Russia

The Russian Federation (, transliteration: Rossiyskaya Federatsiya or Rossijskaja Federacija), or Russia (Russian: ???????, transliteration: Rossiya or Rossija), is a country that stretches over a vast expanse of Europe and Asia. With an area of 17,075,400 km? (6,595,600 mi?), it is the largest country in the world, covering almost twice the territory of the next-largest country, Canada. It ranks eighth in the world in population. It shares land borders with the following countries (counter-clockwise from NW to SE): Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland (only through Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. It also has maritime borders with the United States, Canada and Japan.

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Formerly the dominant republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russia is now an independent country, and an influential member of the Commonwealth of Independent States, since the union's dissolution in December 1991. During the Soviet era, Russia was officially called the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Russia is usually considered the Soviet Union's successor state in diplomatic matters.

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Most of the area, population, and industrial production of the Soviet Union, then one of the world's two superpowers, lay in Russia. After the breakup of the USSR, Russia's global role was diminished. Since then, its influence has grown, but is still far from that of the former Soviet Union.

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Transliteration: Transliteration in a narrow sense is a mapping from one system of writing into another. Transliteration attempts to be lossless, so that an informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words. To achieve this objective transliteration may define comple...

Country: : This article describes a type of political entity. Country is also a short form for the countryside or the country music genre....

Europe: :This article is about the continent. For other meanings, see Europe (disambiguation)....

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