Russia
• Territorially Russia is the world’s largest state
• The Northern most country in the world
• Three times size of the United States, and China
• It stretches across 11 time zones

Size, Location and Space Relationships
Latitudinal extent
• More than 75% of Russia lies pole-wards of the 49th parallel (north of the U.S.-Canadian boundary).
• Moscow is farther north than Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.


Longitudinal extent
• Longitudinal extent
More than twice its maximum north-south extent and extends through 11 time zones
• Russia makes up 76.6% of the total territory of the former USSR (almost twice the size of the US).

Russia

• The capital is Moscow.
• St. Petersburg an important administrative, business and cultural center
• Russia has more than one thousand cities and towns.
• The largest cities,
• Moscow (more than 9 million people),
• St. Petersburg -4.7 million people),

Climate

What is climate?
CLIMATOLOGY
• Climate
qAverage weather conditions for a given area over an extended period of time

Weather
• Weather
q The atmospheric conditions at a specific place and time
Climatology
• Climatology
qA branch of physical geography
qConcerned with Spatial arrangement of climate over the surface of the earth and the processes which contribute to the distribution

Russia: Climate
Latitudinal Position:
• Only small parts of Russia are south of latitude 50°
• More than half of the country is north of 60° north latitude,
• Extensive regions experience six months of snow cover over subsoil.
• Permafrost- as far as several hundred meters.


Continental Position
• Russia has a largely continental climate because of its sheer size and compact configuration.
• Most of its land is more than 400 kilometers from the sea, and the center is 3,840 kilometers from the sea.

Continental Extent
LOCATION OF MAJOR MOUNTAINS

• Russia's mountain ranges, predominantly to the south and the east, block moderating temperatures from the Indian and Pacific oceans

Russia: Brief History

• The Tzars laid the foundation for the Russian empire. Under the Tzars, Russia grew from nation into empire
• Russia’s empire expanded and had territories as far as Alaska and San Francisco in North America


Fall of the Tzar
• Internal weaknesses (such as peasant rebellion, unpaid and poorly fed armies) affected the power of the czars
• The Tzar empire began to fall at the beginning of the twentieth century ( 1905)
• Nicholas II- the last Tzar was overthrown in 1917
• The Tzar and his family were executed
The Soviet Union
• The old capital of Russia- St Petersburg, was renamed Leningrad in honor of the revolutionary leader
• Moscow was chosen as the new capital for a country with a new name, the Soviet Union
• The Union consisted of 15 political entities, each a Socialist Republic.
• Russia was one of these republics
• The other Republics were minorities that were colonized by the Tzars

Former Soviet Union
The Soviet Economic Framework
• Founding of the soviet union was accompanied by an economic experiment- From Czarist autocratic capitalism to Communism
• 1920 onwards,
• The soviet planner had two principal objectives:
• To accelerate industrialization
• To collectivize agriculture
Soviet collectivize agriculture
• Agriculture was organized into huge state-run enterprise
• Holdings of large landowners were expropriated
• Private farms were taken away from farmers
• Lands were consolidated into collective farms
• Sovkhoz was the initial idea- literally means a grain and meat factory in which agriculture was highly mechanized with minimum labor requirement
• The objective was to free hundreds of thousands of workers to labor in factories
• This idea was opposed by many farmers


• In the 1930s in an effort to clump down the protesters of his Sovkhoz concept, Stalin confisticated Ukraine’s agriculture outputs, sealed the part of the border between Russia and Ukraine,.
• This led to a famine that killed millions of farmers and their families
• It is estimated that 30 to 60 million people lost their lives from imposed starvation, political purges and forced relocation
The soviet command economy
• The state assigned the production of particular manufactures to particular places, often disregarding the rule of economic geography
Impact
• Manufacturing became extremely expensive
• In the absence of competition, managers became complacent
• Workers became less productive

The Soviet Union
• Total electrification of the country. The Plan was developed in 1920 and covered a ten to 15 year period
• One party system to ensure capitalist exploitation would not return to the Soviet Union
• Lenin Died in 1924 and replaced by Joseph Stalin
Stalin’s Soviet
• Introduced the First Five-Year Plan for building a socialist economy
• The state assumed control over all existing enterprises
• In agriculture, collective farms were established all over the country
• Resistance from Wealthy farmers led to famine and starvation
• Stalin poised to eliminate “old Bolsheviks”

Stalin’s soviet
• Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953.
• Nikita Khrushchev, won the power struggle by the mid-1950s
• denounced Stalin's use of repression in 1956 and eased repressive controls over party and society known as: de-Stalinization
• He was removed from power in 1964

Mikhail Gorbachev
• Beginning in 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev made significant changes in the economy
• Policy of glasnost freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship.
• In the late 1980s, the constituent republics of the Soviet Union started legal moves towards or even declaration of sovereignty over their territories
Soviet Transformation
• In 1989, Russia, which was then the largest constituent republic convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies
• Boris Yeltsin was elected the chairman of the Congress.
• On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory
Referendum
• A referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on March 17, 1991- majority for preservation of the union
• Attempted coup.
• Gorbechev lost control
• Yeltsin became more powerful
• In August, 1991, Latvia and Estonia declared independence following Lithuania in 1990

Fall of USSR
• On December 8, 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), in its place
• December 25th 1991, Gorbechev resigned as president of USSR. Turned power to Boris Yeltsin, president of Russia


Russia
Russia Frontiers


• Russia shares boundaries with 12 countries
- Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Mongolia, North Korea, China, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia

Urban Geography
• About 73% urbanized
• Urbanization in Russia is a development of the twentieth century. EX.
– 1920s: less than one-fifth of the population was urbanized
– 1940s: one-third of the population was classified as urban.
– 1960: just under one-half of the population (then 210,000,000) lived in cities and towns.

Settlement Patterns
• Population concentration in the west and southwest, where the climatic conditions are least difficult.
• The former Soviet Union encouraged people to move eastward.
• About 25,000,000 people migrated internally from west to east, causing rapid growth in some difficult environments, like Sakha (Yakutiya).
•


Russians in North America
• Alaska.
• U.S. Secretary of State William Seward bought Alaska from the government of Russia for $7.2 million –
• “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Icebox.”
• Seward has been vindicated as Alaska’s wealth in gold and petroleum have been discovered, as well as it’s strategic location for U.S. defense.

Russia: People and Language
Russia
• The population is as varied as the terrain.
• Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians) are the most numerous of the more than 100 European and Asiatic nationalities.
Russia: People and Language

• There are 145 million people constantly living in Russia. They are represented by more than 100 nationalities speaking their own languages.
• Tatars (3.8%),
• Ukrainians (3%),
• Chuvashs (1.2%),
• Bashkirs (0.9%),
• Byelorussians (0.8%),
• Mordvinians (0.7%), Germans and Chechens (0.6% each), Avarians, Armenians, Jews (0.4% each) and other people.
•

Population ctn.
• Russian population is declining; from 147,300,000 in 1997, down to 145,500,000 in 2002
• It is projected that there will be only 100million Russian citizens by the year 2050
• Life expectancy has declined from 64 years ( 10 years ago) to now 54 years for males
• 74 years for females to 72 for females
What are the causes of Russia’s Population decline?
Major causes of Russia’s population decline
• Incidence of infectious diseases like Tuberculosis affects more than 200,000.
• Alcohol consumption – accidents
• Deaths from circulatory diseases, often associated with stress, -following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Russia: declining population: causes
• Almost five million Russians were killed during the collectivization period of the early 1930s because of famines and state directed killings.

• World War I, its aftermath of civil war and the attendant famines killed 17 million Russians and about eight million deficit births (i.e., births that would have taken place, but did not due to the dramatic reduction in population.
Aging Population of Russia, what are the implications on Socio-economic development?


Russia’ Prospect
The heartland Theory
• Mackinder noted that large areas subject to penetration along river routes were vulnerable to a strong maritime power.

• Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) theorized that, western Russia and Eastern Europe enjoyed a combination of natural protection and resource wealth that would someday propel its occupants to world power
• A large area of Eurasia, not penetrated by navigable rivers, would be safe as a fortress and thus, able to develop strength in its secure isolation.

• This Pivot Area, was located in western Russia, stretching from the Moscow Basin, Across the Volga Valley and the Urals into central Siberia.

• The pivot area would be of crucial significance in the political geography of the 20th century;
• any power based in the pivot area could gain strength sufficient to eventually rule the world:

The Heartland theory

• He Who rules East Europe commands the heartland
– He Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island
– He Who rules the World Island commands the World


Critics of the theory
• Nicholas Spykman in 1944 emphasized the role of the Rimland in controlling the heartland.
• He calculated that Eurasia's periphery, not its core held the key to global power
• Spykman foresaw the rise of rimland states as superpowers and viewed Japan’s emergence to wealth and power as just the beginning of that process
Chechnya

• Chechnya is a predominantly Muslim republic that
• resisted Russian colonization in the nineteenth century.
• During the rule of Stalin, Chechens were exiled to Siberia because they collaborated with the Nazis.
• They were allowed to return by Khrushchev in the 1950s.

Chechen
• Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Chechen fought the Russians to a stalemate.
• For economic and political reasons, Moscow has never granted Chechnya its independence

Chechnya
• Since 1994, there has been a state of warfare between Chechen rebels and Russian troops..

• On Oct. 23, 2002, Chechen rebels seized a crowded Moscow theater and detained 763 people, including 3 Americans.

• Russian Government forces stormed the theater the next day, after releasing a gas into the theater, which killed not only all the terrorists, but more than 100 of the hostages.

Other countries in the Region
1. Armenia
2. Georgia
3. Azerbaijan


Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan
Transcaucasia Transition Zone
• Armenia:
– Is a landlocked country that occupies some of the earthquake prone regions of Transcaucasia.
– It is the smallest of the three countries of the TTZ.

Armenia
– Armenia is rich in mineral and produces a variety of fruits and vegetables. It has a plentiful supply of hydroelectric power.
– Yerevan, the capital city, is within sight of the Turkish border.



Transcaucasian Transition Zone
• Azerbaijan
– Azerbaijan is the largest in area and population of the three TTZ countries.
– Predominantly Shi’ite Muslim (like Iran),
– Azerbaijan is rich in oil from the oilfields in the region of the county’s capital, Baki (Baku).
Azerbaijan

• Georgia

– The capital city is Tbilisi.
– The country has 4,700,000 people, 70% of whom are Georgian. Minorities include Armenians (9%); Russian (7%); Azeris (5%) and smaller proportions of Ossetians,and Abkhazians.