Russia II
I
must miss today’s office hour
 Map test: Europe and Russian
Federation only: 20 questions
 Review
 Russia
– Physiographic regions
– Political geography of a federation
– North Caucasus and Chechnya
What is the name of this political unit?
What is the name of this political unit?
What are the names of all these political units?
Russia’s physiographic regions
RUSSIAN
PLAIN
Ural Mountains
• Traditional eastern boundary of
Europe
• Novaya Zemlya
• North-south length covers
2500 kms
• Central Urals are lowest: several
key crossing places
• Forest and mineral resources
were basis for Soviet
industrialization and war machine
WEST SIBERIAN PLAIN
• The world’s largest
unbroken lowland
•Ob and Irtysh river basin
•(south-north flow)
•Permafrost
•Major cities:
•Omsk
•Novosibirsk
EASTERN HIGHLANDS
Amur River at Kahabarovsk
Vladivostok
Caucasus
Mountains
Political Framework

Soviet legacy
–
–
–
–
–

Revolution (1917)
Bolsheviks versus Mensheviks
Lenin “right to self determination”
Ethnic nationalism, multinational state
Capital: Petrograd to Moscow (1918)
Federation
– USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) 1924
– SSRs
 ASSRs,

Autonomous Regions
Russification by forced migration:
deportation to periphery: Siberia
FORMER SOVIET UNION
Command Economy
State ownership, control and coordination
of ‘Means of production’
 Central planning

– State and collective farms
– 5 year plans

Soviet economic principles
–
–
–
–
–
Regional self-sufficiency
Interdependent republics (SSRs and internal)
Industrialize remote and rural regions
West-east depth for defence
COMECON and Warsaw Pact
What Happened to the Soviet Union?
 Eastern
European dictators deposed
 Collapse
in agricultural & industrial
production
– Economic output down by 4% in 1990 &
10-15% in first half of 1991
 Intensification
of ethno-cultural
nationalism & separatism
– Unity of the Soviet Union (macro) & unity
of republics (micro) threatened
 Pluralization
of Soviet politics & erosion
of communist party monopoly
Collapse Of The Soviet Union

Mikail Gorbachev
– Perestroika and glasnost (restructuring and
openness)
 E.g.
attempts to restructure USSR federal structure
– Attempted coup in August 1991, embarassment
– Resignation of President Gorbachev December
1991

Commonwealth of Independent States
– emergence of CIS to replace the Soviet Union –
CIS
– 21 REPUBLICS (internal, ethnic)
– 11 AUTONOMOUS REGIONS (OKRUGS)
– 49 PROVINCES (OBLASTS)
– 6 TERRITORIES (KRAYS) (sparse)
– 2 AUTONOMOUS FEDERAL CITIES
 Moscow
 St
Petersburg
Autonomy
Russian Federation
It is a federation!
Russia’s new administrative divisions
RUSSIAN ETHNICITY
North
Caucasus




Distance decay and
periphery of Russian
empire
Putin’s centralism
3 Muslim republics:
Islamist movement
Strategic resources:
– Oil wells
– Pipelines

Russification, Stalin’s
deportations, guerilla
warfare