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With the dissolution of the Soviet Union visitors have a fresh opportunity to explore a vast array of exciting and ancient cultures, from the glittering imperial Russia of St. Petersburg to the timeless village life of Siberia and Irkutsk. One of the most notable features of present day Russia is a renewed celebration of the wealth of its past and its potential for the future.  Throwing off the blanket of communist uniformity, Russia today is a nation of enormous diversity and tremendous vitality. It is as if the cultural traditions of a century ago have reawakened with a newfound strength - ancient cathedrals are being rebuilt and restored, colorful markets hum with activity once again and literature and the arts are quickly regaining the creative renown they enjoyed decades ago.  A new Russia is now in full bloom.

For most westerners, Russia is associated with its European cities--Moscow, St. Petersburg and Murmansk.  This is the heartland of Imperial Russia, and these great and ancient cities often become the focus for most tourists. However there is much more to Russia, a country that spans eleven time zones and two continents, ending less than 50 miles from North America. Within this vast expanse lie the largest freshwater lake in the world, rivers and forests teeming with fish and wildlife, awe inspiring volcanos, and towering mountains.  Russia is the largest country on earth, with enormous tracts of land that have been opened to travelers only in the last few years.

Just as Russia's rich cultural heritage has once more come to life, its natural heritage too is a new country waiting to be discovered.  The Russian Federation covers 1/8th of the earth's surface (6,592,812 sq. miles/ 17,075,400 sq. km.) from Europe to Asia.  Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, Russia is easily the worlds largest country.  Vast plains cover most of Russia's territory. Mountain ranges are found mostly in the eastern and southern regions, with the Ural Mountains constituting a natural backbone from north to south separating European and Asian Russia.  The country has a tremendous wealth of natural resources, producing 17% of the world's crude oil, 25-30% of its natural gas, and 10-20% of all nonferrous, rare and noble metals mined across the globe.

Most of Russia's territory is located in the temperate belt, though the range of climates and habitats spans from Arctic tundra and forest tundra to forests, forest-steppes and semi-deserts. Average January temperatures range from 0 to minus 5 degrees Centigrade in Western European Russia to minus 40-50 degrees Centigrade in Eastern Yakutia. Average July temperatures range from 1 degree Centigrade on the northern Siberian coast to 25 degrees Centigrade in Russia's Cis-Caspian lowlands.  Russia has the world's fifth largest population (148.8 million people) after China, India, the United States and Indonesia. It contains some 130 nations and ethnic groups including Russians, Tartars, Ukrainians, Chuvashs, Jews, Bashkirs, Byelorussians and Mordovians.

Russia is a democratic state with a republican form of government. The head of state is the President, designed to be the guarantor of legality and governmental compliance with the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens.  In accordance with his status, he determines the main direction of domestic and foreign policy and represents the country in its foreign relations.  The president is elected for a five year term by national direct suffrage and cannot be elected for more than two consecutive terms.

Russian art and architecture seems to many visitors to Russia to be a rather baffling array of exotic forms and alien sensibilities.  Without any sense of the rich tradition of Russian culture, an appreciation of the country's enormous artistic wealth becomes a game of historical anecdote--"the church where so-and-so took refuge from what's-his-name"--or a meaningless collection of aesthetic baubles--"I like the blue domes the best." In fact, Russian art and architecture are not nearly so difficult to understand as many people think, and knowing even a little bit about why they look the way they do and what they mean brings to life the culture and personality of the entire country.

The tradition of icon painting was inherited by the Russians from Byzantium, where it began as an offshoot of the mosaic and fresco tradition of early Byzantine churches.  During the 8th and 9th centuries, the iconoclasm controversy in the Orthodox church called into question whether religious images were a legitimate practice or sacrilegious idolatry.  Although the use of images wasn't banned, it did prompt a thorough appreciation of the difference between art intended to depict reality and art designed for spiritual contemplation.

That difference is one of the reasons that the artistic style of icons can seem so invariant. Certain kinds of balance and harmony became established as reflections of divinity, and as such they invited careful reproduction and subtle refinement rather than striking novelty.  Although this philosophy resulted in a comparatively slow evolution of style, icon painting evolved considerably over the centuries. During the 14th century in particular, icon painting in Russia took on a much greater degree of subjectivity and personal expression.  The most notable figure in this change was Andrey Rublyov, whose works can be viewed in both the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

Unlike the pictorial tradition that westerners have become accustomed to, the Russian icon tradition is not about the representation of physical space or appearance. Icons are images intended to aid contemplative prayer, and in that sense they're more concerned with conveying meditative harmony than with laying out a realistic scene. Rather than sizing up the figure in an icon by judging its distortion level, take a look at the way the lines that compose the figure are arranged and balanced, the way they move your eye around.  If you get the sense that the figures are a little haunting, that's good. They weren't painted to be charming but to inspire reflection and self-examination. If you feel as if you have to stand and appreciate every icon you see, you aren't going to enjoy any of them.  Try instead to take a little more time with just one or two, not examining their every detail but simply enjoying a few moments of thought as your eye takes its own course.

The best collections of icons are to be found in the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum, though of course many Russian churches have preserved or restored their traditional works.

After the 1917 Revolution, the Russian Avant-Garde leapt into the service of the new Bolshevik regime.  It seemed to promise just the sort of break into a new world, and sweeping away of the old, that they had been working for in art for years.  They produced political posters, organized street pageants and fairs, and, most notably, carried out the design of the country's great public spaces for anniversary celebrations of the Revolution. Caught up in the new regime's emphasis on the importance of industrial power, they began to bring to composition a sense of the rationality and focus of industrial work and design. Constructivism, as this style is known, continued to evolve into the late 1920s, when the conservatism of the Stalinist state renounced the Avant-Garde in favor of Soviet Realism.  Many of the prominent artists of the earlier schools played a central role in Constructivism, especially Tatlin.  Other well-known artists of the Constructivist movement include Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Liubov Popova.

Repudiated by the Stalinist government and neglected in the west, the Russian Avant-Garde has only recently received the attention it deserves.  The Russian Museum in St. Petersburg possesses the finest collection of its work.

For most of its history, Russian architecture has been predominantly religious. Churches were for centuries the only buildings to be constructed of stone, and today they are almost the only buildings that remain from its ancient past.  The basic elements of Russian church design emerged fairly early, around the eleventh century. The plan is generally that of a Greek cross (all four arms are equal), and the walls are high and relatively free of openings. Sharply-sloped roofs (tent roofs) and a multitude of domes cover the structure.  The characteristic onion dome first appeared in Novgorod on the Cathedral of Sancta Sophia, in the eleventh century.  On the interior, the primary feature is the iconostasis, an altar screen on which the church's icons are mounted in a hierarchical fashion.

The centers of medieval church architecture followed the shifting dominance of old Russia's cities--from Kiev to Novgorod and Pskov, and, from the end of the 15th century, Moscow.  With the establishment of a unified Russian state under Ivan III, foreign architecture began to appear in Russia. The first instance of such foreign work is Moscow's great Assumption Cathedral, completed in 1479 by the Bolognese architect Aritotle Fioravanti.  The cathedral is actually a remarkable synthesis of traditional Russian architectural styles, though its classical proportions mark it as a work of the Italian Renaissance.  The Russian tradition experienced a brief period of renewed influence under Ivan IV (the Terrible), under whose reign the legendary Cathedral of St. Basil's was built. In general, however, the Tsars began to align themselves increasingly with European architectural styles.  The great example of this shift was Peter the Great, who designed St. Petersburg in accordance with prevailing European design.  His successors continued the pattern, hiring the Italian architect Rastrelli to produce the rococo Winter Palace and Smolny Cathedral.  Under Catherine the Great, the rococo was set aside for neoclassicism, completing St. Petersburg's thoroughly European topography.

During the nineteenth century a fresh interest in traditional Russian forms arose.  Like the associated movement in the visual arts, this revival of older styles participated in the creation of an avant-garde movement in the early twentieth century.  For a brief period following the 1917 Revolution, the avant-garde Constructivist movement gained sufficient influence to design major buildings.  Lenin's Mausoleum, designed in 1924 by Alexey Shchusev, is the most notable of the few remaining Constructivist buildings.  By the late 1920s, the avant-garde found itself repudiated by Stalin's increasingly conservative state. Moving away from modernism, Stalinist-era architecture is best exemplified by the seven nearly indistinguishable "wedding-cake" skyscrapers that dominate the city's skyline.