Why go
Thinking in regions helps place national history on a map. The Volga and Urals frame eastward expansion, while the Baltic and Pacific mark very different horizons. Moscow is one centre within this larger geography, rather than a stand-in for every landscape or community.
The full story
Russia extends across much of Eastern Europe and the northern part of Asia. Its scale encompasses forest regions, southern grasslands, mountain areas and long stretches of Arctic and Pacific coastline. These environments give different settings to the histories of settlement, trade and expansion. The Volga links the forested interior with the Caspian region. Farther east, the Urals form a familiar geographic threshold before Siberia, which reaches towards the Pacific. The Caucasus and the Black Sea belong to another southern setting, with histories connected to steppe peoples and neighbouring states. The country’s territorial extent developed over centuries. Cossack campaigns associated with Yermak helped open a phase of conquest beyond the Urals during Ivan IV’s reign; they did not create the whole later empire at once. Timber, mineral deposits and energy resources also form part of this geographic story, rather than defining a single uniform landscape.