgorod (formerly Gorky) 4,

27, 92, 93 Novgorod 33, 34, 35, 279, 299-300, 309

Novosibirsk 4, 27, 28, 313-14 nuclear power 246 Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (1963) 83, 87

nuclear weapons xii, 80 Nureyev, Rudolph 225, 226

Obraztsov, Sergey 219-20 October Revolution (1917) 43,47-50,

158, 181,202, 289, 296 "official" literature 158, 171-2 oil 8, 14, 118, 240, 246, 247, 304 exports 90, 126, 242, 252 income from xvii, 91, 114, 126 pipelines 304, 310-11, 312 Oistrakh, David 184 oligarchs 115, 121, 124 Olympic Games 262, 281, 287-8 Omsk 4, 27, 28,312-13 One Day in the Life of Ivan

Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn) 76, 168-9, 169-70 opera 148, 174, 176, 177, 186, 187,

227

based on folktales 141, 178 designs for 202 organized crime 111—12, 131, 240, 242

Other Russia coalition 264-5 Our Home Is Russia party 110, 237

painting see visual arts Pamyat ("Memory") xiii

Paradzhanov, Sergey 212

Pasternak, Boris 15* 160-1, 166

Pavlova, Anna 221, 222, 224, 292

peasants 45, 51, 58, 59, 60-1, 66-8

people 13-14, 23-5

"people's theatre" 218

peres troika ("restructuring") xiii, 94,

94-7, 99 Perm 4, 27, 308, 310-11 Peter 1 (Peter the Great, 1672-1725) 34, 37, 120, 135, 144, 300, 311

St Petersburg 279, 289, 291, 297 westernization of Russia 137-9 Peter-Paul Fortress (St Petersburg)

120, 291,294 Peterhof see Petrodvorets Petipa, Marius 220-1, 292 Petrodvorets (formerly Peterhof) 294, 297

Petrograd Soviet 43, 47, 48 petroleum see oil physical geography 15-23 Platonov, Andrey 168 Podgorny, Nikolay 89 poetrv 15, 171 1890s to 1917 158-60, 161, 162, 164

nineteenth-century 148, 149, 155 post-Revolution 162, 163,164, 168,

171

Poland 39, 42, 56, 77, 83, 100 Politburo 48, 50, 54, 66, 90, 95 political development x, 127, 135 political parties 126, 237-8, 264-5 political process 236-8 political subdivision (map) 230 pollution 242, 245, 269, 279 pop music 92-3, 192 population ix, 4, 5, 28, 29, 88, 111

density 26 Potsdam Conference (1945) 55 power stations 70, 246, 247, 314 Pravda ("Truth") 84, 142 pre-school education 272 president 99,101, 106, 109,233,234,

236-7, 282 prices 97, 98, 112, 113, 241 Primakov, Yevgeny 119 prime minister 109, 233 prison camps see Gulag private enterprise 105 private security forces 240 privatization 26, 115, 241, 245, 271

Prokofiev, Sergey 15,185-7,189, 210, 221

propaganda 79,142,158, 161-2,208 prose 148-57

Provisional Government 43-5, 47, 48,

49, 208 public services 111, 253 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 209, 210-11 puppet theatre 219-20, 287, 311, 316 purges ix, 54, 55, 72-6, 82, 130, 272­3

of Jews 78-9, 130,210 Pushkin, Ale к sand r 15, 139, 143,

144-8, 177, 217, 292 Pushkin (town, formerly Tsarskoye

Selo) 294, 297 Putin, Vladimir (b. 1952) xvii-xviii, 105, 120, 121, 123—t, 128, 234 and Chechnya xviii church attendance xv and Medvedev 127, 128 Putin era (1999-2008) 120-9

Rachmaninov, Sergey 178, 179-81, 292

railways 280, 315, 316 see also Baikal-Amur Main Line; Trans-Siberian Railway Ramhert, Dame Marie 225 Rasputin, Grigory 41 Rastreili, Bartolomeo F, 295, 297 Ravel, Maurice 225 Rayon ism 195, 196, 197 RCB (Russian Central Bank) 250 rebirth of Russia xiii—xv, xvii, xviii Red Army 45, 48, 51, 52-6, 56 Red Square (Moscow) xviii, 282, 283, 285

"Red Terror" 52 regional government 234-5, 272 relief regions 16-19 religion 4,116,142,257, 265-8,278, 287

Bolsheviks and 64 festivals 260-1 and music 183

see also Russian Orthodox Church repression 51, 55, 71-2, 236 arts 141-2 of Jews 268

of musicians 142, 185, 187, 188,

189, 192 religious 287

Stalin era 14, 54, 72, 78-9 of writers 142, 147, 157-8, 161-4,

168, 169 see also purges resources 14, 91, 245-7, 252, 254,

302, 304 Revolution of 1905 40, 42, 44, 48, 180, 209

Revolution of 1917 14, 15,34,40-50, 54, 292, 317 February 40-3, 47, 158, 289 October 43, 47-50, 158, 181, 202,

289, 296 role in Russia's evolution xiii, 119­20

rewriting history xiii, 119-20 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay 141, 174,

177-8, 181, 292 Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky) 181,

222, 222-3 rock music 92-3, 192-3 rocketry, Krushchev's enthusiasm for

85-6, 87-8 Rodchenko, Aleksandr 198-9 Romania 77

Romanov dynasty 33^, 292 Roosevelt, Franklin D, 78 Rostov-na-Donu 4, 27, 28 Rostropovich, Mstislav 184-5, 185, 190

Rubinstein, Anton 175 ruble xv, 113, 241, 241-2, 242, 249­50

Rublyov, Andrey (c. 1360-1430) 137,

138, 284 rural areas xvi-xvii, 26-7, 271 Rurik dynasty 33 Russian Academy of Sciences 314, 315,318

Russian Central Bank (RCB) 250 Russian Communist Party 50 Russian Federation 104, 106, 123 Russian language xv, 139, 140, 148 Russian Orthodox Church xiv-xv, 64, 116, 265-8, 277, 287 and culture 136, 137 and music 174, 180, 183, 191 Russian Revolution see Revolution of

1905; Revolution of 1917 Russian State Library (Moscow) 286, 298

Russians (ethnic) 14, 23 Russia's Choice party 110 Russification 40, 76, 135 Russo-Japanese War (1904-5} 41,

306, 308, 319 Rutskoy, Aleksandr 107-9

St Petersburg Conservatory 175, 176,

290, 292, 298 St Petersburg (Leningrad 1924-91) xv—xvi, 4, 14,27, 244,256, 289­90, 301 climate 290, 293 culture 298-9

history 42, 279, 289, 291-3 local government 235 siege of Leningrad (1941-4) 292-3 sights 293-8 St Petersburg State University 273,292 Sakhalin Island 244, 318-19 Sakharov, Andrey 92, 93, 130 SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation

Talks) (1972, 1979) 93 samizdat literature 166, 170 samokritika (denunciation of own

works) 140, 168, 189 Schnittkc, Alfred (1934-98) 183,190­1

schools xvii, 62, 63, 253, 271-2, 273 Scriabin, Aleksandr 178, 178-9 Second World War (1939^15) ix, 74, 77-8, 80, 127, 168, 289 Arctic convoys 301 battle of Stalingrad (1942-43) 77-8,

302, 303 Nazi treatment of Jews 268 role of Siberia 305

siege of Moscow (1941) 77, 281 Stalin's role 54-5, 77-9 security x, 238-40 security services xviii, 35, 39, 73, 74

see also FSB; KGB separatism 122-3 Chechnya xviii, 105, 116-17, 121­2, 124, 131 serfs 14, 145, 147, 149-50, 207, 280 service sector 253, 254 settlement 26-8

Sholokhov, Mikhail 160, 165, 166 Shostakovich, Dmitry 15, 185, 187-9, 189, 190

Siberia 20, 26, 28-9, 243, 247, 304­6

see also Novosibirsk; Trans-Siberian Railway Slavs 24, 267-8 smoking 269

Sobchak, Anatoly 120, 128 soccer 261-2, 288 social issues 15, 268-70 social services 91, 113-14, 116 social welfare 268-9 socialist realism 141, 164,183-4, 190, 211, 212, 218 visual arts 197, 199, 205, 206 Socialist Revolutionaries 47, 50, 51 soils 21, 22, 23 Sokurov, Aleksandr 213 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (1918-2008) 15,76, 130,165, 168-9,169-71, 171 exile 93, 166

The Gulag Archipelago (1973) 75, 76, 92, 170-1 South Ossetia 129 sovereignty xii-xiii

Soviet system, views of 101-2, 126-7 Soviet Union collapse 15, 102-3, 158, 171-2,

219, 232, 267, 301 dissolution (1991) xi, 13,14,46,95, 232

establishment 14, 34, 56-7 governance 231-2 legacy to Rъssia xii, xiii reasons for decline and fall xii

role in emergence of communism 119-20 soviets 43, 47, 49, 51, 99 sovkhozy (state farms) 26-7, 244 space industry 85-6, 91 sport 184, 261-5, 287-8, 299, 311 Stalin, Joseph (1879-1953) 54-5, 65­6, 80-1, 188 and arts 141-2, 156, 187, 210 defence of Tsaritsyn (later

Stalingrad) 302 Krushchev's denunciation of 55, 72,

83, 85, 168 nationalities commissar 54, 56 and religion 266

and Second World War 54-5, 77-9 supersedes Trotksy 48, 65, 66 see also socialist realism Stalin era 14, 54-5, 64-72, 80, 120, 127, 305 ethnic minorities 76-7 purges ix, 54,55, 72-6, 78, 82,130,

210, 272-3 repression 72, 78-9 see also collectivization;

industrialization; Second World War

Stalingrad (now Volgograd), battle of

(1942-43) 77-8, 302, 303 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 214-17, 286

Starovoytova, Galina 112 State Duma (established 1905) 42 State Duma (in Federal Assembly) 109, 110-11, 127, 233, 236-7, 238, 250

state farms (sovkhozy) 26-7, 244 steel industry 246, 304 steppe 22-3, 26

Stolypin, Pyotr (1862-1911) xv, 41 Stravinsky, Igor 175,178,181-3,186,

222-3, 224, 225 sturgeon 245, 258-9 subsidies, arts xvii, 212, 218 Summer Garden (St Petersburg) 295, 296

Summer Palace (St Petersburg) 294,

295, 296 suprematism 195, 195-8

Supreme Soviet 89, 99, 101, 232 Sverdlovsk see Yekaterinburg symbolists 158-9,217

taiga 21-2

Tajikistan 117, 118, 239 tamizdat 166 Tarkovsky, Audrey 212 Tatar invasions 24, 33, 136, 299 Tatars 34 Tatarstan 76, 116 tax system 112, 114, 126, 254 taxes 97, 126, 242, 254 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr liyicb 15, 175-6, 179, 187, 216, 224, 292 ballets 176, 183, 201,221 Tehran Conference (1943) 55, 78 telecommunications 249 theatre xvii, 63, 156, 214-20, 225-6, 278

designs for 196, 201, 202 theatres 215, 216, 226-7, 257 see also Bolshoi Theatre; Mariinsky Theatre

Theophanes the Creek 138, 284 Third International (Comintern) 57 Time of Troubles (1598-1613) 33, 36 Tito, Marshal Josip Broz 79-80 Tolstoy, Leo xv, 15, 149, 151, 151-3, 154-5, 292 folk influences 141 literary language 148 on Russian prose form 139^10 totalitarian government 57 tourism 253,257,300,302,306,314­15, 318, 319 town sea pes xvi trade 9, 248, 251-2, 299 trade unions 59, 219, 253^1 Trans-Siberian Railway 4 1, 248, 305, 306-9

cities on 28, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 318 transport xvii, 9, 248-9 travel 253, 257 Trezzini, Domenico 296 Trotsky, bon 42, 48-9, 61 leadership of Red Army 52-3 superseded by Stalin 48, 65, 66 tsarist past, rediscovery xiii-xv Tsaritsyn see Volgograd tsars 14, 33-4, 34-5, 38, 39,120,284 see also Alexander 11; Alexander N1; Catherine II; Michael; Nicholas I; Nicholas H; Peter ( Tsarskoye Selo see Pushkin (town) Tsvetayeva, Marina 164, 166 tundra 21, 319

Turgenev, Ivan 148, 149-51, 214 Turkmenistan 117, 239

U-2 Affair (I960) 83 Ukraine 56, 68, 117, 118, 239, 252 Ulaanbaatar 309,315 Ulan-Ude 28, 309, 315 "underground" artists 206 Union of Soviet Writers 162-4 unions 59, 219, 253-4 United Nations Security Council xii, 240

United Russia Party xiv, 127 United States 52, 55, 60, 90, 96, 118­19 252 Cold'War 79-80, 86, 87-8 Gorbachev and 95 Putin and 123 universities 63, 272-3, 292, 313-14

see also higher education unofficial literature 165-8, 171-2 urban areas xvi, 27-8, 256, 281 USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) see Soviet Union Uzbekistan 117, 239

values, changes in 257 vegetation 16, 21, 22, 23 villages xvi—xvii, 26—7 Virgin Lands Campaign (1954-6) 305

visual arts 194-207 Vladivostok 14, 28, 244, 306, 309,

316-18 vodka 259-60, 270 Volgograd (formerly Tsaritsyn and

Stalingrad) 302-4 Voynovich, Vladimir 171 Vrubel, Mikhail 195 Vysotsky, Vladimir 192, 193

War Communism 58-60 War and Peace [Tolstoy) 139-40,153, 154

Warsaw Pact xi, 83, 86, 90, 239 We (Zamyatin) 167, 171 welfare 91, 233, 268-9 West Berlin 80 westernization 96, 137-9 White armies 51, 52, 56 wildlife 21, 22, 23 Winter Palace (St Petersburg) 294,

295, 295-6, 296 women 138, 238, 261, 263 World Trade Organization 252 World War 1 (1914-18) 40, 44, 207, 292,317 withdrawal from 45, 50 World War (I (J939—45) ix, 74, 77-8, 80, 127, 168, 289 Arctic convoys 301 battle of Stalingrad (1942-43) 77-8,

302, 303 Nazi treatment of Jews 268 role of Siberia 305 siege of Moscow (1941) 77, 281 Stalin's role 54-5, 77-9

writers 62-3 renunciation of works 140, 168

Yalta Conference (1945) 55, 78 Yaroslavl 308, 309-10 Yashin, Lev 262

Yekaterinburg (formerlv Sverdlovsk)

4, 27,41,51-2, 308, 311-12 Yeltsin, Boris (1931-2007) xi, xiv, xv, 77, 104-6, 115, 312 and constitution 232-3 and Duma 110-11 and Gorbachev xiii, 95, 101-2, 103 and mass media 124 Putin as successor 121, 122 and Russian sovereignty 101-2 Yeltsin era (1991-99) 104-12, 125, 237-8

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny 168 Yezhovshebina 73 Yugoslavia 79-80, 119

Zamyatin, Yevgeny 165-6, 166-7 Zbdanovsbcbina 78, 168, 188 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir xiii-xiv, 110, 237

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