Russia

Russia's story runs from Kievan Rus' — a medieval realm whose legacy Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all claim — through Mongol domination, the rise of Moscow, and the first tsar, Ivan the Terrible, to the Romanov dynasty from 1613. Peter the Great turned the country toward Europe and built St Petersburg; Catherine the Great expanded the empire; and the nineteenth century brought the defeat of Napoleon, the end of serfdom, and expansion across the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia to the Pacific.

The revolutions of 1917 ended the monarchy and brought the Bolsheviks to power, followed by civil war and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922. Stalin's forced collectivisation and its famines, the Gulag, and the Great Terror preceded the enormous sacrifice and victory of the "Great Patriotic War", in which some 27 million Soviet citizens died — a memory now central to national identity. Cold War superpower decades followed, and then Gorbachev's reforms, which led to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

The chaotic 1990s under Yeltsin brought privatisation, the oligarchs, a collapse in living standards, the first Chechen war, and the 1998 default, and then the rise of Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB officer made acting president on the last day of 1999. Over two decades, an oil-and-gas windfall funded rising living standards while independent media, courts, elections, and civil society were hollowed out, and Russia fought wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine and intervened in Syria. On 24 February 2022 it launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest war in Europe since 1945, which has brought an ICC arrest warrant for Putin, an unprecedented wall of Western sanctions, a partial mobilisation that drove hundreds of thousands to flee, sweeping wartime censorship, the death of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison in 2024, and a deepening alignment with China, Iran, and North Korea.

Russian high culture casts a long shadow — the novels of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov; the poetry of Pushkin; the music of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich; the Bolshoi and Mariinsky ballet; and the icon painting and onion-domed churches of an Orthodox Christianity long bound to the state.

Everyday culture prizes deep, unshowy friendship over surface warmth, endurance and irony in the face of hardship, and rituals of hospitality around the table — tea from a samovar, zakuski appetisers, and toasts. The dacha, a modest country cottage and garden, is where much of urban Russia spends the summer, and the wood-fired banya steam bath is a social institution.

Victory Day and the memory of the war are sacralised, with "Immortal Regiment" marches of families carrying portraits of relatives who fought. Since 2022, culture has been increasingly bent to the war effort, dissenting artists have left or been silenced, and a "traditional values" campaign has hardened the repression of LGBT people and of independent expression.

About three-quarters of Russians live in cities, concentrated in European Russia west of the Urals, with Moscow — wealthy, fast, expensive, and heavily surveilled — in a class of its own, and St Petersburg, the imperial capital, its cultured rival. East of the Urals, Siberia and the Far East hold vast territory and few people, in cities strung along the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Living standards rose substantially in the 2000s but stagnated after 2014 and have been reshaped by the war: a defence-driven boom in industrial regions and for soldiers' families, labour shortages and high wages in some sectors, alongside the exit of Western brands, higher prices, and the emigration of many educated young people. Outside the big cities, incomes are far lower and the population is ageing and shrinking.

Life is lived under a pervasive, and since 2022 sharply tightened, set of controls on speech, assembly, media, and movement, with the war a constant if unevenly felt presence.

Russian cooking is built for a cold climate: soups, grains, root vegetables, cabbage, dill, sour cream, and preserved and pickled foods. Borsch, a beetroot soup that originates in Ukraine, and shchi, a cabbage soup, are the classic first courses, followed by pelmeni meat dumplings, beef stroganoff, stuffed cabbage rolls, and blini pancakes with caviar, smoked fish, or curd — eaten in vast quantities at Maslenitsa before Lent.

Zakuski — pickled cucumbers and mushrooms, herring "under a fur coat", cured fish, salads, and black bread — open a proper meal, alongside vodka and toasts. Kasha grain porridge, cold okroshka soup in summer, and stuffed pirozhki buns are everyday food. Tea drunk strong with jam, and mildly fermented rye kvass, are the traditional non-alcoholic staples.

Moscow's Red Square, ringed by the Kremlin walls, the candy-coloured domes of St Basil's Cathedral, and Lenin's mausoleum, is the symbolic centre of the country, with the Tretyakov Gallery, the palatial metro, and the Bolshoi nearby. St Petersburg, built on the Neva by Peter the Great, is a Baroque and Neoclassical city of canals and palaces — the Hermitage in the Winter Palace, the gilded Peterhof fountains, the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood — best seen in the near-endless light of the June "White Nights".

The "Golden Ring" of old towns northeast of Moscow — Sergiev Posad, Suzdal, Vladimir, Yaroslavl — preserves medieval Russia. The Trans-Siberian Railway is the classic long journey, across the Urals and the taiga to Lake Baikal, the deepest and oldest lake on Earth, and on to Vladivostok on the Pacific.

Beyond lie the volcanoes and bears of Kamchatka, the Arctic tundra, the Caucasus mountains and the Black Sea resorts around Sochi, and the Muslim-Tatar city of Kazan on the Volga. All of this, at present, sits behind the strong advice against travel.