Form of government: Federal Republic Area: 17 125 200 sq km Population: 146 780 700 inhab. (2019 estimate) Density: 8.57 inhab./kmq Coordinates: lat. 81 ° – 42 ° N; long. 19 ° -180 ° E – 169 ° W Capital: Moscow = Moskva 12 615 300 inhab. (2019); Monetary unit: Russian ruble (100 kopecks) Human development index: 0.824 (49th place) President: Vladimir Putin (ER), elected on 4-III-2012, re-elected on 18-III-2018 Prime Minister: Michail Mišustin (technician ), from 16-I-2020 Duma: seats (updated to July 2020): ER (united Russia, nationalist), 338; KPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation), 43; LDPR (Liberal Democratic Party, National Populist), 39; SR (Fair Russia), 22; others, 8 Internet: www.gks.ru (Federal State Statistics Service) Member of APEC, Council of Europe, CIS, EBRD, OCS, UN, OSCE, OAS observer, OCI observer, UEE, WTO.
Borders: It borders SE to SW with North Korea, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia, SW to NW with Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Norway. It faces N the Arctic Ocean, E the Bering Sea, the Okhotsk Sea and the Sea of Japan (Pacific Ocean), SW the Caspian Sea, the Azov Sea and the Black Sea, and the NW Sea Baltic.
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: POPULATION AND ETHNIC GROUPS
According to 800zipcodes, Russia has its most populated areas in the European part, where the nomadic peoples from the great Central Asian areas settled, gradually overlapping since ancient times, and where the expansion started from the century. XVI onwards led the Russians to occupy and colonize, alongside and often to the detriment of the indigenous peoples, the different regions of the great dominion that goes from the Baltic to the Pacific. Although both the tsarist empire and the Soviet regime pursued a policy of Russifying the populations incorporated within the political borders of their state, this policy has remained far from complete and – apart from the republics that became independent in 1991, in which the Russians are everywhere only minorities – in the territory of Russia there are still many ethnic groups, large, small and very small, which have maintained their own precise identity. Within the current borders of the country (2003), the main ethnic group is that of the Russians (79.8%), followed by Tatars (3.8%), Ukrainians (2%), Bashkirs (1.2%), Chuvas (1.1%), Chechens (0.9%), Armenians (0.8%), Mordvini (0, 6%), Belarusians (0.6%), Avari (0.5%), Kazakhs (0.5%), Germans (0.4%), Udmurti (0.4%), others (7.4%) ). The nationalities present in the Russian territories include Finno-Ugric populations such as the Mari, the Mordvini, the Komi, the Careli etc .; populations of Turkish origin (or Ural-Altaica) heirs of the Tartar rulers of the Golden Horde, such as the Tatars of Kazan, the Kalmyks of the lower Volga, the Bashkirs of the central -southern Urals; Caucasians such as the Ossetians and the Dagestani ; Mongolian and Tungusic peoples as Buryat and Yakut, and paleosiberiane like the Chukchi, the Coriacchi, the Jukagiri. Despite the strong emigration of recent decades to the USA and Israel, Jews are still numerous, scattered almost everywhere but especially in the big cities: almost absent instead in the autonomous province (Birobidžan) that Stalin had reserved for them in a remote area border with China. From the demographic point of view, the terrible imbalances caused by the Second World War (20 million dead) that followed the no less serious ones caused by the First World War have now been absorbed.and the civil war, estimated overall – but there are conflicting estimates – of 10-15 million. The demographic campaign contributed to the reabsorption which, after the last war, raised the birth rate over 23% despite the sharp decrease in the number of males; after a progressive rise, it has begun to regress and is now at 11.3 ‰ (2007). In the post-war period, the mortality rate also fell considerably, in relation to the improved living conditions; the last twenty years, however, have seen a new albeit slight deterioration: today mortality is around 14.7 ‰ (2007). Since 1992, the first year in which the number of deaths exceeded that of births, the population has therefore been progressively reducing, at a rate that alarms demographers and has only been partially compensated for. in the early nineties, from the return of many Russians who lived in other former Soviet republics. The analysis of the demographic pyramid shows that just 14.5% of the population belongs to the age group between 0-14 years, while 71.2% is in the intermediate class (15-64 years): the fertility in fact went down systematically after 1988 and is now among the lowest in the world (1.1 children per woman). Although the reduction of the birth rate is the norm in industrialized countries, the Russian decrease has peculiar characteristics, the reasons for which are not attributable, as usually happens, to the increase in wealth and the standard of living, but, on the contrary, to the uncertainty in the economic situation and a new deterioration in the health conditions of the population. Substantial differences between the Russian demographic characteristics and those of Western countries are also found with regard to “life expectancy”, which for Russian women is relatively “normal” (73 years) while for males it is very low (61), close to that of countries with much lower income. The main causes of this situation can be identified in the increase in pollution and malnutrition but above all in alcoholism and in the reappearance of endemic diseases such as dysentery and cholera.
