Exploring informative maps that reveal insights about Russia

Russia. Russia has been on the news a lot lately, sadly not for good reasons, and looking at this country from the outside, it's sometimes difficult to understand it. It has a complicated history, from its first dynasty being connected to a group of Norse Vikings, its first government being a group of principalities, which evolved into an ever-growing empire that then drastically changed through a violent revolution to a so-called communist regime that then ended up failing itself. Russia today is odd. It continues being the largest country in the world, but its economy is reasonably small, at least in comparison. Russia's GDP is equal to that of the Benelux region. So, just like this map tells us something about Russia's struggling economy, in this video, I want to go through a few more maps that provide us with some important pieces of information and historical context for this country, allowing us to, I believe, end up with a better understanding of it today. First size. Russia is very big, it's 17.1 million square kilometers, and necessarily unless it was an island, it's surrounded by various countries. In this map, we can see which the nearest country is to different areas of Russia. In some cases, these neighboring states capital are actually closer to the Russian regions than their own capital of Moscow. This also brings to evidence the regional difference realities that Russia faces, being involved in various strategic areas of the world, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Eastern Asia, not to mention the Pacific with its northeastern Siberian regions. This map shows us the federal subjects of Russia. This is because, due to the vastness of their territory and the regional differences, Russia is divided into autonomous areas. Oblasts in yellow, republics in green, krais in orange, autonomous okrugs in blue and federal cities in red all make up the Russian Federation today. Although the autonomy element here is highly questionable in my opinion. It's also important to note that despite having a gigantic northern coastline, save their very small Baltic Sea axis and their limited Black Sea one, to get through to the the Atlantic Ocean, Russia must pass through or very close to other nations' territorial waters. Their access to the Pacific or the Arctic is also severely limited by ice and by lack of infrastructure there. This map shows us how limited the railway network is, both in general but especially in the east. Next, population. Russia has around 143 million people. However, despite being big in size and big in population, these people are not equally distributed along the territory. This great map by reddit user Black Hust shows us precisely this. There is a somewhat even distribution of the population in the west and even a little in the southwest with the key cities here in darker blue being more populated as we see in any other country. However, as we move east and especially north, there's almost no people living there. Even in the southeast, there's very little population density. This map is even clearer, dividing the population of Russia into thirds. We can see two-thirds live in the west in red and blue, with the rest only having one-third in white. Russia was also born in the west of its territory, so being settled sooner and then only expanding east, it makes sense the west is more populated and developed. In this gif, made by reddit user gregorzusludy, we can see the dates in which major Russian cities were founded, and we can see how the eastern ones took a while to be settled, only from the 17th century onwards. Something odd, however is that violent crime is more common in the east and in these less populated areas as this map shows. Usually more populated areas necessarily have higher crime rates. I was a little confused about this. And the next maps explain more regional differences starting with climate. Here we have the copen climate types of Russia. Not only is it interesting to observe how the incredibly large country spans across various climate types from semi-arid to humid subtropical, most of the population is concentrated in the light blue climate area, which is warm summer, humid continental, perhaps more suitable not only for living today, but also for early settling due to agriculture. Russia's agriculture today is in fact located in the west and a little along the south, as we can see on this map. The same type of climate is seen in the far east near China and Japan, where we also saw a good amount of people live. The central third, or in fact almost half of the territory presents a sub-arctic climate already less suitable and therefore justifying less population, it's odd to see how some regions in Siberia, here in purple, vary a little in the type of sub-arctic climates. A similar thing is seen when it comes to terrain. There's a very objective obstacle for the Russians to expand east, the Ural Mountains. And despite there being a large plains area just after it, the rest of the east is full of reasonably high mountain ranges, contrasting to the semi plains area in the west this exaggerated relief map gives us an even clearer view of this with the obstacle dividing the first third of the country and the large elevation areas to the east in fact it's fascinating how according to vividmaps.com where i got a lot of information from moscow is the only capital in the world located more than 1000 kilometers from any mountain range which i guess facilitated the conquests of the russian Empire. This map makes that clear with a tremendously large plateau or plains area throughout the western part of the country, stretching into Eastern Europe and Finland as well. The Russian expansion and colonization of the eastern territories also had to do with one key detail, the moving of Russians into these territories. You see, upon the establishment of Russia, Russians were only the Slavic population of its European territory. The rest of what is today Russia was populated by various ethnic groups, from Central Asians, the Eastern ones, to the native populations of Siberia. Through the colonization of the empire and the population displacements of the Soviet Union, the interior of the country also became Russified. This arguably led to the depopulation of those areas. Many Russians that moved there eventually wanted to leave while the natives might have stayed. In this map, we see how countrywide these population transfers were. And they were arguably made, at least in part, to solve the issue we see on this map of various ethnic groups and pretty much various nations existing inside the Soviet Union at the time, at much greater extent and variety that we see today. Because in modern days, most of Russia is Russian. This other map shows us the percentage of ethnic Russians across regions, only Tanutuva, which by the way used to be its own country, a few regions in the Caucasus and Siberia along with this group of regions here in the west don't have over 50% of Russians. The follow up map shows us the second largest ethnic group in each region. Very often these secondary groups are the native population of the region. Ukrainians are commonly seen here too given that they were one of the majorly dislocated populations in Soviet times. Despite these population differences, Russian ethnicity is dominant and so is their religion. Orthodox Christianity which expanded into these regions from Western Russia is the dominant religion in almost all of Russia. There are a few exceptions for Islam in green and Buddhism in yellow. This Buddhist region in the Northern Caucasus surprised me. If anyone knows what this is, let me know in the comments. This other map is much more detailed and doesn't confine us to the regions. We also see how tribal beliefs remain in some Siberian regions, likely still populated by significant numbers of native people. I would argue that the reason why these regions were able to conserve their native religion, if you will, was because they are border regions and share those borders with countries that follow the same religions, so the Russification and Russian migration into those areas couldn't be fully effective in eliminating the foreign religion, if you will. If right across the border there is a nation that practices it, it's likely that it will continue being influenced by it, especially if their own capital city is further away. We see this with the incidence of Buddhism, especially along the border with Asian countries. Despite this regional breakdown, the percentages of religious followers are different. Only 41% of Russians consider themselves Christian Orthodox, 6% other Christian faiths, 6% Muslim, 0.5% Buddhist, despite it being dominant in 3 regions, which really tells you how sparsely populated those are, 1% Pagan, 1% other religions, 13% Atheists, and 30% believe in a god but don't specify which or how. Let's also look at a couple economic maps to better understand this and the financial reality of the country. Russia has the 9th largest GDP in the world, although it's still the same as those three small European countries. At around 1.7 trillion dollars, roughly the same economy size as Brazil for instance, the distribution of this GDP is a whole other aspect though. If we look at each region's contribution to the GDP, we can see that the region labeled as Central Russia is the richest with the largest economy, followed by the Volga, then the Urals, likely due to industrial production, the northwestern area is oddly on par with the region labeled as Siberia, in fact the central plains area of Russia. The far eastern region contributes very little, as does the Caucasus. If you divide the country in two, the area in red represents the same amount of GDP as the one in orange. And if you look at individual federal subjects instead of regions, the difference is shocking, with Moscow and St. Petersburg accounting for so much, while 99% of the other regions account for so little. Russia is, in my opinion, a perfect example of why the GDP per capita is such a useless indicator. According to it, this northern Siberia province has the highest GDP per capita in Russia despite being somewhat poor. This is only because it has such a small population. Dividing the GDP by the number of people in a region or country doesn't really translate to any actual wealth distribution. For that we need to use the Gini coefficient which measures inequality. The ideal value is 0, Russia has between 35 and 40 as we can see here, not great but on par with the UK, Italy, China or India and ahead of the US for instance. There's obviously an infinite number of other indicators we could see in map form to learn how people live in Russia, comparing the regions, for instance this map shows us life expectancy and allows us to understand how there's a significant difference between some regions not necessarily connected to their earnings, but let's move on otherwise this video would never end. Gas production and exports are a key part if not the most important one of Russia's economy and I feel like we'd be missing out if we didn't see one of those maps. In fact, they hold the largest natural gas reserves in the world. By far, Russia has historically been the major gas and oil supplier of Europe, recent events have changed this with Europe seeking self-sufficiency or other suppliers but until recently these were the various oil and gas supply pipelines from Russia into Europe, also allowing us to understand the strategic importance of this resource that they have. And finally, this map, which shows us in red the list of countries that the Russian government has considered to be unfriendly to their country. First published in 2021, with the US and Czechia being the inaugural members, eventually all of the G7 and all 27 European Union member states are on the list, Turkey is currently the only NATO member to not be on it. So, those are a few maps of Russia that teach us about the country. I believe that by looking at these maps and analyzing them a little, we're able to very roughly understand what Russia is and why it is that way. From its territory, population, economy, religion or ethnic groups, Russia is different from a lot of countries in the world. Their bigger and their territory differences, distance, climate, terrain among others obviously impacts that. In addition, their historical context of expansion from a group of principalities, establishment as an empire and path of revolution towards the USSR, then failing, still leaves its marks today. For instance, the agricultural nature of the empire and its failure to industrialize perhaps partly justifies the concentration of people in the areas where agriculture was more suitable, in the same way that the population displacements of the Soviet Union led to the Russification of the country and the diminishment of native populations. There are an infinite number of maps of Russia we could look at to better understand the country, not to mention the detailed look we could have at each of these. If you're interested and have any other ideas of interesting data that we can visualize through maps, leave a comment and I can make a part 2 of this video. Because I really do think that looking at data through maps is one of the best ways to understand a country and its reality and history. Thanks so much for watching this video, subscribe if you want and I will see you next time for more general knowledge.