Russia

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Russia is large enough that the fact most needs a comparison to land. At roughly 17 million square kilometers, it's the largest country on Earth by a wide margin, nearly twice the area of Canada, the next largest, and it spans eleven time zones, from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, wedged between Poland and Lithuania, to Chukotka in the far northeast, closer to Alaska than to Moscow. Flying from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast covers roughly 6,430 kilometers, about the same distance as flying from London to New York, entirely within one country's borders. Most of that vast territory, everything east of the Ural Mountains, sits geographically in Asia and is thinly populated, Siberian taiga and tundra with a scattering of resource-extraction cities; the country's political and demographic weight sits overwhelmingly in the much smaller European third, where Moscow, St. Petersburg and the great majority of the population live. Russia is, geographically, a European capital governing an Asian landmass, which is exactly why this atlas records it as on-continent both Europe and Asia rather than choosing one.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

This atlas records 1991 as Russia's founding year, the year the Soviet Union dissolved and the Russian Federation became the state whose borders, population and government exist today. That date is honest about the current state and honest about almost nothing else. Moscow first appears in the historical record in 1147, in a monastic chronicle describing a banquet the prince of Suzdal hosted there, a traditional founding date for the city even though archaeology shows people had already been living on the site since the Neolithic. Moscow grew into the seat of its own principality, then the capital of Muscovy by the late thirteenth century, then the Tsardom of Russia under Ivan the Terrible in 1547, then lost its status as capital when Peter the Great moved the seat of government to St. Petersburg in 1712, nine years before the Tsardom was proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721, so St. Petersburg, not Moscow, was already the Empire's capital from the very start; the capital returned to Moscow only on 12 March 1918. Soviet rule followed in 1922, then the Russian Federation in 1991. Six names, six governments, one continuously inhabited capital region: 1991 answers only the narrowest possible version of when Russia began, a single state's founding date, and no more than that.