Russia

Why Russian has two words for Russian

The oldest names the country used for itself were Rus' and the "Russian land". According to the Primary Chronicle, the word Rus' came from the people of the three brothers who founded the Rurikid dynasty, and the Finnish word for Swedes, ruotsi, shares its origin. The present name, Rossiya, comes from the Byzantine Greek Rosía. It was first attested in 1387, in the spelling Rosiya, and spread through Russian sources in the fifteenth century as Moscow became the centre of a unified state. Until the end of the seventeenth century the inhabitants still more often called their country Rus', the Russian land or the Muscovite state.

The two names left two adjectives. Russkiy refers to ethnic Russians. Rossiiskiy denotes citizens of the state regardless of ethnicity, and a more recent noun, rossiyanin, names a citizen in the same sense. Peter the Great's empire of 1721 was the Rossiyskaya imperiya. When the Russian Soviet republic was proclaimed in 1918 its title again used Rossiyskaya, because the other form had an ethnic meaning and the state was meant to hold many nations. The present state's name in Russian is Rossiyskaya Federatsiya, and Article 1 of the constitution makes "Russian Federation" and "Russia" equal names for it.

English translates both adjectives as "Russian", so the distinction the state has written into its own title since 1721 disappears in translation. Rus' survives in modern Russian as a word of poetry, for an older Russia or an imagined essence of it.

What the constitution says about Russia's peoples

The constitution approved by referendum in December 1993 writes the same distinction into law. Its sovereign is a people described as multinational, and its units are subjects of the federation declared equal to one another.

Who belongs to that multinational people depends on who did the counting. Wikipedia gives over 193 ethnic groups and Britannica more than 120 besides the ethnic Russians. The census of 2010 counted 137.5 million speakers of Russian, 3.1 million of Tatar and 1.1 million of Ukrainian, and Wikipedia puts the number of minority languages spoken in the country at between 100 and 150.

Article 65 names the subjects one by one. The English text published at constitution.ru, as fetched in 2026, lists 22 republics, the Republic of Crimea among them, and three cities of federal importance, Moscow, St Petersburg and Sevastopol. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and Wikipedia describes that annexation as internationally unrecognised. This catalogue records the dispute and takes no position on it. The politics of Russia follows how the republics bargained with Moscow for their powers in the 1990s and how the centre later took them back.

How Moscow gathered a state of many peoples

The East Slavic state of Kievan Rus' took shape in the ninth century and adopted Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium in 988. After it broke apart in the twelfth century the Grand Principality of Moscow became the dominant Russian principality and led the unification of the Russian lands, and in 1547 its ruler was crowned tsar. Ivan IV then annexed the khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberia.

By the end of the nineteenth century the empire covered roughly 22,800,000 square kilometres, and more than 100 ethnic groups lived inside it. The revolution of 1917 abolished the monarchy, and on 30 December 1922 the Russian Soviet republic joined the Byelorussian, Transcaucasian and Ukrainian republics in forming the Soviet Union.

When that union dissolved, Russia kept the Soviet seat at the United Nations. In a letter dated 24 December 1991 Boris Yeltsin, then the Russian president, told the United Nations Secretary-General that the Russian Federation would continue the Soviet Union's membership of the Security Council, with the support of 11 members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia sat at the Security Council on 31 December 1991 and no objection was raised. Russia: history covers the centuries in between, from the khan's tribute to the end of serfdom and the Soviet state.

Where Russians live on so much land

Russia extends some 9,000 kilometres from west to east and between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres from north to south, across the eastern third of Europe and the whole of northern Asia. Its clocks run from UTC+2 in Kaliningrad, a detached region between Poland and Lithuania that was part of East Prussia until 1945, to UTC+12 in Kamchatka and on the Bering Sea. Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus rises to 5,642 metres, and the Caspian shore lies 28 metres below sea level by the record's figure, 29 by Wikipedia's.

The people are gathered at one end of all that ground. Wikipedia puts the density at 8.5 inhabitants per square kilometre, with the vast majority living in the west, and Britannica places most of the population in the European part of the country, especially around Moscow. The capital held 13,274,285 people on 1 January 2025. The World Bank puts the urban share at 75.3% in 2025, while Wikipedia gives two-thirds.

The total depends on the border being counted. Wikipedia's estimate for 2025 is 146.0 million, or 143.6 million without Crimea and Sevastopol, against 147.2 million at the census of 2021 and a peak of over 148 million in 1993. The World Bank records a fall of 0.1% in 2025, and Wikipedia estimates the fertility rate that year at 1.37 children per woman. The geography of Russia explains why the great Siberian rivers run north to a frozen sea and why the farms stayed in the south-west.

How Russia's constitution divides power

The 1993 constitution gave the president strong powers, and an amendment that took effect with the election of 2012 extended the presidential term from four years to six. The legislature is the Federal Assembly. Britannica describes its upper house, the Federation Council, as made up of appointed representatives from each of the administrative divisions, and its lower house, the State Duma, as a 450-member chamber elected by popular vote.

The sources label the settlement differently. Wikipedia describes the 1993 text as establishing a semi-presidential republic, and the record, drawn from Wikidata, classifies the government as super-presidential. Russia: politics sets out what the president can do without parliament and how the courts fit in.

Outside its borders Russia joined the Commonwealth of Independent States on 21 December 1991, the Collective Security Treaty Organization in 1994, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 1996, the World Trade Organization on 22 August 2012 and the Eurasian Economic Union on 29 May 2014. It was expelled from the Council of Europe in March 2022, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began on 24 February that year.

What the Russian economy earns and spends

Output came to 2.56 trillion US dollars in 2025, or 17,547 dollars a head, and 49,568 dollars a head at purchasing power parity. Rosstat confirmed on 10 April 2026 that the economy grew 1.0% in 2025 and put output at 214.261 trillion roubles in current prices. Unemployment stood at 2.1% and inflation at 8.7% that year, and the World Bank projects growth of around 1% in 2026 and 2027.

Oil and gas carry more weight than their share of output suggests. In the mid-2000s the sector made up around 20% of GDP and about half of both exports and federal budget revenue. The war against Ukraine has been paid for since early 2022 partly from the budget and partly through bank loans the government compelled lenders to make, and defence and security took about 40% of government spending in 2025, more than education, healthcare, social policy and the national economy combined. On 11 September 2026 the Bank of Russia held its key rate at 14.00%, after seasonally adjusted price growth reached 11.6% in annualised terms in July. Russia: economy traces how the oil and gas money moves from the Siberian fields to Moscow.

Which faiths and tongues Russian law recognises

Article 14 makes Russia a secular state, and a law of 1997 names Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism as the country's traditional religions, part of its "historical heritage". The Russian Orthodox Church is recognised in law for its "special role" in the country's history and culture. Islam is traditional among most peoples of the North Caucasus and some Turkic peoples of the Volga-Ural region, and Buddhists form large communities in Kalmykia, Buryatia and Zabaykalsky Krai and the majority in Tuva. The Jehovah's Witnesses were outlawed in 2017 after being declared an "extremist" faith.

Russian is the state language under Article 68 and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and the other republics may add their own. The culture of Russia follows what the church and then the state allowed to be printed and sung, and what reached readers late.

How foreign visitors reach Russia now

UNESCO lists 33 World Heritage properties in Russia as of September 2026, 22 cultural and 11 natural. The Kremlin and Red Square, the historic centre of St Petersburg and Kizhi Pogost were inscribed together in 1990; the rock paintings of Shulgan-Tash Cave, added in 2025, are the most recent. The Trans-Siberian Railroad runs 9,288 kilometres from Moscow to Vladivostok across eight time zones.

The FSB Border Service recorded 15.6 million trips into Russia by foreign citizens in 2025, 1.6 million of them declared as tourism, and the Russian Union of Travel Industry attributes more than half of the tourist arrivals to visitors from China. Russia: travel covers the electronic visa, the registration rules and the seasons.