Facts about European Russia

European Russia - Russia west of the Ural Mountains - comprises only a quarter of Russia but is still bigger than any other European country. With four-fifths of Russia's population, it's very much the country's hub. It is a land of much variety, stretching from the frozen tundra that borders the Arctic Ocean to the peaks of the Caucasus, Europe's highest mountains, 3000km south. Between these extremes lie Russia's two greatest cities and much more.

During the Soviet years, only pockets of this huge country were truly open to foreigners. Even today, when virtually all of it can be freely explored by anyone, much remains little known to the outside world.

Russia's most vital cities are Moscow, in the historic heartland at the centre of European Russia, and St'Petersburg, established less than 300 years ago on the Gulf of Finland as Russia's gateway to Europe. In these two places tsars reigned and the world's greatest communist state was born, Russia's unique architecture flowered, and the mysteries of the Russian Orthodox Church flourished, as they do today. Here too, the impact of all the modern changes is most evident - as any traveller can experience in hotels, shops and restaurants or while sampling the nightlife. Within a few hundred kilometres of these cities are dozens of smaller places where you can witness the country's historic grandeur together with the beauty of its gentle countryside and the perennial, bitter hardness of Russian life.

To the north lie tracts of forest, lakes, marshes and tundra - a vast new world for hikers, skiers and campers. As well, the north is dotted with intriguing human enclaves such as the Arctic ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, Kizhi Island with its extraordinary assemblage of old wooden architecture, remnants of Gulag labour camps, and the venerable churches and monasteries of Vologda and elsewhere.

East from Moscow, then south, flows the Volga River. The Volga is one of Russia's historic highways and links many cities of both ancient and modern importance - among them Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Ulyanovsk, Saratov, Volgograd (once Stalingrad) and Astrakhan - along its course to the Caspian Sea. Numerous ethnic minorities, whose religious beliefs range from Islam to Buddhism to animism, live in or near to the Volga basin, reminders of European Russia's proximity to Asia and the many former Soviet republics.

European Russia's other great waterway, the Don River, flows south from near Moscow to the Sea of Azov, an offshoot of the Black Sea, near Rostov-on-Don. Between the two rivers begins European Russia's steppe, part of the great rolling grasslands - now largely given over to agriculture - which stretch across the northern hemisphere from Mongolia to Hungary.

The steppe gives way on European Russia's southern fringe to the Caucasus Mountains.Stretching between the Black and Caspian seas, the Caucasus is a range of spectacular beauty and home to an incredible jigsaw of ethnic groups. Many of these groups were not conquered by Russia until the 19th century; today some are tragically mired in bloody conflicts with each other or with Russia.

There is even a coastal riviera, where the Caucasus Mountains meet the Black Sea, to which Russians flock for summer holidays.

Though the practicalities of travel outside the main cities may demand some patience and persistence, Russia never fails to surprise, not least with its people’s bizarre combination of gloom and high spirits, rudeness and warm hospitality, secrecy and openness. In the end you’ll have shed your own shaft of light on the place that Winston Churchill characterized as a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.