Official name Russian Federation
Population 142,893,540 (2006 estimate)
Area 17,075,200 sq km
Capital Moscow 10,101,500 (2002)
Population growth rate -0.37 percent (2006 estimate)
GDP per capita (U.S.$) $4,040 (2004)
GDP by economic sector
Agriculture, forestry, fishing 5 percent (2004)
Industry 35.2 percent (2004) Services 59.8 percent (2004)
Natural resources
Wide natural resource base including major deposits of oil,
natural gas, coal, and many strategic minerals, timber
Languages Russian (official), Tatar, Ukrainian,
Chuvash, Bashkir, Mordovian, Belarusian, and others
Religious affiliations Orthodox (Russian)
Christian 52 percent Muslim 8 percent
Atheist 5 percent Non-religious 28 percent Other 7 percent
Introduction
Russia, an independent country officially known as the Russian Federation (in Russian, Rossiyskaya Federatsiya). By far the world’s largest country, Russia is almost twice the size of the next largest country, Canada. Russia sprawls across eastern Europe and northern Asia. It possesses mineral resources unmatched by any other country. Four-fifths of the people live in the European part of Russia, west of the Ural Mountains. The capital, Moscow, is an administrative, commercial, industrial, and cultural hub in the heart of European Russia.
In the 14th and 15th centuries a powerful Russian state began to grow around Moscow. Russia emerged as a great world power during the reign of Peter the Great, who built Saint Petersburg as Russia’s new “window on the West†and moved the seat of government there in 1712. The massive Russian Empire reached its greatest size in 1914, before World War I. Moscow regained its capital status after the Russian Revolution of 1917, when militant socialists called Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian monarchy. In 1922 they founded the world’s first communist state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or Soviet Union). Russia was the largest and most powerful Soviet republic.
The USSR had a totalitarian political system in which Communist Party leaders held political and economic power. The state owned all companies and land, and the government controlled most aspects of the economy. After the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, Russia began transforming itself into a more democratic society with an economy based on market mechanisms and principles. For many Russians the transformation brought a severe decline in standard of living. At the same time, Russia became more integrated with the global economy and benefited from improved relations with the countries of the European Union as well as its neighbours in Asia.
Environmental Issues
Land and water resources experienced severe degradation during the Soviet period. Some areas, such as the Kuznetsk Basin on the Tom’ River in southern Siberia, the industrial belt along the southern portion of the Ural Mountains, and the lower Volga River, were degraded beyond repair.
By-products of nuclear weapons production caused permanent damage near Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk in southern Siberia, and near Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains. Fallout from the 1986 explosion at Ukraine’s Chernobyl’ nuclear power plant affected Russia primarily in Bryansk Oblast (see Chernobyl’ Accident). Less well-known than the Chernobyl’ disaster were accidents at the Mayak nuclear weapons production plant near Chelyabinsk in 1949, 1957, and 1967, which together released significantly higher emissions than Chernobyl’. The Soviet military tested nuclear weapons on the islands of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean, which was their second testing site after Semipalatinsk (now Semey), Kazakhstan. Nuclear reactors and wastes were dumped into the Barents and Kara seas of the far north, and in far eastern Siberia. Dumping of nuclear wastes in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) continued until 1993. The disposal of nuclear submarines and nuclear waste is still a problematic issue. Although a number of nuclear submarines have been decommissioned, many are still docked at Russian ports as a result of a lack of money and facilities for storing nuclear wastes.
Airborne pollutants have caused damage to vegetation in many areas of Russia. Copper, cobalt, and nickel smelters emit huge amounts of sulphur dioxide in the northern Siberian city of Noril’sk and on the Kola Peninsula in north-western Russia. Winds spread these contaminants across northern Europe, where the pollutants have caused widespread destruction of Scandinavian forests. They have also affected large areas of forests in the Kuznetsk Basin and the southern Urals.
Chemical fertilizers and airborne pollutants have contaminated some agricultural areas. Soil resources have also been adversely affected by mismanagement. Broad areas of land in southern Russia suffer from erosion. Wind erosion has affected the more arid parts of the North Caucasus, lower Volga River basin, and western Siberia.
Pollutants released into rivers have accumulated in lakes and seas with limited water exchange, including the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the Black Sea. A toxic layer of hydrogen sulphides covers the Black Sea, due in part to organic compounds from agricultural by-products and untreated sewage. Many Russian cities are not equipped with adequate sewage treatment plants. Inadequate or non-existent waste water treatment contributes to the degradation of rivers and lakes.
Many hydroelectric dams were built during Soviet times on Russia’s major rivers. A series of dams on the Volga River has significantly slowed the river and decreased the volume of water it can carry; the decline in the flow of the Kuban’ and Don rivers has been even greater. The rivers therefore retain even more of the pollutants that are discharged into their waters. In addition, many of the dams do not have properly functioning fish ladders, so many fish do not make it past the dams to their spawning grounds. As a result, the numbers of sturgeon and other fish have been greatly reduced. Pollution, damming, and overfishing caused the production of fisheries in inland bodies of water to decline by four-fifths from 1948 to 1983. In some areas the decline was much higher. The commercial fish catch in the Volga River in the 1980s was one-tenth the size of the catch in the 1930s.
Forests in more accessible parts of the country suffer from deforestation caused by extensive logging. The rate of deforestation has increased in the Ussuri region in extreme far eastern Russia because of the activities of foreign logging operations. Some large stands of undisturbed forests are protected in Russia’s extensive network of national reserves and parks. Adequate funding for park rangers and other personnel is lacking, however, and poaching (illegal hunting) of endangered animals such as the Siberian tiger has increased as a result.
Russia produces a significant portion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, which most scientists believe are a major cause of global warming. In 2004 the government of Russia ratified the Kyôto Protocol, an international treaty that calls for industrialized nations to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases to levels 5 percent below 1990 emission levels by 2012. For the treaty to go into effect, it had to be ratified by at least 55 countries and by enough industrialized nations to account for at least 55 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Russia’s decision to enforce the treaty paved the way for it to go into effect in 2005.
