Category:Russia

Rossiya, Россия, known in English as Russia (hence, Russian Federation), formerly as Ruthenia, originating historically from the Rus, an early medieval union of certain East Slavic and Finno-Ugric peoples ruled by the Rurikid Varangians, and including various territories in Eastern Europe and North Asia spanning the periods of Kievan Rus, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the modern Russian Federation. It is presently divided into forty-six oblasts (and one autonomous oblast) &mdash; Amur, Arkhangelsk, Astrakhan, Belgorod, Bryansk, Chelyabinsk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Kaliningrad, Kaluga, Kemerovo, Kirov, Kostroma, Kurgan, Kursk, Leningrad, Lipetsk, Magadan, Moscow, Murmansk, Nizhny Novgorod, Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Orenburg, Oryol, Penza, Pskov, Rostov, Ryazan, Sakhalin, Samara, Saratov, Smolensk, Sverdlovsk, Tambov, Tomsk, Tver, Tula, Tyumen, Ulyanovsk, Vladimir, Volgograd, Vologda, Voronezh, Yaroslavl, and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast &mdash; twenty-two republics, nine krais (territories), four autonomous okrugs (regions), and the three federal cities of Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Sevastopol.