Russia is the largest country in the world, covering about 17.1 million km² across Eastern Europe and the whole of northern Asia, roughly 9,000 km from Kaliningrad on the Baltic to Big Diomede Island in the Bering Strait and across eleven time zones. Its main physical regions are the East European Plain west of the Ural Mountains, the West Siberian Plain between the Urals and the Yenisei, the Central Siberian Plateau beyond it, the mountain belts of southern and northeastern Siberia, and the Caucasus on its southwestern edge. The highest point is Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus at 5,642 m, the highest mountain in Europe; the lowest is the Caspian Sea shore, about 28 m below sea level. The main rivers are the Volga, Europe’s longest at 3,531 km, and the great Siberian systems of the Ob–Irtysh, Yenisei and Lena, with the Amur on the Chinese border. More than 140 million people live there, three-quarters of them in cities, and the vast majority in the west of the country. Six named features, from the Caucasus to Kamchatka, show how that territory was built and how it is used.
Mount Elbrus, Europe’s Highest Volcano
Elbrus rises on the border of the republics of Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia, about 11 km north of the main Caucasus watershed that marks the frontier with Georgia, 100 km from the Black Sea and 370 km from the Caspian. It is a dormant stratovolcano with two domed summits either side of a saddle at 5,416 m: the western peak reaches 5,642 m and the eastern 5,621 m. That makes it the highest mountain in Russia and Europe, the highest volcano in Eurasia, and the tenth most prominent peak on Earth.
The Caucasus exists because the Arabian Plate is pushing north into Eurasia. Elbrus began forming about 10 million years ago, and uranium-lead dating places the formation of its main caldera around 700,000 years ago. It is not fully asleep: fumaroles still sometimes escape from the eastern flank, and hot springs rise on its slopes. Snowfields covering 138 km² feed 22 or 23 main glaciers, which supply the Baksan, Kuban and Malka rivers, though all of them are retreating. The mountain stands about 65 km southwest of Kislovodsk and 80 km west-southwest of Nalchik, and Prielbrusye National Park, reached by road up the Baksan valley, protects its southeastern flank.
The first recorded ascent of the eastern summit was made on 10 July 1829 by a Circassian, Khillar Khashirov; a British party led by F. Crauford Grove reached the higher western summit in 1874. The local names describe it well: Circassians call it the mountain of happiness, while to Karachays and Balkars it is Mingi Taw, the eternal mountain.
The Volga and the Caspian Depression
The Volga rises in the Valdai Hills at 225 m above sea level, northwest of Moscow, and flows east past Tver, Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan before turning south past Samara, Saratov and Volgograd. After 3,531 km it enters the Caspian Sea below Astrakhan at 28 m below sea level, the lowest ground in Russia. It drains 1,360,000 km², carries 8,000 to 8,500 m³ of water per second at its delta, and has no natural link to any ocean, which makes it the longest river in the world flowing into a closed basin.
The river is the spine of European Russia. Five of the country’s ten largest cities, Moscow included, lie in its basin, and the Soviet Union turned it into a chain of reservoirs: the Kuybyshev Reservoir above Samara, at 6,450 km², is the largest in Europe. At its mouth the Volga Delta has grown from 3,222 km² in 1880 to about 27,224 km² today as the Caspian’s level has shifted, making it the largest delta in Europe. Around it, the Caspian Depression spreads across Astrakhan Oblast, Kalmykia and Dagestan as a flat, arid lowland dotted with salt lakes such as Baskunchak and Elton.
Mount Narodnaya and the Ural Mountains
The Urals run about 2,500 km from the Kara Sea to the Kazakh steppe and form part of the conventional boundary between Europe and Asia. They are not high, averaging 1,000 to 1,300 m, and the highest summit, Mount Narodnaya, reaches only 1,894 m on the boundary between the Komi Republic and Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug. The chain continues north as Vaygach Island and Novaya Zemlya.
The range is one of the oldest on Earth still standing. It formed in the Uralian orogeny, when the eastern edge of Laurasia collided with the small continent of Kazakhstania and the island arcs between them, in a collision that lasted nearly 90 million years from the late Carboniferous to the early Triassic. Unlike the Appalachians, the Urals never collapsed after the collision and still sit on a deep crustal root, which helps explain why they survive at all after 250 to 300 million years.
That deep geology made the Urals Russia’s mine. They hold about 48 kinds of economically valuable ores and minerals, including iron, copper, nickel, gold, platinum and chromite on the eastern slopes and coal, oil and gas in the west, and since the 18th century they have made the region one of Russia’s largest centres of metallurgy and heavy industry, from the steel city of Magnitogorsk to the factories of Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Tagil and Chelyabinsk. The western slopes are limestone karst, riddled with caves and sinkholes, especially in the Sylva basin.
The West Siberian Plain and the Vasyugan Swamp
East of the Urals the land drops into what has been called the largest unbroken lowland in the world. The West Siberian Plain covers about 2.6 to 2.7 million km², roughly one-third of Siberia, stretching 2,500 km from the Arctic Ocean to the foothills of the Altai and 1,900 km from the Urals to the Yenisei. More than half of it lies below 100 m. Across this flat surface wander the Ob and its tributary the Irtysh, which together form the world’s seventh-longest river system at 5,410 km, and the Ob empties into the Gulf of Ob, the longest estuary in the world.
So little slope means poor drainage. Much of the plain floods each spring, and its soils are mostly peat. The Vasyugan Swamp, between the Ob and Irtysh in Tomsk, Novosibirsk and Omsk oblasts, covers about 53,000 km² and is the largest peatland in the world. It began forming nearly 10,000 years ago, and three-quarters of its present area became waterlogged within the last 500 years.
Beneath the bogs lie the oil and gas fields that supplied most of Russia’s production in the 1970s and 1980s, worked from towns such as Surgut and Nizhnevartovsk. Along the drier south lie the cities of Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Tomsk and Novosibirsk, Siberia’s largest city, which stands where the Trans-Siberian Railway crosses the Ob.
Lake Baikal, 1,642 Metres Deep
Lake Baikal lies in southern Siberia between Irkutsk Oblast and the Republic of Buryatia. It is 636 km long and 79 km wide, covers 31,722 km², and reaches a maximum depth of 1,642 m, the deepest of any lake. That depth gives it about 23,615 km³ of water, roughly 22 to 23% of the world’s fresh surface water and more than all five North American Great Lakes combined. At 25 to 30 million years old, it is also the oldest lake on Earth.
Baikal fills a rift where the crust is pulling apart by about 4 mm a year. Its surface sits 455.5 m above sea level, its floor 1,186.5 m below it, and under that lie some 7 km of sediment, which puts the bottom of the rift 8 to 11 km down, the deepest continental rift on Earth. Earthquakes and hot springs are common. As many as 330 rivers flow in, among them the Selenga, Barguzin and Upper Angara, but only one flows out: the Angara, a tributary of the Yenisei. The largest of its 27 islands, Olkhon, is 72 km long. UNESCO listed the lake as a World Heritage Site in 1996.
Klyuchevskaya Sopka and the Volcanoes of Kamchatka
At the far eastern end of the country, the Kamchatka Peninsula holds about 160 volcanoes, 29 of them still active. They sit above the Kuril–Kamchatka Trench, where the Pacific Plate sinks beneath the peninsula, and the region suffers deep earthquakes and tsunamis; a quake of about magnitude 9.3 struck offshore in 1737. The volcanoes form a UNESCO World Heritage Site made up of six separate areas.
The tallest is Klyuchevskaya Sopka, about 4,750 m, roughly 100 km inland from the Bering Sea. It is the highest mountain in Siberia and the highest active volcano in Eurasia, yet it is geologically very young, having appeared only about 7,000 years ago. It has erupted about 110 times during the Holocene; its first recorded eruption came in 1697 and it has been almost continuously active since. In 2007 one eruption threw an ash plume 10 km high that disrupted air traffic between the United States and Asia. The volcano was first climbed in 1788 by members of the Billings Expedition, and ascents are still rare because the danger of flying lava, which killed several climbers in 1931, persists.
Between Elbrus and Klyuchevskaya lies most of the variety Russia has to offer: an ancient but unusually well-preserved mountain belt, the largest unbroken lowland in the world, the deepest lake and a volcano only about 7,000 years old. For more on the two ends of that journey, read our Mount Elbrus guide and the geography of the Kamchatka Peninsula, or go deeper into Siberia’s great rift with the complete guide to Lake Baikal.