RUSSIA Overview

RUSSIA'S President: Vladimir Putin


A/Physical Aspect of Russia
In terms of territory, Russia is the world's largest country. With a total area of 17,075,200 kilometers (6,592,735 square miles), Russia covers about one-eighth of the world's land surface. Russia is 60 percent larger than the world's second-largest country, Canada. But, like Canada, much of Russia's territory is located above the 50th parallel, where subarctic and arctic weather conditions are prevalent.
Russia stretches from its westernmost point in the city of Kaliningrad, just north of Warsaw, Poland, to its easternmost point at Big Diomede Island in the Bering Strait. Within eyesight is Little Diomede Island, belonging to the United States just off the coast of Alaska's Seward Peninsula. Russia's great breadth of territory includes many different geographical regions. These include areas of permafrost (areas of eternal ice) in Siberia and the Far North as well as taiga and steppes (vast grassland). Much of Russia's northern and eastern coastline is hemmed in by ice for much of the year, complicating navigation. However, Russia has year-round warm water seaports at Murmansk on its northwestern coastline of the Barents Sea and at Vladivostok at the far eastern coast on the Sea of Japan.
B/Population
Russia's population is predominantly urban, with 73% of its population of 141,903,979 citizens residing in urban areas.^[2] Russia has experienced a population loss of about 5 million since it peaked shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. Currently, population growth is nearly stagnant, with an overall growth rate of -0.02% since the start of 2009.^[3]
The United States Census Bureau estimates that Russia's population will decline from the current 143 million to a mere 111 million by 2050, a loss of more than 30 million people and a decrease of more than 20%.

Roughly 80 percent of Russia's population is ethnic Russian. The remaining 20 percent is made up of a wide variety of ethnic groups including Tatar, Ukrainian, Belarussian, Moldavian, Kazakh, and many others.The country was made up of more than 100 ethnic or "national" groups. About three-fourths of the population of Russia is urban. Moscow, Russia's capital and largest city, is home to some 9 million people. Russia has a well-educated population with near universal literacy.

Previously Russia was the world's sixth most populous country, following China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil.

C/Regime Type

In accounting for why Russia stood on the brink of disintegration in the 1990s, most analysts neglected to account for why it managed to hold together. The tools developed for understanding regionalism in Russia left little room for explaining (much less predicting) how regional mobilization against the state might be contained or even reversed. In this regard, Vladimir Putin’s rule has been striking for the speed and apparent ease with which the Kremlin managed to tame the regions. And contrary to expectations, regional leaders greeted the increasingly authoritarian re-centralization of power in the Kremlin not with jeers, but with applause. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in four Russian regions, the paper argues that the tide of regionalism was reversed by the activation of integrative practices along Russia’s internal borders. The research makes an original contribution to the empirical literature on post-Soviet politics in accounting for the puzzling success of the Kremlin’s regional policy under Putin. It further contributes to the theoretical understanding of borders in political science by conceptualizing the relationship of internal borders to regime type and processes of state formation.