Eleven time zones make the world’s largest country
Russia spans Eastern Europe and North Asia as Earth’s largest country, crossing eleven time zones and sharing land borders with fourteen states. More than 140 million people make it Europe’s most populous nation and the world’s ninth. Its name traces to the Rus’, described in an old chronicle as Swedes.
Homo erectus reached the Taman Peninsula around 2 million years ago, and flint tools in the North Caucasus date back 1.5 million years. Denisova Cave in the Altai yielded Denny, a hybrid who was half Neanderthal and half Denisovan and lived about 90,000 years ago. Modern humans appear in Western Siberia by 45,000 years ago and reached Arctic Mamontovaya Kurya by 40,000. The Kurgan hypothesis places the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Volga–Dnieper steppe, where sites like Sintashta and Arkaim show the earliest horses used in war.
Gothic, Bosporan, Khazar and Pecheneg powers held the south in turn, while East Slavs moved into the forests between today’s Moscow and Saint Petersburg and absorbed Finno-Ugric peoples from the seventh century. The Primary Chronicle says the Varangian Rurik was chosen to rule Novgorod in 862, and his successor Oleg took Kiev in 882. Rurik’s grandson Sviatoslav and his father Igor brought the East Slavic tribes under Kiev and destroyed the Khazar state.
Under Vladimir the Great, who adopted Byzantine Christianity, and Yaroslav the Wise, Kievan Rus’ became one of Europe’s largest states. Yaroslav’s rota system shared power by seniority but bred feuds, and by the twelfth century authority had drifted to Novgorod, Vladimir-Suzdal and Galicia–Volhynia.
The Greek-derived name Rossiya is first attested in 1387 and displaced Rus’ as Moscow rose, and Peter the Great proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721. English borrowed “Russia” from Medieval Latin in the fourteenth century. Russian still separates russkiy, for ethnic Russians, from rossiiskiy, for citizens of any background.
Source: Russia
