Russia Reference

Environmental Geography
• Declining sturgeon harvest
– Black market and Russian mafia
• Russian domain occupies a major portion of the world’s largest landmass
– Home to some of best farmlands, metal resources, petroleum reserves
• Large seasonal temperature extremes
• Ukraine and Belarus cover eastern portions of European Plain
• Cold winters and cool summers
• Podzol soils – acidic soils that limit agricultural output and ability of the region to support a highly productive farm economy

Environmental Geography
• Chernozem soils – fertile “black earth” soils that have proven valuable for commercial wheat, corn, and sugar beet cultivation and for commercial meat production
• Urals make European Russia’s eastern edge
• Poor farming land
• Siberia located east of the Urals
– Taiga – coniferous forest zone
– Permafrost – a cold-climate condition of unstable, seasonally frozen ground that limits the growth of vegetation and makes problematic the construction of even simple tracks.

Ural Mountains

Siberia

Environmental Geography
• Longer growing seasons and milder climates
• Influence of monsoon rains of East Asia
• Seismically active
• Located on European Russia’s extreme south
– Between the Black and Caspian seas
• Caucasus Mountains
– Air and Water Pollution
• Poor air quality in hundreds of cities

Kamchatka Peninsula

Caucasus Mountains

Environmental Geography
– Air and Water Pollution (cont.)
– Legacy of Soviet Union
• Water pollution from industrial sources
• Lake Baikal pollution
– The Nuclear Threat
• Soviet expansion of nuclear weapons and nuclear power after 1950
– Fallout from above-ground testing
– Nuclear explosions for seismic testing and oil exploration
– Dumping of nuclear wastes
– Chernobyl accident
• Construction of new nuclear plants
• Possibility of warehousing of international nuclear wastes

Environmental Geography
– The Post-Soviet Paradox
• Soviet Union’s demise brought environmental recovery in some areas
– Consolidation of nuclear warhead storage
– Increasing environmental awareness
• Demise has also contributed to more environmental degradation
– Casual handling of waste materials
– Cities having to finance their own cleanup projects
– Possible smuggling of weapons’ grade fuel out of Russia
– Increased exploitation of resources to obtain cash

Population and Settlement
• More than 200 million residents
• Most live in cities
• European Russia: 110 million; Siberia: 35 million; Belarus and
Ukraine: 60 million
– The European Core
• Region contains largest cities, biggest industrial complexes, and most productive farms
• Supports higher population densities
– Moscow metropolitan area: 8.5 million people
– St. Petersburg on Baltic Sea
– Volga River industrial region
– Ural Mountains settlement region

Population and Settlement
– Siberian Hinterlands
• Sparsely settled landscape, with increasing distance between cities
• Trans-Siberian Railroad – a key railroad corridor to the Pacific completed in 1904
– An alignment of isolated but sizable key urban centers follow it
• Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) Railroad -- newer (1984) line that runs parallel, but further north, of Trans-Siberian

Trans-Siberian Railway

Population and Settlement
– Eastward Movement
• Trans-Siberian Railroad accelerated pace of eastward movement
– Greater political freedom than enjoyed under the Tsars
» Tsars – czars; authoritarian leaders who dominated politics of pre-1917 Russian Empire
– Political Imperatives
• Leaders from both the imperial and Soviet eras forcibly moved selective populations to new locations
– Gulag Archipelago – a vast collection of political prisons
– Russification – Soviet policy of resettling portions of Soviet
Union

Population and Settlement
• Reverse Russification in newly independent non-Russian countries
– By 2000, 6 million Russians had left former Soviet republics
• Also movement to other regions
» U.S., Israel, Finland
– The Urban Attraction
• Rural-to-urban migration
• Greater freedom of mobility as compared to the Soviet period

Population and Settlement
• Core area that contains superior transportation connections, upscale stores and shops, most desirable housing, most important offices
• No inner-city decay
• No sprawling decentralized suburbs
• Stozgorods (socialist neighborhoods) – fully planned public housing projects that ring the inner city
• Chermoyuski – large uniform apartment blocks built during the
1950s and 1960s
– Poorly constructed Soviet housing

Population and Settlement
• Mikrorayons – large housing projects of the 1970s and 1980s further out from city centers
– Massed blocks of high-rise apartment buildings supposed to form self-contained communities
• Greatest growth in recent years has been on the urban fringe
• Dacha – elite cottage communities on urban fringe, for more well-to-do residents, especially for use in summers
• Declining populations in the region
– Attempts to better the healthcare system, to increase birthrates, and to foster immigration
• Pattern of smaller families likely to continue

Cultural Coherence and Diversity
• As other European nations carved out empires elsewhere in the world, the Russians expanded eastward and southward into
Eurasia
– Origins of the Russian State
• Slavic peoples – defined linguistically as a distinctive northern branch of the Indo-European language family
– Originated in modern Belarus
– Intermarried with the Varangians (Rus)
– Interacted with the Byzantine Empire and adopted Christianity and a Cyrillic alphabet
» Eastern Orthodox Christianity – a form of Christianity historically linked to Eastern Europe and church leaders in
Constantinople (modern Istanbul)

Cultural Coherence and Diversity
– Growth of the Russian Empire
• By 14 th century, a new and expanding Russian state was formed
– The Russian peoples were divided into three distinctive, but closely related peoples: Russians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians
• 16 th and 17 th centuries: expansion further east
– Cossacks – seminomadic Slavic-speaking Christians who migrated to seek freedom in steppes
• 1700’s expansion into the Baltic (Peter the Great)
• 19 th century expansion into Central Asia

Cultural Coherence and Diversity
– The Legacy of the Empire
• Russian expansion was one of the greatest the Earth ever witnessed
– The region, however, is still diverse
• Modern-day tensions with western Europe
– Russians believe they are heirs of Greek and Roman traditions
– Long history of authoritarianism

Cultural Coherence and Diversity
• Region is dominated by Slavic languages
– The Belorussians and Ukrainians
• Majority of Belorussians live in Belarus, and most people in
Belarus are Belorussians
• Russian speakers dominate large parts of eastern Ukraine
• Outside of Ukraine, Ukrainians are scattered in communities in southern Russia and southwest Siberia
– Patterns Within Russia
• 80% of Russia’s population claims a Russian linguistic identity
• Large enclaves of other peoples in Russia
– Finno-Ugric speakers, Altaic speakers, Eskimo-Aleut speakers

Russia Languages

Cultural Coherence and Diversity
– Transcaucasian Languages
• A large variety of languages in this small region
– No fewer than three language families are spoken in this region
» Caucasian, Altaic, and Indo-European speakers
• Religious revival after the downfall of the Soviet Union
• Mostly Eastern Orthodox Christianity
• Roman Catholicism in western Ukraine
• Islam in North Caucasus, Volga region, and Kazakstan border
• Judaism in larger cities of European west
• Buddhism in Russian interior

Cultural Coherence and Diversity
– Soviet Days
• Modernism in art was viewed as decadent
– Social realism – an artistic style devoted to the realistic depiction of workers harnessing the forces of nature or struggling against capitalism
– Turn to the West
• By the 1980s, U.S. mass consumer culture had an impact on the region’s art
• After the fall of the Soviet Union, a deluge of Western culture

Cultural Coherence and Diversity
– Russians and the Net
• By 2003 an estimated 7 million Russian people will be using the Net
– Threefold increase from 1999
– The Music Scene
• Western popular music adopted
• Generation of western-style music from within
• Reactions from more conservative elements within Russia
– Extreme nationalists and Eastern Orthodox Church

Geopolitics
• Russian Empire collapsed in 1917
• Bolsheviks – a faction of Russian communists representing the interests of the industrial workers
– Seized power in Russia after fall of Russian Empire
• Bolsheviks transformed the spatial and economic structure of the country
– The Soviet Republics and Autonomous Areas
• Established 15 “union republics” based on nationality
• Autonomous areas – created by Soviets to give regions of varying sizes as special ethnic homelands, but within structure of existing republics

Geopolitics
– Centralization and Expansion of the Soviet State (cont.)
• Soviet state remained centralized, and union republics had no autonomy under Stalin
• Enlargement of the Soviet Union after World War II
• Port of Kaliningrad remained an exclave
– Exclave – a portion of a country’s territory that lies outside its contiguous land area
• Stalin erected an “Iron Curtain”
– Term coined by Winston Churchill for ideological and political barrier between democracy and communism that has historically prevented cooperative solutions

Geopolitics
– Centralization and Expansion of the Soviet State
• The Soviet Union and the U.S. became antagonists in a global
Cold War
– Escalation of military competition between the two nations
– End of the Soviet System
• Glasnost – policy of greater openness during the 1980s that was enacted by Gorbachev
– Several republics demanded independence
• Perestroika – planned economic restructuring to make production more efficient and more responsive to needs of Soviet citizens
• December 1991, all 15 republics had become independent states and the Soviet Union ceased to exist

Geopolitics
– Russia and the Former Soviet Republics
• Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) – a looser political union that included all but three of the former republics
• 1996: Russian and Belarus political and economic union
• 1998: Russia and Ukraine economic linkages
• 2000–2001: Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova formed the GUAM group
– Designed to facilitate trade (oil) through the Caspian–Black Sea corridor

Geopolitics
– Russia and the Former Soviet Republics
• Denuclearization – return of nuclear weapons from outlying republics to Russian control and partial dismantling
• Movement of tactical nuclear weapons into Kaliningrad exclave
– Devolution and the Russian Federation
• March 1992: signing of a new Russian Federation Treaty
– Granted Russia’s internal autonomous republics greater political, economic, and cultural freedoms
• Autonomous republics located along northern slope of the Caucasus, central Volga Valley, southern border of Siberia
• Greater autonomy gives greater economic freedom, but could fragment Russia more politically

Russia’s Republics

Geopolitics
– Regional Tensions
• Efforts to achieve greater autonomy in Siberia, Caucasus (Chechnya)
– The Shifting Global Setting
• Collapse of Soviet Union resulted in crash of Russian global power
– Economic productivity and technological prowess, and not the control of large territory determines political success
• Today, greater cooperation with China
• Japan, Russia, and the Kuril Islands
• Limited nuclear arsenal
• Serves as intermediaries in diplomatic negotiations
• 1990s: economic declines, but stabilization in 2000 and 2001
• Difficult to determine true economic potential of the region

Economic and Social Development
• During the Soviet period, most of what is Russia’s current economic infrastructure was established
• Centralized economic planning – a system in which state controlled production targets and industrial output
• Stressed the development of huge, basic industries
• Nationalized agriculture, collective farms
• Development of roads, rail lines, canals, dams, and communications networks
• Overall, there were economic improvements, improvements in literacy, but inefficient agricultural system

Economic and Social Development
• Problems of unstable currencies, corruption, and changing government policies plague the system
– Redefining Regional Economic Ties
• Less predictable flows of foreign trade between Russia and its former republics
• Russia is still the economic power of the region
– Privatization and Economic Uncertainty
• 1992, the freeing of price controls increased inflation
• Privatization led to economic abuses and corruption
• Continued struggle in agricultural sector
– 2/3 of country’s farmland was privatized by 2000
• Privatization of service, heavy industry, and natural resource sectors

Russia Industry

Economic and Social Development
– The Russian Mafia
• It’s estimated that the Russian mafia controls 40% of the private economy and 60% of the state-run enterprises
• More liberal economic policies after the fall of the Soviet
Union allowed the Russian mafia to flourish
– Has global connections as well
– A Fraying Social Fabric
• Increased rates of violent crime, high unemployment, rising housing costs, declining welfare expenditures
• Russian middle-class represents only 10% to 15% of the population
• Increased domestic violence

Economic and Social Development
– A Fraying Social Fabric (cont.)
• Limited healthcare expenditures
– Alcoholism, smoking, and AIDS
– A New Day for the Consumer
• Western consumer goods available to all who can afford
• Luxury goods
– Attracting Foreign Investment
• Region struggles to attract outside capital
• Strongest global ties are with U.S. and western Europe

Russia Foreign Investment

Economic and Social Development
– Globalization and Russia’s Petroleum Economy
• One of the strongest links between Russia and the global economy
• Most exports today go to western Europe
– Local Impacts of Globalization
• Moscow has benefited the most
• St. Petersburg and Omsk have seen growing global investment
• Less competitive industrial centers have been hard hit