Population
According to the 2010 census, Russians make up 80.9% of the population. Among the more than 200 ethnic minorities, the Tatars form the largest ethnic group with 3.9%, followed by the Ukrainians (1.4%), Bashkirs (1.2%), Chuvashes (1.1%), Chechens (1, 0%), Armenians (0.9%), Avars (0.7%), Mordvins and Kazakhs (each 0.5%), Udmurts, Azerbaijanis, Darginers, Ossetians, Belarusians, Kabardians, Kumuks and Mari (each 0, 4%). In 2010 there were 394,000 Germans living in Russia (around 0.3%, Russian Germans), the number of which fell sharply during the 1990s as a result of emigration to Germany and continues to decrease (1994: around 1 million). Due to the low population density of the Asian part of the country (2.5 residents per km 2), the average population density is (2018) 9 residents per km 2; the mean value of the European part of the country is 27 residents per km 2. The decline in annual population growth that began in the late 1980s (2018: −0.11%) is more pronounced among Russians than among the non-Russian minorities. Against the background of the aging population In 2018, the retirement age was raised by five years (women from 55 to 60 years, men from 60 to 65 years). The life expectancy of men (2018: 65.6 years, women 77.3 years) is extremely low in Russia. This is mainly attributed to alcohol and nicotine abuse and a high suicide rate.
According to Topb2bwebsites, the political and economic destabilization of Russia and other successor states of the Soviet Union, and in particular the diverse ethnic tensions at the beginning of the 1990s, triggered both domestic and cross-border migration processes. Since 1990, almost 1 million migrants, primarily of Russian nationality, have immigrated to Russia from the former Soviet neighboring republics. Many citizens of neighboring countries also live in Russia, mostly as migrant workers. In 2017 alone 210,400 migrants immigrated to Russia; the migration rate (2017) is 1.7 per 1000 residents.
The development and settlement of the northern and eastern parts of the country carried out during the Soviet era turned into a relocation of parts of these areas after 1990 (especially in the peripheral areas of Siberia and the Far East), while the west and south-west of Russia recorded increased migration.
The biggest cities in Russia
| Biggest Cities (Inh. 2018) | |
| Moscow | 12 342 600 |
| St. Petersburg | 5 351 900 |
| Novosibirsk | 1 612 800 |
| Ekaterinburg | 1,468,800 |
| Nizhny Novgorod | 1,259,000 |
| Kazan | 1,243,500 |
| Chelyabinsk | 1 202 400 |
| Omsk | 1,172,000 |
| Samara | 1 163 400 |
| Rostov on Don | 1 130 300 |
Russian arts
Russian art, term for the Old Russian art that developed on the basis of elements of the ancient, Scythian, Baltic, Finno-Ugric and East Slavic cultures.
With the adoption of Christianity in 988, the Byzantine cultural influences, which decisively shaped the art of the Kievan Rus (up to the beginning of the 13th century), intensified. The new Russian art began when, under Peter the Great, Russia opened up to Europe. The period of Soviet-Russian art began after the October Revolution in 1917 and ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Contemporary Russian art is determined by post-socialist Russian art.
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
On July 10, 1918, the first constitution of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR) was adopted; 1918-20 / 21 Soviet Russia had to fight off a civil war triggered by the White Guard armies and an intervention by the Entente powers as well as Germany and Poland. With the Bolshevik victory, various areas of the former Russian Empire that had already declared themselves independent were occupied by Soviet Russian troops (Caucasus, Ukraine and Belarus). The RSFSR was a leading founding member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) formed on December 30, 1922 together with the Ukraine, Belarus and the Transcaucasian Federation; from the beginning it dominated the entire development of the Soviet Union without having its own visible representation in the state and party organization as a Union republic. The Russian central authority granted the individual republics and nationalities (constitution of 1924, also in the later ones of 1936 and 1977) formal rights of self-government or autonomy, but uniform communist social and economic structures were enforced everywhere and the development of the central power and the CPSU aligned with given central goals of the Soviet Union. Russian became the official language and lingua franca throughout the Union; the Russian parts of the population settled in the non-Russian republics made up the political and economic elite there. Stalinism pursued any opposition or political deviation and had a large prison camp system (GULAG) in place since the 1930s.
In the 1920s and 1930s, numerous companies were established in the RSFSR as part of industrialization. In the Second World War, Russia was the main Eastern European theater of war from 1941; the initially rapid advance of German troops far into the territory of the RSFSR was stopped in December 1941 in front of Moscow; The German Wehrmacht suffered decisive defeats at Stalingrad in 1942/43 and at Kursk in 1943; In 1944 the Red Army liberated the territory of the RSFSR. The Volga German Republic, founded in 1924 within the RSFSR, was dissolved in 1941 (under the wrongly raised accusation of collective collaboration with Germany); the Russian Germans were forcibly resettled, as were the Kalmyks, the Caucasian mountain peoples and the Crimean Tatars in 1943–44. Northern East Prussia, annexed in 1945, was incorporated into the RSFSR as the Kaliningrad region; in 1954, Crimea (on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Ukraine’s annexation to Russia) was detached from the RSFSR by resolution of the Supreme Soviet and added to the Ukraine; after the transformation of the Karelo-Finnish SSR into the Karelian ASSR (1956), it became part of the RSFSR. (To the further story Soviet Union)
When the policy of glasnost and perestroika introduced by M. S. Gorbachev in 1985 fell into a crisis at the end of the 1980s, mass protests and strikes became more frequent in the big cities. The CPSU renounced its monopoly of power (February 1990), particularly under the pressure of the democratic forces in Russia, which organized themselves in the collective movement “Democratic Russia” that arose in 1990. Conservative communist forces reacted by founding their own Russian Communist Party (June 1990) under Orthodox leadership. In view of the decline of the central power, the radical reform forces under B. N. Yeltsin, that of Gorbachev in 1988, grew stronger had been dismissed from his top political positions, but with his election as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR in May 1990 obtained the highest Russian state office.
