Russia
The largest country on earth, a vast Eurasian land of many peoples, shaped by Orthodox faith, by a deep and soulful inner life behind a reserved face, by boundless hospitality, and by an incomparable heritage of literature and music. The complete guide.
Russia is the largest country in the world, a vast land spanning eastern Europe and northern Asia across eleven time zones, home to about one hundred and forty-six million people. To understand it, begin with the sheer immensity of the land, which has shaped the whole of Russian life and character; with the many peoples and faiths it contains, bound together by the Russian language and the dominant Russian Orthodox Church; with the deep Orthodox Christian heritage, a thousand years old, that runs through the culture; with the famous Russian soul, the dusha, the deep, emotional, soulful inner life that lies behind a reserved and serious public face; with the boundless hospitality and the deep value placed on family, friendship, and sharing; and with the extraordinary heritage of literature, music, and art that Russia has given the world. From these flow the customs that follow: the warm welcome behind the serious face, the abundant table, the steam of the bath house, the great festivals. This guide walks through each in turn.
Overview
Russia is the largest country on earth by far, a colossal land stretching across the whole top of the world from eastern Europe, across the Ural mountains that divide the continents, and over the vast expanse of Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, spanning eleven time zones and bordering fourteen nations. Within its immense bounds lie almost every kind of land: frozen tundra and endless forest, the great plains and rivers, the steppe, mountains, and the long Siberian wilderness. About one hundred and forty-six million people live there, the great majority of them ethnic Russians, with many other peoples, and most live in the western, European part of the country, in the great cities of Moscow, the capital, and Saint Petersburg, and along the southern belt.
Russia is a federation and a presidential republic, governed from Moscow under a powerful presidency, an arrangement in which central authority has long been strong, as it was through the centuries of the tsars and the Soviet era before. The official language is Russian, written in the Cyrillic alphabet brought with Christianity a thousand years ago, and dozens of other languages are spoken by the many peoples of the federation. The dominant faith is Russian Orthodox Christianity, with a large Muslim minority and others, and the country is heir to a thousand years of history, from medieval Rus through the empire of the tsars and the Soviet Union to the present.
A few deep forces shape life in Russia. There is the sheer immensity of the land, which has marked the whole of Russian life and character. There are the many peoples and faiths, bound by the Russian language and the Orthodox Church. There is the deep Orthodox Christian heritage. There is the famous Russian soul, the deep and emotional inner life behind a reserved face. There is the boundless hospitality and the value placed on family, friendship, and sharing. And there is the incomparable heritage of literature, music, and art. The sections that follow trace these forces and then walk through the customs of daily life.
The immensity of the land
To understand Russia, one must begin with its sheer size, for the vastness of the land is the first and deepest fact of Russian life and has shaped the national character beyond all else. Russia is so large that it is hard to grasp: it covers a ninth of all the land on earth, spans eleven time zones, so that when it is morning in the west it is night in the east, and stretches across nearly half the globe. When it is a single dawn breaking over Moscow, much of the country is already deep in another day. No other nation comes close to this immensity, and it has made Russia a world unto itself.
The land is one of extremes and great spaces. There is the long, hard winter, deep and bitterly cold across most of the country, that has shaped Russian life, food, dress, and spirit, and the short, intense summer; there is the vast forest, the taiga, the largest on earth; the endless plains and the steppe; the great rivers, the Volga above all, the longest in Europe; and beyond the Urals, the enormous expanse of Siberia, rich in resources, harsh in climate, and so vast that most of it is barely peopled. This is a land of distance, cold, and scale on a scale found nowhere else.
The immensity of the land has marked the Russian soul deeply. It has bred a people accustomed to vast distances and to the hardness of nature, with a certain endurance, patience, and fatalism, a capacity to withstand hardship, and a feeling for the boundlessness of the land that runs through Russian literature, music, and the very sense of self. It has made central authority strong, for so vast a realm has always been hard to hold together, and it has given Russians a deep, almost mystical bond with their homeland, the Rodina, the motherland, and its endless spaces. To understand Russia is to begin with the immensity of the land, the first force that has shaped everything else.
Many peoples, one language
Russia is not one people but many, a vast federation of more than a hundred and ninety peoples and ethnic groups gathered within its enormous bounds. The great majority are ethnic Russians, an East Slavic people who give the country its language and its dominant culture, but alongside them live a great many other nations: the Tatars and Bashkirs of the Volga, many of them Muslim; the peoples of the North Caucasus, the Chechens and others; the Buddhist peoples of the south and east, such as the Buryats and Kalmyks; the many indigenous peoples of Siberia and the far north; and many more, each with its own language, faith, and traditions.
What binds this immense diversity together is, above all, the Russian language, the common tongue of the whole federation and the vehicle of its dominant culture, spoken across all eleven time zones and far beyond Russia's borders. Russian is a Slavic language written in the Cyrillic alphabet, which came to the land with Orthodox Christianity a thousand years ago, and it is one of the world's great languages, the tongue of an incomparable literature, closely akin to Ukrainian and Belarusian. Dozens of other languages hold official status in the various republics and regions of the federation, and over a hundred minority tongues are spoken, but Russian is the shared language of all.
This is a country, then, of one dominant people and culture and many others, of Orthodox Christianity and a large Islam and other faiths, of European Russia and Asian Russia, held together within a single vast state. The dominant Russian culture, with its Orthodox heritage, its language, and its traditions, sets the national tone, but the country is genuinely multi-ethnic and multi-faith, and the regions of the Tatars or the Caucasus or Siberia are worlds with their own deep character. To understand Russia is to understand this vast gathering of many peoples and faiths, bound together by the Russian language and the long shared history of the Russian state.
Orthodoxy and the onion domes
At the heart of Russian culture lies the Orthodox Christian faith, which came to the land more than a thousand years ago and has shaped its art, its values, its calendar, and its very identity ever since. By tradition it was in the year 988 that Prince Vladimir of Kiev brought Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine empire to the lands of the Rus, beginning a thousand-year synthesis of Byzantine, Slavic, and Russian culture. From Byzantium came the faith, the Cyrillic alphabet, the tradition of the holy icon, and the magnificent style of church-building that gave Russia its iconic onion-domed churches, crowned with colourful cupolas, of which Saint Basil's in Moscow is the most beloved symbol.
The Russian Orthodox Church has been a powerful force through the whole of Russian history, closely tied to the state and central to national identity, and though it was fiercely suppressed during the Soviet decades, it revived strongly after the fall of communism and stands again as a major presence in Russian life. The faith is woven through the culture in the icons that hang in homes and churches, the great cathedrals, the saints and the holy days, and the deep, mystical, otherworldly strain in Russian spirituality. Today a large majority of Russians identify as Orthodox, though, as in much of Europe, many are believers more in heritage and identity than in regular practice.
Beneath and beside the Orthodox faith run older currents and other religions. The pre-Christian Slavic paganism never wholly vanished, and many old beliefs, customs, and seasonal festivals, the forest and house spirits, the agricultural rites, the deep web of superstition, survived woven into Orthodox practice. And Russia is home to other great faiths: Islam, the second religion, deep-rooted among the Tatars and the peoples of the Caucasus; Buddhism among some southern and eastern peoples; Judaism; and the shamanism of Siberia. Yet Orthodox Christianity remains the dominant faith and the deepest single influence on Russian culture. To understand Russia is to understand the Orthodox Church, the onion domes, the icons, and the thousand-year faith at the core of the national soul.
The Russian soul
Russians speak often of the Russian soul, the dusha, and the phrase points to something real and deep in the national character: a rich, emotional, soulful inner life, a capacity for deep feeling, for melancholy and joy, for spiritual searching and intense friendship, that lies at the very heart of how Russians understand themselves. The Russian soul is felt to be deep, broad, and contradictory, given to extremes of emotion, to suffering and endurance, to profound sincerity and warmth among intimates, and to a searching spiritual and philosophical bent, the very qualities that fill the great Russian novels and music.
This depth of feeling lies behind one of the most striking features of Russian manners: the contrast between a reserved, serious, even severe public face and a warm, emotional private self. To strangers and in public, Russians can seem cool, unsmiling, and reserved, for in Russian culture the easy public smile of some other nations is distrusted as insincere, and one does not smile at strangers or wear one's feelings openly before those one does not know. But this reserve is a surface, behind which lies enormous warmth, for once a Russian admits you to the circle of friends and family, the coldness vanishes and gives way to a deep, generous, emotional warmth, loyalty, and openness.
This is perhaps the single most important thing for an outsider to understand about Russians: that the serious, undemonstrative public manner is not unfriendliness but a cultural reserve, and that beneath it lies a people of great warmth, depth, and feeling. Friendship in Russia is a deep and serious bond, not lightly given but, once given, profound and lasting, marked by total openness, mutual help, and the sharing of one's whole inner life. The famous saying holds that a Russian will share his last piece of bread with a friend. To understand Russia is to understand the dusha, the deep soul behind the serious face, and the profound warmth that waits within.
Greetings and the serious face
Russian greetings reflect the culture's blend of formality with strangers and warmth with intimates. With those they do not know well, Russians greet with a firm handshake, men shaking hands with men, and a polite but reserved, serious manner, without the easy smile that some cultures give to strangers. Among friends and family the greeting is far warmer, with embraces, and kisses on the cheek among close friends and relatives. The greetings come in Russian, a formal zdravstvuyte or a friendly privet among intimates, and Russians address one another formally, using the formal form and, in respectful settings, a person's first name together with their patronymic, the name drawn from their father.
Russian communication is, to outsiders, indirect and high-context in some ways and strikingly direct in others. Russians do not, as a rule, smile at strangers or in public without reason, and a smile given without cause is thought false or foolish, so that the unsmiling public face is normal and not a sign of unfriendliness. Yet Russians can be very direct and frank in speech among those they know, saying plainly what they think, and a certain seriousness and depth marks conversation, which often turns readily to the deep questions of life, politics, art, and the soul that Russians love to discuss.
For a visitor, the keys are to understand the reserve and to respect the formality. Do not expect or give the easy public smile; greet people with a firm handshake and a serious courtesy; use the formal forms and proper names until a warmer footing is reached; and do not mistake the reserved manner for coldness. Once admitted to friendship, all this falls away into deep warmth. A little Russian is much appreciated, and patience, sincerity, and respect open the way. To understand Russia is to understand that the serious face is a surface, and that genuine warmth and depth wait behind it for those who are received as friends.
Hospitality and the laden table
Hospitality is one of the deepest and most cherished of all Russian values, and the welcoming of a guest is something close to sacred. To be a guest in a Russian home is to be received with extraordinary generosity, for the Russian host will lay out everything they have and more, pressing food and drink upon the guest in abundance that can overwhelm the unprepared. The table groans with dishes, the host urges the guest to eat and eat again, and to refuse the offered food and drink, or to fail to do justice to it, can give offence, for the generous feeding of a guest is a profound expression of respect and warmth.
This boundless hospitality flows from the deep Russian value of sharing and from the warmth that lies behind the reserved face. A guest brings honour to the house, and no effort or expense is spared to welcome them, however modest the host's means; indeed the poorer the host, often the more generous the welcome, for to share what one has, even one's last, is a Russian ideal. The guest, in turn, is expected to bring a small gift, flowers, chocolates, or wine, and to accept the hospitality graciously, to eat heartily, and to honour the host by enjoying the feast.
The table is the centre of Russian hospitality and sociability, and a Russian gathering means long hours around it, eating, drinking, and talking deep into the night. The many toasts, often heartfelt and eloquent, raised with vodka or wine, are a central ritual, each marking a wish, a tribute, a sentiment, and the long, warm, expansive conversation that fills the evening is the heart of Russian social life. For a visitor, to be welcomed to a Russian table is to experience one of the warmest hospitalities in the world. To understand Russia is to understand the sacredness of the guest and the boundless generosity of the laden table.
The Russian table
Russian food is hearty, warming, and built for a cold climate and a hard land, drawing on the grains, roots, cabbage, and preserved foods that could sustain life through the long winter. The foundations are simple and beloved: dark rye bread, the staff of Russian life; the potato, cabbage, beetroot, carrot, and onion of the cold-country garden; sour cream, smetana, added to almost everything; mushrooms and berries gathered from the forest; and the preserved and pickled foods, the salted fish, the pickled vegetables, that carried families through winter. From these come the classic dishes the world knows as Russian.
Chief among them is borscht, the famous beetroot soup, deep red and served with sour cream, and the other warming soups; blini, the thin pancakes eaten with sour cream, jam, or caviar; pelmeni, the little meat dumplings; pirozhki, the stuffed buns; kasha, the porridge of buckwheat or other grains; and the array of small dishes, the zakuski, the appetisers of salads, cured fish, pickles, and more that open a proper meal and accompany the drinking. Tea, drunk strong and often, traditionally from the samovar, the urn at the heart of the household, is the great everyday drink, and the old drinks of kvass, the mild fermented bread drink, and above all vodka, hold their place.
Vodka deserves its own word, for it is woven deep into Russian social life, drunk at celebrations and gatherings with food and toasts in a ritual all its own. It is taken neat, in small glasses, downed in one with a toast and followed by a bite of food, a pickle or a piece of bread, and never, by custom, sipped slowly or drunk without a toast or food. The drinking of vodka among friends, with its eloquent toasts and its accompaniment of zakuski, is a cherished ritual of Russian hospitality, though one a visitor is wise to approach with care. To understand Russia is to understand its hearty, warming table, its tea from the samovar, and the ritual of vodka and the toast.
The banya and the dacha
Two beloved institutions stand at the heart of Russian life and leisure: the banya, the Russian bath house, and the dacha, the country cottage. The banya is far more than a place to wash; it is a deep and cherished tradition, a steam bath of intense heat in which Russians gather to sweat, to beat themselves and one another gently with bundles of birch twigs to stir the blood, to plunge into cold water or snow, and to sit and talk and drink tea between rounds of steam. It is at once a cleansing, a health ritual, a deep relaxation, and a profoundly social occasion, a place where friends gather and bonds are made, and it is loved across all of Russia.
The dacha, the country house or cottage, is the other great refuge of Russian life. A great many Russian families, especially of the cities, have a dacha, a modest country place with a garden, to which they escape from the city through the summer and on weekends, to grow vegetables and fruit, to gather mushrooms and berries from the forest, to relax and breathe country air, and to gather with family and friends. The dacha and its garden are deeply woven into Russian life, a connection to the land, a source of food and rest, and a cherished setting for the summer life of the family, with roots reaching back centuries.
Both the banya and the dacha express something deep in Russian culture: the love of nature and the countryside, the importance of family and friendship and shared leisure, and the value of the simple, restorative pleasures of the steam, the garden, and the gathering. For a visitor, to be invited to a Russian banya or to a family dacha is a real honour and a window into the warm private heart of Russian life. To understand Russia is to understand the steam of the bath house and the garden of the country cottage, two of the most cherished settings of Russian life and friendship.
Family and the babushka
The family lies at the very heart of Russian life, a deep and enduring source of love, support, and belonging, and Russian family bonds are famously strong and close. The ties between the generations run especially deep, and it is common for extended families to live close together or even under one roof, with grandparents playing a large and cherished role in family life. Above all there is the babushka, the grandmother, a figure of immense importance and affection in Russian culture, who often helps raise the grandchildren, runs the household, and holds the family together with her care, her cooking, and her wisdom, and her counterpart the dedushka, the grandfather.
Family life is warm, close, and central, and Russians genuinely love to spend time together, gathering for meals, holidays, and celebrations, so that to spend an evening alone in one's room is uncommon in a culture so given to togetherness. The great holidays and family occasions, the New Year above all, the birthdays, the name days, bring the family together around a laden table for the eating, drinking, and warm conversation that are the heart of Russian sociability. Children are deeply loved and central to family life, and much is invested in their care and education.
Russian society places great value on community and togetherness as well, captured in old ideas of communal harmony and the deep bonds of friendship that function almost as family. Modern life has brought change, with smaller families, the strains of economic hardship in recent decades, and a low birth rate that has concerned the nation, yet the family remains the bedrock of Russian life and the deepest source of belonging and support, far beyond what the state provides. To understand Russia is to understand the central place of the family, the cherished babushka, and the deep bonds of kin and friendship that sustain Russian life.
New Year, Maslenitsa, and the feasts
The Russian year is rich with festivals, woven from the Orthodox calendar, the seasons, the Soviet inheritance, and the deep love of celebration. The greatest holiday of all is the New Year, which in Russia far outshines Christmas as the central winter festival, a legacy of the Soviet decades when religious Christmas was suppressed and the secular New Year took its place. It is a magical family celebration with a decorated tree, the gift-bringing figure of Grandfather Frost, Ded Moroz, and his granddaughter the Snow Maiden, a great feast, and revelry at midnight, the warm heart of the Russian winter.
The Orthodox feasts hold their own deep place, kept by the old church calendar that runs days behind the Western one. Orthodox Christmas falls on the seventh of January, a quieter, more religious occasion than the New Year, marked by fasting, the Christmas Eve Holy Supper, and the midnight liturgy; and Orthodox Easter, Paskha, is the greatest religious feast of all, celebrated with the midnight service, the joyful greeting of the risen Christ, and the special foods, the sweet bread and the cheese paskha and the painted eggs. The old folk festivals endure too, above all Maslenitsa, the joyful pancake week before the Lenten fast, when Russians eat blini, the round golden symbols of the sun, see out the winter, and burn a straw effigy in a great bonfire.
The modern calendar adds its own holidays, several from the Soviet era: the Defender of the Fatherland Day in February, honouring the military and men; International Women's Day in March, when women receive flowers and gifts; the Labour Day holidays of early May; and, greatest of the national days, Victory Day on the ninth of May, which commemorates the immense Soviet sacrifice and triumph in the Second World War, a war that cost Russia more than any other nation, marked with great parades and deep national feeling. Through all the festivals run the Russian love of the family gathering, the laden table, and the deep emotion of celebration. To understand Russia is to understand its feasts, from the magical New Year to the solemn Victory Day.
Weddings and the milestones of life
The great milestones of life in Russia are marked with warmth, ceremony, and the gathering of family and friends, woven from Orthodox tradition, old custom, and modern practice. Birth and the naming of a child, and, for the Orthodox, baptism in the church, bring the family together, and childhood's milestones, above all the start and finish of schooling, are marked with real feeling, the first day of school in September and the graduation a cherished family occasion.
The wedding is the great celebration. A Russian wedding traditionally includes the civil ceremony at the registry office, which makes the marriage official, and, for the devout, an Orthodox church ceremony with its beautiful rite of crowning, followed by a long, lavish, and joyful feast of food, drink, toasts, music, and dancing that can run for a day or more. Old customs surround it: the visiting of war memorials and famous places by the wedding party, the eloquent toasts, the cries of gorko, meaning bitter, that call on the couple to kiss and sweeten the moment, the abundance and warmth of the celebration. Russian weddings are generous, festive, and full of feeling.
Death is marked in the Orthodox way, with its solemn rites, and with deep customs of mourning and remembrance: the funeral, the gathering of family and friends, the memorial meals held at set times after the death, and the visiting and tending of graves, especially in the spring, when families go to the cemeteries to remember and honour their dead. Through the milestones of life, from baptism to funeral, run the enduring threads of Russian culture: the central place of family and friendship, the rites of the Orthodox faith, the warmth of the gathering, and the love of the abundant, emotional celebration. To understand Russia is to understand these milestones, where family and faith mark the passage of every Russian life.
Customs, superstitions, and what to avoid
Russian life is woven through with a rich body of custom and superstition, old beliefs that survive from pre-Christian times and are widely observed, half in earnest, half in habit, even by the modern and educated. Many Russians will not shake hands or pass anything across a threshold, for it is thought to bring bad luck; will sit down quietly for a moment before setting out on a journey; will not whistle indoors, for it is said to whistle away one's money; will avoid praising a person, a plan, or good fortune too openly, lest it be jinxed, and may knock on wood or spit lightly over the shoulder to ward off the bad luck of a boast. These customs are taken seriously and worth respecting.
Other customs govern the giving of gifts and flowers. Flowers are given in odd numbers, for an even number is brought only to funerals and the dead; certain flowers and colours carry their own meanings. A gift should be given and received graciously, and a guest never arrives empty-handed. When entering a Russian home, one removes one's shoes at the door, often putting on slippers offered by the host, for shoes are not worn through the house. These are small things, but they matter, and the visitor who observes them shows respect.
In manner and conduct, the keys are the seriousness and reserve already noted: one does not smile without cause at strangers, does not show off or boast, and is direct and sincere rather than effusive. Respect is shown to elders, and the formal forms of address are used until friendship is reached. Public behaviour tends to be more reserved and serious than in some Western cultures. For a visitor, the way to get on is to observe the customs, respect the superstitions, behave with sincerity and dignity, and meet the reserve with patience, knowing the warmth that lies behind it. To understand Russia is to understand its rich web of custom and superstition and the seriousness with which the surface of life is conducted.
Literature, music, and the arts
Few nations have given the world so much great art as Russia, and the love of literature, music, and the arts runs deep in the national soul. Russian literature stands among the supreme achievements of humanity, above all in the great age of the nineteenth century, when Pushkin, the founder and beloved father of Russian letters, was followed by the towering novelists Tolstoy, whose War and Peace and Anna Karenina are among the greatest novels ever written, and Dostoevsky, whose dark, searching works plumb the depths of the human soul, along with Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, and a host of others. These writers gave the world an art of extraordinary psychological and spiritual depth, and they are revered in Russia as national treasures.
In music Russia is equally a giant. The great composers, Tchaikovsky above all, beloved for his symphonies, concertos, and ballets, along with Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and many more, gave the world some of its most powerful and beautiful music. And Russia is the home of classical ballet at its supreme height, the art of the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky theatres, of dancers and choreographers who set the world standard, a national art of dazzling discipline and beauty in which Russia has long led the world.
The visual and folk arts are rich too: the ancient tradition of the holy icon, with its golden, otherworldly beauty; the revolutionary Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century, Kandinsky, Malevich, and others, who reshaped modern art; and the beloved folk crafts, the nested matryoshka dolls, the gold-and-black Khokhloma painting, the blue-and-white Gzhel ceramics, the lacquered boxes, the painted trays. The Russians cherish their cultural inheritance deeply, filling theatres, concert halls, and museums, and holding their great writers and composers as national heroes. To understand Russia is to understand the incomparable depth of its literature, music, and art, perhaps the nation's greatest gift to the world.
The Soviet century and after
No account of modern Russia can pass over the Soviet century, the seventy years of communist rule that transformed the country and whose legacy shapes Russian life to this day. After the revolution of 1917 overthrew the tsars, Russia became the heart of the Soviet Union, a vast communist state that industrialised at terrible human cost, endured the immense suffering and ultimate triumph of the Second World War, became one of the two superpowers of the twentieth century, and reached into space, sending the first human into orbit. It was also an era of dictatorship, of repression and the labour camps, of the suppression of religion and free thought, and of profound hardship alongside genuine achievement.
The Soviet era left deep marks on the Russian character and way of life, marks still visible especially in the older generation: habits of caution and reserve formed under a watchful state; a deep valuing of education, culture, and the arts, which the Soviet system fostered; the experience of shortage and the arts of making do; a certain collective spirit alongside a wariness of authority; and the enormous, defining memory of the war, the Great Patriotic War, in which the Soviet peoples bore the heaviest losses of any nation and won the victory now commemorated each year with deep emotion on Victory Day.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the years that followed brought wrenching change: the loss of empire and superpower status, a chaotic and painful transition from the planned to the market economy, hardship, upheaval, and a search for a new national identity, followed by a reassertion of central authority and national pride. Modern Russia carries the whole of this long inheritance, the tsarist, the Soviet, and the post-Soviet, in its institutions, its memory, and its sense of itself. To understand Russia today is to understand the Soviet century that shaped the living generations and the complex, contested legacy it left behind.
The nation today
Russia today is the largest country in the world, a federation of about one hundred and forty-six million people spanning eastern Europe and northern Asia across eleven time zones, with its capital at Moscow. It is a presidential republic with a strong central authority, heir to the long traditions of powerful rule that have marked Russia through the eras of the tsars and the Soviet Union. Its official language is Russian, its dominant faith Russian Orthodox Christianity, and its people a vast gathering of more than a hundred and ninety ethnic groups bound within a single state. It is a major world power, rich in natural resources, with vast reserves of oil, gas, minerals, and timber.
Modern Russia is a country of sharp contrasts: of great wealth and deep inequality; of sophisticated, cosmopolitan cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg above all, and a vast, poorer countryside; of a highly educated and cultured population and serious economic and demographic challenges, including a low birth rate and an ageing, declining population. Its relations with much of the wider world have grown deeply strained in recent years, above all over its war in Ukraine, which has brought heavy international sanctions and a profound rupture with the West, reshaping the country's economy, politics, and place in the world. These are matters of grave consequence and intense international concern.
Through all its modern turns, Russia holds firmly to the deep identity that defines it. The immensity of the land still shapes the national soul; the many peoples remain bound by the Russian language and the Orthodox heritage; the deep faith, the onion domes, and the icons endure; the famous Russian soul, the warmth behind the reserve, the boundless hospitality, the love of family and friendship, remains as strong as ever; and the incomparable inheritance of literature, music, and art is cherished as the nation's glory. To know Russia is to meet one of the world's great and complex nations, a vast Eurasian land of deep soul, hard history, and extraordinary cultural riches, ever a world unto itself.