Russia's geography: a country that drains into a frozen sea

Why Russia's great rivers run towards the Arctic

Britannica divides Russia into five drainage basins: the Arctic, the Pacific, the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Caspian. The Arctic basin covers most of Siberia and the northern part of the Russian Plain as well, and three rivers carry the greater part of it. The catchments of the Ob, the Yenisey and the Lena together exceed 8 million square kilometres north of the Stanovoy Range, and their combined discharge into the Arctic Ocean averages about 50,000 cubic metres a second. Smaller rivers fill in the rest of the basin: the Northern Dvina and the Pechora in the European north, the Indigirka and the Kolyma in the Siberian north-east.

The land these rivers cross is almost level. The Ob falls about 200 metres in more than 2,010 kilometres, so it and its neighbours meander across floodplains many kilometres wide. They are the routes from the interior of Siberia to the Arctic sea lanes, and ice blocks them for long periods every year. The coast they reach lies almost entirely above the Arctic Circle and is locked in ice for much of the year. The exception is the port of Murmansk, on the Kola Peninsula, which receives water warmed by the Gulf Stream.

The reason the water goes north is the shape of the ground around it. The high land in Russia stands along its southern and eastern edges, and the plains between tilt towards the Arctic coast. Where the mountains come close to the Pacific the pattern breaks. The Stanovoy Range, which rises to 2,412 metres, runs some 640 kilometres east to the coast and separates the Lena, which flows to the Arctic, from the Amur, which flows to the Pacific. About 4.7 million square kilometres of Siberia drains to the Pacific, much of it through the Amur, a river of 2,824 kilometres that forms the border with China over much of its course. Its tributary the Ussuri forms another long stretch of the same border.

Wikipedia counts more than 100,000 rivers in Russia, grouped into twenty watershed districts, and places forty of the rivers longer than 1,000 kilometres east of the Urals.

The two reference works used here do not agree on how long the main rivers are, and neither states the point it measured from.

The gap on the Yenisey is close to a thousand kilometres. The other figures differ by less than 3%.

How spring floods built the Siberian swamps

The West Siberian Plain runs from the Urals to the Yenisey and from the Arctic Ocean to the foothills of the Altai. Britannica gives its area as more than 2.6 million square kilometres, one-seventh of Russia. Only in the extreme south does it rise above 200 metres, and Britannica puts more than half of it below 100 metres. The two gentle rises in it, the Siberian Uvaly across the middle and the Ob Plateau in the south, barely interrupt a surface that Wikipedia describes as flat and featureless.

In a cold climate, flat ground and northward flow produce floods. Because the rivers run north, their upper reaches thaw first, and the meltwater arrives downstream while the lower channels are still frozen. It has nowhere to go, so it spreads across the plain, and the floods have left swamp across much of the plain's northern half. The Vasyugan Swamp, in the centre of the plain where the Ob meets the Irtysh, is the extreme case. Britannica gives its area as about 49,000 square kilometres and Wikipedia as 48,000.

The same thing happens on every river that flows north. Wikipedia names the Pechora and the Northern Dvina in European Russia and the Kolyma and the Indigirka in Siberia, and classifies about 10% of Russian territory as swamp.

Britannica puts the cause more generally. Much of Russia lies at latitudes where the winter cold is intense and evaporation can barely keep pace with the moisture that accumulates, and the result is an abundance of rivers, lakes and marshes. It counts some two million fresh and saltwater lakes in the country, most of them in the poorly drained lowlands of the Russian and West Siberian plains. Further north, in the tundra, partial and intermittent thawing of the ground stops the lakes, ponds and swamps from draining at all.

People on the West Siberian Plain live on the higher and drier ground in the south, south of latitude 55° N, where Britannica places the bulk of the region's population.

How the land rises from Baltic to Pacific

Russia runs about 9,000 kilometres from east to west and between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres from north to south, across latitudes from 41° to 82° N. The country's record gives its area as 17,075,400 square kilometres. Wikipedia gives 17,098,242 square kilometres and states that its figure excludes Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 and which most of the international community recognises as Ukrainian territory. This catalogue records both figures and takes no position on the dispute.

On structure and relief, Britannica divides the country in two along the Yenisey. West of the river, on about two-fifths of the total area, lowland plains broken only by low hills and plateaus make up most of the ground. East of it the terrain is mostly mountain, with some large lowlands between.

What the Russian Plain is made of

The Russian Plain covers most of European Russia. About half of it lies below 200 metres, and its highest point, north-west of Moscow, reaches only 343 metres. North of the latitude of Moscow the ice sheets left moraine ridges behind, the Valdai Hills and the Smolensk Upland among them, standing above low hollows full of lakes and marshes. South of Moscow, rolling plateaus alternate with broad plains: the Central Russian Upland separates the upper Dnieper from the Oka and the Don, and the Volga Hills fall steeply to the Volga. East of the Volga the Caspian Depression drops below sea level. The record puts the country's lowest point on the Caspian Sea at 28 metres below sea level.

Why the Urals divide so little

The Urals are the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia and run about 2,100 kilometres from the Arctic coast to the border with Kazakhstan, continuing into the Arctic Ocean as the islands of Novaya Zemlya. Mount Narodnaya is given as 1,894 metres by Wikipedia and 1,895 by Britannica. The range is a series of broken parallel ridges, and several low passes cut through it, especially between Perm and Yekaterinburg, where the main routes from Europe into Siberia cross. Britannica's judgement is that the Urals do not significantly impede movement.

East of the West Siberian Plain, the Central Siberian Plateau fills most of the ground between the Yenisey and the Lena. Wikipedia gives its plateaus as 320 to 740 metres high, with the Putorana Mountains on its northern edge reaching 1,701 metres in Britannica's figure.

Why Russia's mountains line the south and east

Britannica treats the rest of Russia, about a quarter of its area, as a single region. The high mountain systems along the south and east differ in origin but together form the barrier that closes the country on those two sides.

How the Caucasus and the Altai close the south

The crest of the Caucasus forms the border with Georgia and Azerbaijan, and Mount Elbrus stands just inside it at 5,642 metres, the highest point in the country's record. East of the Caspian the barrier is narrower. The Altai reach 4,500 metres at Belukha on the borders with Kazakhstan and Mongolia, and the V-shaped Western and Eastern Sayan enclose the high Tyva Basin, with subsidiary ranges running north around the Kuznetsk and Minusinsk basins.

Why Lake Baikal fills a crack in the crust

Around Lake Baikal the crust has broken into blocks, and faults separate high plateaus and ranges from deep basins. Britannica puts the floor of the lake at its deepest more than 1,160 metres below sea level and the mountains on its western shore at 2,560 metres, a vertical difference of some 3,700 metres. Wikipedia measures from a different peak, 2,840 metres high, and a lake floor 1,700 metres below sea level, and arrives at more than 4,500 metres. The lake is 636 kilometres long, 50 kilometres wide on average, and covers 31,500 square kilometres, a figure UNESCO gives as 3.15 million hectares. Its maximum depth is 1,620 metres in Britannica and 1,700 metres in UNESCO's description, which also dates the lake at 25 million years and credits it with 20% of the world's unfrozen fresh water. UNESCO calls it "the Galapagos of Russia" for the freshwater fauna its age and isolation have produced.

Where the Pacific edge shakes

East of Baikal the ranges fan out across the ground between the Lena and the Pacific. The Verkhoyansk Mountains rise to 2,389 metres just east of the Lena, and north of this system the swampy Kolyma Lowland faces the Arctic. On the Kamchatka Peninsula the mountains are volcanic, and Klyuchevskaya Sopka reaches 4,750 metres. The volcanic chain continues south-west through the Kuril Islands into Japan. Four of the Kurils are disputed between Russia and Japan, and this catalogue takes no position on them. Kamchatka and the Caucasus are the two centres of seismic activity in the country. In 1995 an earthquake largely destroyed the oil-processing town of Neftegorsk.

Why the cold deepens from west to east

The climate follows from the relief. The mountains in the south and east block warm air from the Indian and Pacific oceans, and the open plains of the west and north let in air from the Atlantic and the Arctic. Distance from the sea over most of the country leaves a humid continental climate across almost all of it except the tundra and the far south-west. In winter the temperature falls both from south to north and from west to east, so the coldest ground in Russia lies deep in the north-east.

In the colder months a high-pressure system, the Siberian anticyclone, settles over north-eastern Siberia and sends out polar air. Britannica gives January averages there below −46 °C and describes the winters as long, severe and almost snowless, with precipitation falling away towards the east. The lowest temperature recorded in the country is given two ways. Wikipedia puts it at −71.2 °C at the Northern Pole of Cold in Sakha. Britannica gives minimum temperatures of −68 °C recorded in Sakha.

Most of the country has two seasons. Spring and autumn are short changes between extremes of cold and heat, January is usually the coldest month (February on the coast) and July the warmest, and summers can be hot even in Siberia. The Arctic coast and islands have a polar climate. In the tundra, summer brings white nights, with dusk at midnight and dawn shortly after, and winter brings days of darkness.

The exceptions sit at the edges. The Black Sea coast of Krasnodar Krai around Sochi and strips of the North Caucasus are humid subtropical, with mild wet winters. The western tip of Kaliningrad Oblast on the Vistula Spit is oceanic. The Lower Volga and the Caspian shore are semi-arid.

What the thaw releases from the frozen ground

Britannica gives the area of permafrost in Russia as about 10 million square kilometres, seven times the drainage basin of the Volga. In European Russia it lies under the tundra and the forest-tundra. In western Siberia it begins along the Yenisey, and east of that river it covers almost everything except southern Kamchatka, Sakhalin and Primorsky Krai. Britannica notes that it makes settlement and road building difficult across very large areas.

The Arctic Council records that the entire North, Siberia and the Russian Far East are lands of traditional Indigenous settlement and that most of it lies on permafrost. Its figures on the change come from the AMAP assessments of Arctic snow, water, ice and permafrost. The 2017 assessment found that near-surface permafrost in the High Arctic and other very cold areas had warmed by more than 0.5 °C since 2007 to 2009, and the layer that thaws each summer deepened in most places where it is monitored. The area of near-surface permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere is projected to fall by 20% by 2040, measured against 2017.

On the Yamal Peninsula, Dr Bogoyavlensky of the Oil and Gas Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences found more than 1,500 lakes there with craters left by gas emissions, and more than 7,000 of the permafrost hills the Nenets call bulgunnyakhs. Some of those hills burst, throwing ice and frozen rock 10 to 20 metres. In 2016 Yamal was quarantined for an outbreak of anthrax, the first there in 75 years, and more than 2,000 reindeer died.

The Arctic Council reports that the fires in Yakutia in August 2021 were "larger than all other fires in the world combined", and that air pollution in Yakutsk that month reached 247 times the WHO guideline. The same year, floods in the Amur Region caused 6 billion roubles of damage. The Arctic Council also notes that mammoth remains are being found more often as the ground thaws. In 2021 a reindeer herder, Konstantin Tusida, found the forelimb bones of a mammoth in a stream near Tambey, flowing into the Yabtayakha River.

How the vegetation belts follow the latitude

Russia's vegetation lies in broad belts running east to west. Britannica lists them from north to south: Arctic desert at the extreme north, then tundra, then the forest zones, which cover about half of the country, then wooded steppe and steppe, and finally small areas of semidesert on the northern shore of the Caspian. Wikipedia adds that every major vegetation zone in the world is present except tropical rainforest.

The tundra covers about 10% of the country, a treeless and marshy plain stretching from the Finnish border to the Bering Strait and south along the Pacific coast to northern Kamchatka. Mosses, lichens, dwarf willows and shrubs grow low above the permafrost, and wild reindeer move across it. Fewer than 1% of Russians live there.

The taiga accounts for more than 60% of Russia in Wikipedia's figure and runs from the western border to the Pacific. In the west, dense spruce and fir on wet ground alternate with pine on lighter soils; east of the Yenisey the climate is more continental and the winters harsher. Its soils are podzols, leached by groundwater close to the surface, and large areas are sphagnum bog. Sable, marten, ermine, moose, brown bear and wolverine live in it.

South of the taiga, a belt of mixed and broadleaf forest forms a triangle, widest on the western border and narrowing towards the Urals, with oak and spruce the main trees. Much of it has been cleared for farming, especially in European Russia. East of the Urals a narrow strip of birch and aspen woodland separates the taiga from the wooded steppe as far as the Altai.

The steppe is a band of treeless grassland reaching from Hungary through Ukraine, southern Russia and Kazakhstan to Manchuria. Wikipedia describes its temperatures, sunshine and moisture as the most favourable in the country for settlement and farming, with the caveat that rainfall varies and droughts occasionally ruin the harvest.

Wikipedia's land-use figures put 46% of Russia under forest and woodland, 8% under arable farming and 4% under permanent pasture.

Where the land lets Russians farm and settle

The same belts decide where the crops are. Britannica's account of Russian farming says the share of land under crops in European Russia rises from virtually none in the North region to about two-thirds in the Central Black Earth region. In West Siberia, East Siberia and the Far East, farming keeps to the southern fringe. Even in West Siberia, where the cultivated strip is widest, crops occupy less than a tenth of the land, and the share becomes negligible further east. Cereals take more than two-thirds of the cropland in most regions and less than half in the damper North-west and Centre, where fodder and livestock count for more. In southern Siberia the crops are wheat, rye, oats and sunflowers. Wikipedia's economy figures put about 13.1% of Russia's land in agricultural use and 7.4% as arable.

People follow the same line. The record gives Russia 146,119,928 inhabitants on 1 January 2025, 75.3% of them urban in 2025, and Moscow 13,274,285 on the same date. Britannica places most of the population in the European part of the country, especially in the fertile region around Moscow. The rivers there have long served as a transport system, linked by short portages and later by canals, and the Volga system carries about two-thirds of Russia's inland waterway traffic in both sources.

Siberia filled slowly. Britannica records that Russian settlement there stayed insignificant until the Trans-Siberian Railroad was built between 1891 and 1905, after which migration came on a large scale. The line runs 9,288 kilometres from Moscow to Vladivostok through Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Irkutsk and along the southern shore of Lake Baikal, keeping to the southern edge of Siberia where the farmland is. Siberia's population remains sparse, more than half urban, and concentrated in the west and south, and its largest cities are Novosibirsk, Omsk and Krasnoyarsk.

The record lists eleven UTC offsets across Russia, from +02:00 in Kaliningrad, a detached oblast on the Baltic bounded by Poland and Lithuania, to +12:00 in Kamchatka and on the Bering Sea.