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Russia in eight friendly questions about the essentials. No expert knowledge needed: young and old can join in, and everyone learns something new.
Fresh tracks in the snow 0–3 · Birch forest explorer 4–6 · Russia connoisseur 7–8
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Moscow is Russia's biggest city, and its underground railway, the Moscow Metro, is the busiest in Europe. Many of its stations look like underground palaces, with marble walls, high ceilings and grand chandeliers, so the metro is a tourist attraction in its own right.
Photo: U.S. Department of State, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.
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The Ural Mountains form part of the border between Europe and Asia, and about three-quarters of Russia's land lies on the Asian side. The country is so wide that it spans 11 time zones, and in the far east a Russian island lies only about 4 km from an American one.
Photo: ugraland from Moscow, Russia, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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The Siberian tiger, also called the Amur tiger, lives mainly in the mountain forests near Russia's Pacific coast. In winter its coat grows longer, softer and paler, and the fur on its head can get so long that it almost covers its ears.
Photo: Appaloosa, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Alexey Pajitnov made Tetris in the mid-1980s at a computer research centre in Moscow. The name combines 'tetra', meaning four, because every piece is made of four blocks, and tennis, his favourite sport. His first version had no pictures at all: the blocks were drawn with brackets.
Photo: Official GDC, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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The Russian alphabet has 33 letters, and some look just like English ones but sound different: the letter that looks like a P is said like an R, and the one that looks like a C is said like an S. Cyrillic is used for other languages too, as far away as Mongolia.
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Yuri Gagarin, born in a small Russian village, circled the Earth once in his spacecraft Vostok 1, a trip of 108 minutes. As the rocket lifted off he called out 'Poyekhali!', meaning 'Off we go!', and 12 April is now celebrated worldwide as the International Day of Human Space Flight.
Photo: Александр Моклецов / СовИнформБюро, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
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Baba Yaga's hut can turn around on its chicken legs. Most famously, she flies through the air sitting in a big wooden mortar, a bowl for grinding grain, steering with the pestle and sweeping away her tracks with a broom.
Photo: Богатов Николай Алексеевич, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.
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These dolls are called matryoshkas, from a loving nickname for Matryona, once a popular Russian girl's name. The very first set, made in the 1890s, had eight dolls: a mother holding a rooster on the outside, then her children, and a tiny baby in the middle.
Photo: No machine-readable author provided. Fanghong assumed (based on copyright claims, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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