In Depth

Russia fills out Europe's right flank and reaches across the top of Asia to wade in the Pacific, making it European, Asian, Arctic, and none of the above. Its struggle for identity, association, and empire has defined it since the Vikings formed the state of Rus nearly 1,200 years ago. Blood and repression have marred this struggle, right up to today. Russia's leaders have been expert at inflicting ugliness on their people, and Russians have become expert at putting up with it. Yet the country has survived and thrived, producing some of the world's best science, music, and literature. More remarkably, Russians are among the most festive and giving people on the planet, always ready to put their last morsel of food and last drop of drink on the table to honor an unexpected late-night guest with toasts, more toasts, and laughter. Moscow has dominated the country's political, economic, and cultural life for most of the past 900 years; St. Petersburg, during the 2 centuries when it assumed the role of Russia's capital, plunged the country at long last into the modern world. The two distinct, yet distinctly Russian, cities remain the pride of this unfathomably vast country.

Calendar Confusion

Russia used the Julian calendar until February 1918, well after the rest of Europe switched to the Gregorian calendar, which at that point was 13 days ahead. When the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace, it was still October 1917 in Russia but was already November in the rest of Europe; hence, for the next 7 decades, the Soviets celebrated "Great October Revolution Day" on November 7. The Russian Orthodox calendar ignored the switch, and Russians still celebrate Christmas on January 7 instead of December 25. Some also celebrate the "Old" New Year on January 13 and 14, as well as the traditional New Year's bash on December 31 and January 1.

Unorthodox Beginnings

Whether legend or fact, the story of how Russians chose Orthodox Christianity hardly sounds holy: Grand Prince Vladimir I of Kievan Rus was deciding which of the world's religions would best suit his burgeoning state. He rejected Judaism for its prohibition of pork, a crucial Russian food source; and dismissed Islam because no Russian (even in the 10th c.) would heed a ban on liquor -- a lesson Mikhail Gorbachev learned a millennium later after launching a disastrous anti-alcohol campaign. Prince Vladimir finally settled on Orthodox Christianity, allegedly because of his envoys' rave reviews of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople.

The Great Russian Spying Tradition

You've heard of the KGB, that ultimate of Cold War villains. Yet it represents just one chapter in Russia's rich history of spying, snooping, informing, rooting out conspiracies, and all-around paranoia. Most of this activity has been aimed not at outsiders, but at Russians themselves. Ivan the Terrible (1533-84) was the first Russian leader to establish a secret office to spy on his subjects, and his successors kept up the tradition. Undercover agents and counterespionage thrived amid the revolutionary activity of the late 19th century. When the Soviets took over, they formalized the secret police into a pillar of the government that became notorious for torturing or murdering suspects or sending them to prison based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence.

Soviet spy agencies were labeled with a succession of double-speak acronyms. Felix Dzerzhinsky, considered the father of Soviet espionage, established the Cheka, an abbreviation for the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counter-revolution, Speculation and Sabotage, in 1917. Later, the NKVD (People's Committee for Internal Affairs) ruled over labor camps and prisons for political enemies under Stalin. It then became the MGB (Ministry of State Security), before morphing into the better-known KGB (Committee of State Security). Its many departments snooped on every aspect of Russians' lives, from workplace tardiness to personal correspondence. The system shrank considerably after the Soviet collapse, but the "gebeshniki," or "state security guys," enjoyed a bit of a comeback under Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB operative who ran the post-Soviet intelligence agency, the FSB (Federal Security Service), in the late 1990s before becoming president. While the FSB is in charge of domestic snooping, foreign spies are tracked by the honestly named Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).