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Russia (Russian: Россия, Rossiya), also the Russian Federation (Rossiyskaya Federatsiya), is a Eurasian country extending over much of northern Eurasia. It is a semi-presidential republic comprising 85 federal subjects. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (both via Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It also has maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, Iran through the Caspian Sea, and the U.S. state of Alaska by the Bering Strait.

At 17,075,400 square kilometers, Russia is by far the largest country in the world, covering more than an eighth of the Earth’s land area; with 143 million people, it is the eighth largest by population. It extends across the whole of northern Asia and 40% of Europe, spanning 11 time zones and incorporating a great range of environments and landforms. Russia has the world's greatest reserves of mineral and energy resources, and is considered an energy superpower. It has the world's largest forest reserves and its lakes contain approximately one-quarter of the world's unfrozen fresh water.

<phonos file="Russian Anthem Instrumental.ogg">National anthem of Russia</phonos>

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The Rus' Khaganate was a polity that flourished during a poorly documented period in the history of Eastern Europe (roughly the late 8th and early to mid-9th centuries CE). A predecessor to the Rurik Dynasty and the Kievan Rus', the Rus' Khaganate was a state (or a cluster of city-states) set up by Varangians (Scandinavians) in what is today northern Russia. The region's population at that time was composed of Slavic, Finnic, and Norse peoples. The varangians were called Rhos or Rus. The region was also a center of operations for eastern Scandinavian adventurers, merchants and pirates. According to contemporaneous sources, the population centers of the region, which may have included the proto-towns of Holmgard (Novgorod), Aldeigja (Ladoga), Lyubsha, Alaborg, Sarskoe Gorodishche, and Timerevo, were under the rule of a monarch or monarchs using the Old Turkic title Khagan. The Rus' Khaganate period marked the genesis of a distinct Rus' ethnos, and its successor states would include Kievan Rus' and later states from which modern Russia evolved.

Rye, by Ivan Shishkin (1878). Shishkin was a leading Russian landscape painter associated with the realistic Peredvizhniki movement. The painting represents boundless rye fields in the Central Black Earth Region. The canvas still hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

• ...that the Blue Bridge (pictured), the widest in St. Petersburg, Russia, derives its name from a 19th-century tradition of color-coding the bridges across the Moika River?
• ...that the Singer's Bridge, designed by architect Vasily Stasov, was called the Yellow Bridge and is the third-widest bridge in Saint Petersburg, Russia?
• ...that the phenomenon of Renting-A-Russian sometimes refers to getting a male Russian ice dancer to country hop to pair with a female figure skater from another country?

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Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia was the eldest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, the last autocratic ruler of the Russian Empire, and of Empress Alexandra of Russia. During her lifetime, Olga's future marriage was a matter of great speculation within Russia. Matches were rumored with Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, Crown Prince Carol of Romania, Prince Edward, eldest son of Britain's George V, and with Crown Prince Alexander of Serbia. Olga herself wanted to marry a Russian and remain in her home country. During World War I, Olga nursed wounded soldiers in a military hospital until her own nerves gave out and, thereafter, oversaw administrative duties at the hospital. Olga's murder following the Russian Revolution of 1917 resulted in her canonization as a passion bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church. She was an elder sister of the famous Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, who was widely rumored to have survived the assassination of the Imperial Family. In later years, when dozens of people made claims to be surviving members of the imperial family, a woman named Marga Boodts claimed to be Grand Duchess Olga. Few people took Boodts' claim seriously.

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