Russia

M a s s i v e^{[note 1]}

Russia

Demographics
Population:	145,478,097
GDP (million):	1,647,568
GDP p/cap.:	11,273
Life expectancy:	73.2
Development Index:	0.824

Government
Democracy Index:	3.24
Corruption Index:	29

More
Education Index:	0.823
Religiosity:	34

Russia, officially the Russian Federation (Russian: Российская Федерация tr: Rossiyskaya federatsiya), is where invasions go to die (unless you're the Mongols). It's the largest country globally, situated between Europe and Asia, or making up most of Europe, or taking up all of Northern Asia — or all of the above. Take your pick; Siberia makes this all way too complicated.

As the successor to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation includes 89 federal subjects (48 oblasts, 24 republics, 9 krais, 4 autonomous okrugs, 3 federal cities, and 1 autonomous oblast), of which 6 are internationally recognized as part of Ukraine. This is even more complicated than it sounds. Imagine if the US had 89 states that occasionally had shooting wars; 6 of those 89 were legally Mexican or Canadian; of those 6, 4 were active warzones whose de jure country still partly controlled them and was fighting to get them back; and said de jure country occasionally attacked military installations and illegal infrastructure in the other 2.

Demographics[edit]

Despite Russia housing hundreds of ethnic groups, those are mainly concentrated in semi-autonomous republics. Russia is overwhelmingly Slavic, and shared Russian and Slavic identity is a core part of its fabric. This consists of a shared love of borscht, pickles, black bread, vodka, cigarettes and Adidas tracksuits,^[7] and a shared sense of existential despair.

The Soviet Union was hit particularly hard by World War II. Something like 26 million people died between 1941-45. Russia and other countries of the former USSR still have an imbalance in gender as a result.^[8]

41 of Russia's over one hundred ethnic groups are legally recognized as “Indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North, Siberia, and the Far East.” To receive legal protection, these people must number less than 50,000 people, maintain a traditional way of life, and inhabit separate territories. 24 larger ethnic groups were identified as national identities but did not qualify for assistance. Unemployment in Indigenous populations is 1.5-2 times higher, and incomes are 2-3 times lower than other Russians, with over a decade's difference in life expectancy for men and women.^[9]

Flag[edit]

The Russian flag comprises three colors:

1. White represents the nation's broad ethnic diversity, which runs the gamut from vanilla to ivory.
2. Blue, for the color to which your sensitive areas turn during winter.
3. Red, for the blood of the nation's ethical journalists and opposition politicians whose gruesome murders the Kremlin had nothing to do with. ;-)

But seriously: Red symbolises (Moscow) Russia, White symbolizes (Belarus) Russia, Blue symbolizes (Ukraine) Russia.

The Eastern Front[edit]

Soviet soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad.

As the Mongols discovered, you have to raze Russia to the ground to get a surrender out of them. The Khans paid attention to their supply lines and exploited advantages in the weather (which turned the rivers into Mongol highways). They also got lucky that Russia was a disunited mess at that point; it didn't expand past the Urals until the 1400-1500s.

Napoleon found his grip on Europe weakening thanks to Spain and was in search of a significant symbolic victory over Russia. His first objective was to take Vilnius. When he took Vilnius without having fought the Russian army, he decided to move straight into Russian territory in Moscow's direction, hoping that this would cause Alexander to bend his knee. Napoleon's subordinates urged him to halt and dig in for the winter, but Napoleon saw this as admitting defeat, so he marched on. ("Avant deux mois, la Russie me demandera la paix.") The massive amount of terrain to conquer using trench warfare and the oncoming Rasputitsa made Napoleon's defeat almost inevitable, as the Russians only needed to stall. He lost most of his 600,000 men to the arduous pursuit, starvation, exhaustion, and garrison duty.^{[note 2]}

Hitler had similar delusions, and on the anniversary of Napoleon's statement, he began the "European crusade against Bolshevism" (Ole Dolfy thought that all Slavs were inferior). Beyond Nazi propaganda, the view of the Soviet army as a ramshackle mob wasn't helped by the first year of the German invasion when the Soviets had few officers because of Stalin's purges and their under-equipped rookies were swept aside. The Soviets lost about 8-10 million versus 5.5 million Germans, which led to the whole "USSR won through bodies" myth - similar to views of Robert E. Lee fighting the Union and Grant (Grant only won by "throwing bodies" at the rebels, while Lee was a tactical genius and a good man fighting for a bad cause, etc.). This, however, only accounts for about the first 1/3rd of the war. The Soviet army, for the other 2/3rds of the war, was a very different beast. All those elite Wehrmacht pilots and officers lay dead or dying, Zhukov was recalled from the Far East and brought his command staff with him, the Red Army was re-equipped with enormous quantities of modern armor and artillery, and the Red Guard were veterans all but in name. The Germans ran out of fuel (inevitably) halfway through^[11] and lost what was left of their motorized divisions. Russians were literally throwing live Nazis on the ground, spraying water on them until they froze, and then driving over them like roads. Old joke: What's the only thing the Nazis didn't slap a swastika on? Answer: Moscow.^[12]

Exporters of democracy[edit]

After experimenting with anarchy democracy in the 1990s under Yeltsin, Russia is, thanks to Vladimir Putin, an enlightened "sovereign democracy",^{[note 3]} which has cut assassinations of journalists down to only two or three a year^{[14][note 4]} and doesn't cut off the gas supply every time a foreign country criticizes it. Their "democracy" is now so thriving that the United Russia party scored 238 out of 450 Duma seats in the 2011 elections with only minimal widespread electoral fraud.^[15]

One of their many favorite pastimes is insisting that NATO is out to get them. Every time the situation gets a bit dicey at home, the solution is easy. "Take back more of Russia!" They have enough of Russia already. That whole area of Siberia? Just develop the land slowly, and you could have a country that rivals China in resources. Seems like Russia is thinking, "Tired of being cold. Maybe take back warm land."

Irredentism[edit]

Russia has seized land by force in several former Eastern Bloc countries that it considers unfriendly (mainly Ukraine and Georgia), often under the guise of protecting Russian speakers who did not ask to be protected, or intensified local conflicts in order to send in "peacekeepers". Russia has created internationally unrecognized puppet states out of these territories:

• Transnistria (1990) — a sliver of Moldova and Ukraine
• Abkhazia (1990) — part of Georgia
• South Ossetia (1991) — part of Georgia
• Crimea (invaded in 1991; annexed in 2014) — part of Ukraine
• Donbas (2014; annexed in 2022) — part of Ukraine, claimed as the "Donetsk People's Republic" and "Luhansk People's Republic," which are only recognized by the Russian, Syrian, and North Korean governments. Annexed into the Russian Federation in 2022 along with two other Ukrainian oblasts whose occupying governments weren't pretending to be breakaway states, following a rigged door-to-door referendum voters still stuck there were coerced into taking part in at gunpoint. Note that this happened around the time Russia announced a "partial" mobilization to replenish their decimated forces, and that deploying conscripts abroad is illegal under Russian law, meaning they likely did this so these areas wouldn't technically be abroad even if anyone who sees Ukraine as the actual country it is would say otherwise. Also note that the other two oblasts in which these referendums were held (Zaporizhzhia and Kherson) have populations that are less than 10% Russian, yet Russia expects the world to believe the vast majority of the population wanted to be annexed by Russia.

Religion[edit]

The three-barred Cross of the Russian Orthodox Church. The bottom represents the footrest of Christ, while the top represents the titulus mockingly announcing Christ as the "King of the Jews" that the Romans affixed to the Cross during Christ's crucifixion.

Russia's most prominent religion is Russian Orthodox, a branch of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which 41% of people observe. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the observance of Orthodox Christianity has risen, but not church attendance, and the amount of people who do not identify with any religion has dropped, according to the Pew Research Center analysis in 2008.^[16] More women are shown to be religious than men, and the age positively correlates with the percentage of people who observe it. In 2008, the education level did not correlate with the amount of religious identification among Russians.

Apparently, the country is also adding the spectator sport of public creationist silliness, as demonstrated by a protest by Russian Orthodox Young Earth creationists, specifically the Bozhya Volya (Божья воля), or "God's Will", an activist group outside of Moscow's Charles Darwin museum.^[17] They unfurled a banner that read, "God created the world" on the building. The stunt there is tied to Dmitriy Enteo, also known as the perpetrator against the Pussy Riot facade. In addition, the newer competitive events of passing laws against free speech to combat teh evul gay and beating up detaining human rights activists^[18] and Pastafarians^[19] seem to be crowd favorites.

European or Asian? Maybe even Eurasian[edit]

Russia's possible future?

“”Russia's only real geostrategic option - the option that would give Russia a realistic international role and also maximize the opportunity of transforming and socially modernizing itself - is Europe.

—Zbigniew Brzezinski

Given Russia's territorial belongings and peculiar history (starting off as an Eastern European country and spending about 200 years under the Tatar yoke), there's a lot of debate about whether it belongs to Europe or Asia. Nowadays, most evidence, including genetics, points to the former: haplogroups in the Russian genetic pool form a cluster with Northern and Eastern Europeans, especially Ukrainians and Poles.^[21][22] They are also very far from Turkish and Mongol groups.^{[note 5]} This is also evident in the country's traditions and customs, originating from Slavic paganism, Eastern Byzantine Orthodoxy, and Western European culture.

Nevertheless, it was a common propaganda tactic in the 19th century to portray Russians as "Asiatic" (which, due to the epoch's racialist trends, was just a euphemism for "barbaric"/"inferior"). This view was promoted by France after the 1812 defeat (most notably by Henri Martin), by Poland after the suppression of the November Uprising, and by Britain during the Great Game; about a century later, it was also exploited by Nazis during WW2 to justify the Russians' "racial inferiority" and the conquest of USSR. After 1945, when racialism quickly declined in popularity, the association between Russia and Mongols/nomads also went out of fashion since it lost its propaganda value; nowadays, it remains popular only among hardcore Ukrainian nationalists who seek to establish their country as the true heir to Kievan Rus. Some Russians argue that the country has a unique "Eurasian" path between East and West; history disagrees, however: Russia's closest cultural ties have always been with the West, and the relations with Asian countries were of the same type that Britain had with India: either conquest or trade.

Russian-American writer Nabokov provides an interesting take on this question in his novel "Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle". It takes place in an alternate reality called Antiterra (Demonia). Russia and the US are combined into one country called Estotia. The Russo-Anglo-American Atlantic world is fighting the Golden Horde in this world's analog of the Cold War.^[23]

LGBT rights[edit]

Activists in Madrid protest against Russia's abuses against its LGBT community.

Russia has a very proud record of ignoring and violating LGBT rights. While same-sex activity has been considered legal since 1993,^[25] there are no anti-discrimination laws that protect gay people from having hate crimes committed against them in any services, nor is same-sex marriage formally recognized. Additionally, while gay people are legally allowed to openly serve in the military, there is an unofficial "don't ask, don't tell" policy.^[26] In fact, at the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games, athletes were told that it's okay to be gay as long as they don't say it in front of the children's faces.^[27] Russia has a federal law against the "promotion of propaganda for non-traditional sexual relationships" (advocacy for LGBT rights), which uses this exact rationale, with a bit of offending religious fee-fees mixed in.^[28][29] Due to the overly draconian and the nakedly discriminatory nature of these laws, protests surrounding the 2014 Sochi Olympics were widespread, including asking the International Olympic Committee to move the games to another country and encouraging athletes to boycott the event and Russian products, most notably Russian vodka. Since 2013, Vladimir Putin has signed a law forbidding gay couples from countries that recognize same-sex marriage to adopt Russian children, claiming to "protect" them from "complexes, emotional suffering, and stress."^[30] Gay pride parades were never officially granted and were usually met with vast amounts of homophobia;^[31] most notably, the biggest of the gay pride parades in Russia, the annual Moscow Pride parade, was described as "satanic" by former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who believes that a ban on gay pride parades would reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS. Since then, gay parades have been banned in Moscow for 100 years.^[32][33] Due to this tomfoolery, the European Court of Human Rights has fined Russia for the gay parade ban.^[34]

Public opinion doesn't fare better than official policy. 85% of polled Russians by the All-Russian Public Opinion Center strongly oppose same-sex marriage, and 88% support the gay propaganda ban.^[35] Additionally, a poll conducted by the Levada Center has a 35% of Russians thinking that homosexuality is a disease and 43% believe it to be a bad habit.^[35]

The Chechen Republic has its own story entirely to tell how it feels about gay rights.

Transgender people fare slightly better in Russia, though much work remains. They are legally allowed to change their gender, but it requires sterilization.^[36] Though recently, to reduce driving-related fatalities, a ridiculous Russian amendment has classified transgenderism and other sexual preferences as a "mental disease". Thus, it impairs a person's ability to drive a vehicle properly.^[37] There's not even a convenient correlation does not imply causation fallacy to back that ridiculous reasoning up since Russia has one of the worst road accident fatalities in the world, much worse than countries that are more accepting of transgender (and the other of the classified "mentally ill" sexual preferences) people as drivers such as the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, etc.^[38] The only reason traffic fatalities will go down after introducing the bill is generally fewer drivers on the road, to begin with, assuming that there will be any impact on Russia's driver base at all since it targets only a tiny minority of people. Enforcing this amendment to root out the crazy trans drivers is another story.

Siberia[edit]

       Siberian Federal District        Geographic Russian Siberia        Historical Siberia (and present Siberia in some usages)

Siberia is the Asian portion of Russia (a "portion" comprising two-thirds of the country's landmass, though home to only one-quarter of the population). It became notorious as the destination of prisoners of conscience exiled during the times of the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union. So notorious is the association of the words Siberia and prison that the place is routinely described as the destination of all Russian prisoners, even when they are sent to Mordovia, as far west of Siberia itself as London is from Warsaw.^[39] Apart from its penological functions, Siberia is a primary source of oil and gas. Siberia has almost every known natural resource, from timber to diamonds to abandoned barrels of nuclear waste.

Today, Siberia is a mostly-settled region with several large cities connected by a network of highways and railroads; indeed, Novosibirsk, the unofficial capital of Siberia, is the third-largest city in Russia, with a population of 1.47 million people. Settlements far away from established urban centers can still be impractical due to the harsh climate and long travel distances.^[40] At least the era of the phrase "send them to Siberia" in the sense of imprisonment or exile is almost over. However, the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in a Siberian penal colony^[41] shows that this assumption is a bit premature.

Russian language[edit]

The written Russian language uses Cyrillic characters, traditionally invented by St. Cyril and St. Methodius (missionaries from the Byzantine Empire) to spread Christianity. Contemporary Russian uses 33 characters, with two silent characters, one indicating palatalization (Ь) and a hard character (Ъ) that is rarely used (other languages that use Cyrillic include Ukrainian, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Mongol, and Macedonian). While Cyrillic appears significantly different from Latin, it uses quite a few characters that look and sound like their Latin counterparts, for example, А, К, М, О, and Т. However, other characters can look like their Latin counterparts but represent drastically different sounds, such as В sounding like v as in "van" and Р sounding like r as in "rat".

Due to the prestige and widespread influence of the English language, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the term "Runglish" is used to describe the adaptation of English words and phrases into a Russian sound alike, such as calling "ice cream" by its English name with Russian inflections rather than "мороженое" (morozhenoye).^[42] The term "Runglish", first coined by Sergei Krikalyov, was initially used to describe the hybrid language used by Americans and Russians in the International Space Station since crew members must learn to use both languages to fully operate as cosmonauts/astronauts.^[43] Russian nationalists are not a huge fan of Runglish, to say the least, moaning that Westerners are subverting the "purity" of their language.^[44] Because of this, the Russian government dubbed 2007 the "Year of the Russian Language" to preserve it.^[44]

Twitter, much to the major annoyance of Russians and virtually any group who uses the Cyrillic alphabet, especially Bulgarians, has banned people who frequently tweet or have a name with Cyrillic characters.^[45] Twitter imposed these measures to tackle Russian trolls and bots, taking advantage of the service to spread discord and misinformation. Unsurprisingly, this measure has shown little result in curbing activity outside of profiling large groups of people who are unrelated to the incidents.

Cyrillic spelling is frequently abused by English writers that try to make a product seem "cooler" by being foreign or Яцssiди Yatsssidi "Russian". While the fake Cyrillic imitates English at a glance, they'd translate to complete gibberish if read correctly. Common letters being abused include Д (D) being "A", Ф (F) being "O", Я (Ya) being "R", Г (G) being "r", Ц (ts) being "U", И (ee) being "N".^{[note 6]}

Vodka[edit]

Vodka is, not surprisingly, the national beverage. According to the OECD, thirty percent of all deaths in 2012 were attributable to alcohol.^[46] Researchers found that Russian men who drink large amounts of vodka have a 35% risk of dying before age 55.^[47]

Chechnya[edit]

Flag of the Chechen Republic.

The Chechen Republic (more commonly known as Chechnya) is a constituent republic known for separatism, terrorism, and being an enormous pain for Moscow. There have been no fewer than 2 civil wars between the Chechen separatists and the Federal Russian Government following the USSR's dissolution. The score stands as 1 win for the separatists and a more recent win for the Russian Federal Government.

For modern-day Russia, the Chechen wars drastically reshaped both countries, their leaders, and their peoples for decades to come. President Boris Yeltsin, planning a blitzkrieg against the separatists, quickly collapsed under his own weight. The war descended into a quagmire, humiliating the Kremlin and forcing them to essentially sue for peace. In comes Prime Minister Putin, who orchestrated a far more organized and brutal campaign against the separatists, beating them down and flattening the country before installing the Kadyrov clan into power. The Chechen wars helped destroy Yeltsin's approval ratings while turning Putin into an eternally popular strongman, whose tough talk, uncompromising rhetoric, and insistence that "There is no border with Chechnya" won over many disaffected Russians who resented the separatists' insurgent tactics.^[48][49]

The President of the Chechen Republic is Ramzan Kadyrov, a barely 40-year-old man who passes the time by joking about killing opposition members.^[50][51] He acts like a warlord, crushing any and all opposition,^[52] presiding over abuses of human rights by his unaffiliated supporter militias,^[53][54] and, more recently, putting gay men in concentration camps while insisting there are no gay men in his country; he went on record to brag about how he wants to eliminate the gay population before the end of 2017.^[55][56] Putin has agreed with the Chechen leader that these camps do not exist and that gay people aren't being systematically persecuted for being gay since gays don't actually exist.^[57] The Kremlin has fed a dragon that's gotten too big for even them to control.^[58][59] Putin has little choice but to back Kadyrov and not truly investigate the allegations,^[60] lest he risk pissing off the real-life Ramsay Bolton.^[61][62]

Chechens have been fighting on both sides of the Ukrainian conflict.^[63] This has included Islamist militias fighting (at least nominally) on the side of Ukraine,^[63] while the Russian military has been outsourcing a lot of its dirtier jobs^{[note 7]} to Chechen fighters.^[63]

See also[edit]

• Joseph Stalin
• Pussy Riot
• Tunguska event
• RT
• Trump-Russia connection
• 2014 Ukrainian crisis
• Fun:Vatnik argument bingo: Ukraine edition
• И теперь на русском языке!

External links[edit]

• The Dying Russians, The New York Review of Books
• Louis Potgieter would be proud.
• Dash cam videos are Russia's largest export, after vodka, oil, weapons, and suicidal novelists

Notes[edit]

References[edit]