Why go
The sharpest contrasts help make sense of the country’s scale. Sochi joins the Black Sea with the Caucasus, Lake Baikal sits among forested mountains, and Karelia combines lakes with granite. Altai and Kamchatka add high mountain and volcanic landscapes to that wider picture.
The full story
Sochi illustrates the close relationship between coast and mountain in the western Caucasus. Its Black Sea setting has a subtropical character, while Krasnaya Polyana supplies the mountain context associated with the 2014 Winter Olympics. The two belong to the same region but describe different landscapes. Lake Baikal provides a different Siberian image: a deep freshwater lake surrounded by taiga-covered mountains. Karelia, farther west, is characterised by lakes and granite, with Ruskeala Canyon among its named landscape features. These settings differ from the snowy mountains of Altai and the steppes of Tyva. Kamchatka’s volcanoes and geysers place it in another category again. The useful national comparison is between landscape types and regions, rather than an assumption that they form one continuous excursion. Coast, forested lake country, steppe and volcanic terrain each give a different meaning to the broad idea of Russian nature.