:: wikimiki.org ::
| Ivan Yevreinov |
Ivan YevreinovIvan Mikhailovich Yevreinov (Иван Михайлович Евреинов in Russian) (1694 - February 3 O.S. 1724) was a Russian geodesist and explorer.
Ivan Yevreinov was born in Poland, then brought to Russia and baptized into Orthodox Christianity.
Ivan Yevreinov was first a student at the School for Mathematical and Navigational Sciences in Moscow (from 1714) and then in a geodesic class of the Naval Academy in St.Petersburg. In 1719, Ivan Yevreinov was sent to Kamchatka and Kuril Islands by the order of Peter the Great to secretly perform cartography together with Fyodor Luzhin and find if America and Asia are joined together.
In 1720 he reached Okhotsk by land (through Siberia), then on a small ship Vostok he reached Kamchatka, then by land traveled to Nizhnekamchatsk (and was the first to measure geographical coordinates of this place). He returned to the ship, mapped the shores of Kamchatka, then sailed to the south along Kuril Islands (was first to map sixteen of Kuril Islands) down to Hokkaido. On the Kuril Islands they collected taxes from the local population, then through Kamchatka, Okhotsk and Yakutsk they returned to Tobolsk and finally to Kazan, there Ivan reported about his findings to Peter the Great. Ivan Evreinov was not able to answer whether America and Asia are connected by land, but he was first to make accurate mapping of Kamchatka, Kuril Islands and Russian Pacific Coast, before him even coordinates of local forts and villages were not known.
Since 1723 he worked on mapping Khlynov and surroundings and died there.
Name of Evreinov is given to a Mountain and a Peninsula on Okhotsk Sea and one of the straits between Kuril Islands.
External links
- [http://www.npacific.ru/np/library/encicl/6/0001.htm Biography]
Yevreinov, Ivan
Yevreinov, Ivan
Yevreinov, Ivan
Russian language
Russian (Russian: русский язык, russkij jazyk, ) is the most widely spoken language of Europe and the most widespread of the Slavic languages.
Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages, and is therefore related to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, as well as the modern Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages, including English, French, and Irish, respectively. Written examples are attested from the 10th century onwards.
While it preserves much of its ancient synthetic-inflexional structure and a Common Slavonic word base, modern Russian exhibits a large stock of the international vocabulary for politics, science, and technology. A language of great political importance in the 20th century, Russian is one of the official languages of the United Nations.
NOTE. Russian is written in a non-Latin script. All examples below are in the Cyrillic alphabet, with transcriptions in IPA.
Classification
Russian is a Slavic language in the Indo-European family.
From the point of view of the spoken language, its closest relatives are Belarusian and Ukrainian, the other two national languages in the East Slavic group. In many places in Ukraine and Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably.
The basic vocabulary, principles of word-formation, and, to some extent, inflexions and literary style of Russian have been influenced by Church Slavonic, a developed and partly adopted form of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic language used by the Russian Orthodox Church. Many words in modern literary Russian are closer in form to the modern Bulgarian language than to Ukrainian or Belarusian. However, the East Slavic forms have tended to remain in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with slightly different meanings. For details, see Historical Sound Changes and History of the Russian language.
Outside the Slavic languages, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have been greatly influenced by Greek, Latin, French, German, and English.
Geographic distribution
Russian is primarily spoken in Russia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics of the USSR. Until 1917, it was the sole official language of the Russian Empire. During the Soviet period, the policy toward the languages of the various other ethnic groups fluctuated in practice. Though each of the constituent republics had its own official language, the unifying role and superior status was reserved for Russian. Following the break-up of 1991, several of the newly independent states have encouraged their native languages, which has partly reversed the privileged status of Russian, though its role as the language of post-Soviet national intercourse throughout the region has continued.
In Latvia, notably, its official recognition and legality in the classroom have been a topic of considerable debate in a country where more than third of the population is Russian-speaking, consisting mostly of post-World War II immigrants from Russia and other parts of the former USSR (Belarus, Ukraine). Similarly, in Estonia, the Soviet-era immigrants and their Russian-speaking descendants constitute about one quarter of the country's current population.
A much smaller Russian-speaking minority in Lithuania has largely been assimilated during the decade of independence and currently represent less than 1/10 of the country's overall population.
In the twentieth century it was widely taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR, especially in Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. However, younger generations are usually not fluent in it, because Russian is no longer mandatory in the school system. It was, and still is, widely taught in Asian countries such as Laos, Vietnam and Mongolia due to Soviet influence, and is still used as a lingua franca in Afghanistan by various tribes.
Russian is also spoken in Israel by at least 750,000 ethnic Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union (1999 census). The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian.
Sizeable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America (especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Miami, and Chicago). In the first two of them, Russian-speaking groups total over half a million. In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, live in their self-sufficient neighborhoods (especially the generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early sixties). It is important to note, however, that only about a quarter of them are ethnic Russians.
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union the overwhelming majority were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterwards the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat. According to the United States 2000 Census, Russian was reported as language spoken at home by 1.50% of population, or about 4.2 million, placing it as #10 language in the United States.
Significant Russian-speaking groups also exist in Western Europe. These have been fed by several waves of immigrants since the beginning of the twentieth century, each with its own flavour of language. Germany, Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Greece have significant Russian-speaking communities totaling 3 million people.
Two thirds of them are actually Russian-speaking descendants of Germans, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, or Ukrainians who either repatriated after the USSR collapsed or are just looking for temporary employment. But many are well-off Russian families acquiring property and getting education.
Earlier, the descendants of the Russian émigrés tended to lose the tongue of their ancestors by the third generation. Now, when the border is more open, Russian is likely to survive longer, especially when many of the emigrants visit their homelands at least once a year and also have access to Russian websites and TV channels.
Recent estimates of the total number of speakers of Russian:
Official status
Russian is the official language of Russia, and an official language of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (Ukraine) and the unrecognized Moldovan Republic of Transnistria. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
Education in Russian is still a popular choice for many of the both native and RSL (Russian as a second language) speakers in Russia and many of the former Soviet republics.
97% of the public school students of Russia, 75% in Belarus, 41% in Kazakhstan, 24% in Ukraine, 23% in Kyrgyzstan, 21% in Moldova, 7% in Azerbaijan, 5% in Georgia received their education only or mostly in Russian, although the corresponding percentage of ethnic Russians was 80% in Russia, 11% in Belarus, 27% in Kazakhstan, 17% in Ukraine, 9% in Kyrgyzstan, 6% in Moldova, 2% in Azerbaijan, 1.5% in Georgia.
Dialects
Despite levelling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary, a large number of dialects exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of the Russian language into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between the two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern, Central and Southern, with Moscow lying in the Central region. Dialectology within Russia recognizes dozens of smaller-scale variants.
The dialects often show distinct and non-standard features of pronunciation and intonation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some of these are relics of ancient usage now completely discarded by the standard language. Also cf. Moscow pronunciation of "-чн-", e.g. "булошная" (buloshnaya - bakery) instead of "булочная" (bulochnaya).
The northern dialects typically pronounce unstressed clearly (the phenomenon called okanye оканье); the southern palatalize the final and aspirate the into . It should be noted that some of these features are also present in modern Ukrainian, indicating a linguistic continuum or strong influence one way or the other.
Among the first to study Russian dialects was Lomonosov in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth, Vladimir Dal compiled the first dictionary that included dialectal vocabulary. Detailed mapping of Russian dialects began at the turn of the twentieth century. In modern times, the monumental Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language (Диалектологический атлас русского языка ), was published in 3 folio volumes 1986-1989, after four decades of preparatory work.
The standard language is based on the Moscow dialect.
Derived languages
- Fenia or Fenka, a criminal lingo of ancient origin, with Russian grammar, but with distinct vocabulary.
- Surzhyk is a Ukrainian-Russian pidgin spoken in some rural areas of Ukraine
- Trasianka is a Belarusian-Russian mix (sort of pidgin) used by a large portion of the rural population in Belarus.
- Russenorsk is an extinct pidgin language with Russian vocabulary and Norwegian grammar, used for communication between Russians and Norwegians in Svalbard and Kola Peninsula.
- Runglish: Russian-English pidgin.
Writing system
Alphabet
Runglish publication describing the "Slavonic" language.]]
Russian is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic (кириллица) alphabet, consisting of 33 letters.
The following table gives their majuscule forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound:
Old letters that have been abolished at one time or another but occur in this and related articles include or , і , and or . The yers ъ and ь were originally pronounced as ultra-short or reduced , (conventional transcription, not IPA).
For information on an informal approach on transliterating Russian into English, see the article Transliteration of Russian into English.
Orthography
Russian spelling is reasonably phonetic in practice. It is in fact a balance among phonetics, morphology, etymology, and grammar, and, like that of most living languages, has its share of inconsistencies and controversial points.
The current spelling follows the major reform of 1918, and the final codification of 1956. An update proposed in the late 1990's has met a hostile reception, and has not been formally adopted.
The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the French and German models.
Sounds
The phonological system of Russian is inherited from Common Slavonic, but underwent considerable modification in the early historical period, before being largely settled by about 1400.
The language possesses five vowels, which are written with different letters depending on whether or not the preceding consonant is palatalized. The consonants typically come in plain vs. palatalized pairs, which are traditionally called hard and soft. (The 'hard' consonants are sometimes said to be velarized, but this is only the case for /l/.) The standard language, based on the Moscow dialect, possesses heavy stress and moderate variation in pitch. Stressed vowels are somewhat drawled, while unstressed vowels (except /u/) tend to be reduced to an unclear schwa.
Russian syllable structure can be quite complex with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to 4 consecutive sounds. Using a formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant the stucture can be described as follows:
(C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C)
Consonants
Russian is notable for its distinction based on palatalization of most of the consonants. While /k/, /ɡ/, /x/ do have palatalized allophones , only might be considered a phoneme, though it is marginal and generally not considered distinctive. It should be noted that palatalization is a phonological concept, and not all 'soft' consonants are phonetically palatalized. The velar and labial consonants are truly palatalized, which means that the center of the tongue is raised during and after the articulation of the consonant. The coronal stops, however, are phonetically laminal. In addition, in the case of /t/ and /d/, the tongue is raised enough to produce frication, thus making affricate-like. (There is no contrast between frication and no frication, though, as /ts/ is never palatalized.) are postalveolar with a flat tongue (laminal retroflex).
Grammar
Russian has preserved an Indo-European synthetic-inflexional structure, although considerable levelling has taken place.
Russian grammar encompasses
- a highly synthetic morphology
- a syntax that, for the literary language, is the conscious fusion of three elements:
- a polished vernacular foundation;
- a Church Slavonic inheritance;
- a Western European style.
The spoken language has been influenced by the literary, but continues to preserve characteristic forms. The dialects show various non-standard grammatical features, some of which are archaisms or descendants of old forms since discarded by the literary language.
Vocabulary
Western European
See History of Russian language for an account of the successive foreign influences on the Russian language.
The total number of words in Russian is difficult to reckon because of the ability to agglutinate and create manifold compounds, diminutives, etc. (see Word Formation under Russian grammar).
The number of listed words or entries in some of the major dictionaries published during the last two centuries, and the total vocabulary of Pushkin, are as follows:
Philologists have estimated that the language today may contain as many as 350,000 to 500,000 words.
(As a historical aside, Dahl was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, still insisting that the proper spelling of the adjective русский, which was at that time applied uniformly to all the Orthodox Eastern Slavic subjects of the Empire, as well as to its one official language, be spelled руский with one s, in accordance with ancient tradition and what he termed the "spirit of the language". He was contradicted by the philologist Grot, who distinctly heard the s lengthened or doubled.)
The language of abuse and invective
Main article: Mat (language)
Apparently, the ability to curse effectively has always been recognized as a form of art not only in certain quarters of society, but even by the more conservative-minded literati. For example, as far back as in the nineteenth-century naval yarns of Staniukovich, "artistic invective" (артистическая ругань ) keeps coming out of the sailors' mouths, though it is never spelled out.
The ability to agglutinate has produced the so-called "three-decker curse" (трёхэтажный мат ).
Proverbs and sayings
Main article: Russian proverbs, Russian sayings
Russian language is replete with many hundreds of proverbs (пословица ) and sayings (поговоркa ). These were already tabulated by the seventeenth century, and collected and studied in the nineteenth and twentieth, with the folk-tales being an especially fertile source.
History and examples
See also: Reforms of Russian orthography
The history of Russian language may be divided into the following periods.
- Origins
- The Kievan period (9th-11th centuries)
- Feudal breakup (12th-14th centuries)
- The Moscovite period (15th-17th centuries)
- Empire (18th-19th centuries)
- Soviet period and beyond (20th century)
See also:
- Examples of literary language (12-20th century)
Judging by the historical records, by approximately 1000 AD the predominant ethnic group over much of modern European Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus was the Eastern branch of the Slavs, speaking a closely related group of dialects. The political unification of this region into Kievan Rus, from which both modern Russia and Ukraine trace their origins, was soon followed by the adoption of Christianity in 988-9 and the establishment of Old Church Slavonic as the liturgical and literary language. Borrowings and calques from Byzantine Greek began to enter the vernacular at this time, and simultaneously the literary language began to be modified in its turn to become more nearly Eastern Slavic.
Dialectal differentiation accelerated after the breakup of Kievan Rus' in approximately 1100, and the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century. After the disestablishment of the "Tartar yoke" in the late fourteenth century, both the political centre and the predominant dialect in European Russia came to be based in Moscow. There is some consensus that Russian and Ukrainian can be considered distinct languages from this period at the latest. The official language remained a kind of Church Slavonic until the close of the seventeenth century, but, despite attempts at standardization, as by Meletius Smotrytsky c. 1620, its purity was by then strongly compromised by an incipient secular literature.
The political reforms of Peter the Great were accompanied by a reform of the alphabet, and achieved their goal of secularization and Westernization. Blocks of specialized vocabulary were adopted from the languages of Western Europe. By 1800, a significant portion of the gentry spoke French, less often German, on an everyday basis. The modern literary language is usually considered to date from the time of Alexander Pushkin in the first third of the nineteenth century.
The political upheavals of the early twentieth century and the wholesale changes of political ideology gave written Russian its modern appearance after the spelling reform of 1918. Political circumstances and Soviet accomplishments in military, scientific, and technological matters (especially cosmonautics), gave Russian a world-wide if occasionally grudging prestige, especially during the middle third of the twentieth century.
Since the collapse of 1990-91, fashion for ways and things Western, economic uncertainties and difficulties within the educational system have made for inevitable rapid change in the language. Russian today is a tongue in great flux.
References
The following serve as references for both this article and the related articles listed below that describe the Russian language:
In English
- B. Comrie, G. Stone, M. Polinsky, The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century, 2nd. ed. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996
- W.K. Matthews, Russian Historical Grammar, London, University of London, Athlone Press, 1960
- T.R. Carleton, Introduction to the Phonological History of the Slavic Languages, Columbus, Ohio : Slavica Publishers, 1991
- A. Stender-Petersen, Anthology of old Russian literature, New York, Columbia University Press, 1954
In Russian
- Иванов В.В. Историческая грамматика русского языка. "Просвещение", М., 1990.
- Цыганенко Г. П. Этимологический словарь русского языка. Киев, 1970.
- Т. Н. Михельсон, Рассказы русских летописей XV–XVII веков. М., 1978
- Н.М. Шанский, В.В. Иванов, Т.В. Шанская. Краткий этимологический словарь русского языка. М. 1961.
- А. Шицгал, Русский гражданский шрифт, "Исскуство", Москва, 1958, 2-e изд. 1983.
- Л. П. Жуковская, отв. ред. Древнерусский литературный язык и его отношение к старославянскому.
М., «Наука», 1987.
Many further references are listed in the books above.
See also
Language description
- Russian alphabet
- Russian grammar
- Russian orthography
- Russian phonetics
- History of Russian language
Related languages
- East Slavic languages
- Church Slavonic language
- Great Russian language
- Old Church Slavonic language
- Old Russian language
Other
- List of Russian language topics
- List of English words of Russian origin
- Russian literature
- Russian humour
- Russian proverbs
- Reforms of Russian orthography
- Transliteration of Russian into English
- Volapuk encoding
- Non-native pronunciations of English
- List of commonly confused homonyms in Russian
- Common phrases in different languages
- Runglish
External links
- [http://www.declan-software.com/russian Russian language learning software]
- [http://www.russianlessons.net/ Online Russian language lessons]
- [http://www.dicts.info/dictlist1.php?k1=81 All free Russian dictionaries]
- [http://overstuffed-closet.net/russian The Russian Language Fanlisting]
- [http://www.speakrus.ru/dict/ Free downloadable vocabularies of the Russian language]
- [http://RusWin.net Cyrillic (Russian)]
- [http://www.masterrussian.com MasterRussian.com - vocabulary words and phrases, tips, hand-picked links]
- [http://www.ifstudio-translations.com/ Free Russian translations.]
- [http://tinyurl.com/5lhlp Vasmer's Etymological Dictionary of Russian language]
- [http://www.masterrussian.net/mforum Russian Language Forum. A large community interested in Russian]
- [http://www.gramota.ru "GRAMOTA". An educational/reference site on the Russian language, supported by the Russian government. (In Russian)]
- [http://www.lib.ru "Moshkov's library". A large collection of classical and modern Russian e-texts. (In Russian)]
- [http://www.languagehelpers.com/Russian/TheRussianAlphabet.html Russian alphabet with sound (languagehelpers.com)]
- [http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/language/ Reference Grammar]
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Russian-english/ Russian - English Dictionary]
- [http://www.lorem-ipsum.info/_russian Generator for Russian typographical filler text]
- [http://www.andaman.org/book/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm G. Weber, "Top Languages"]
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=rus SIL Ethnologue Report for Russian]
- [http://www.linguarus.com Russian for Everybody (Self-Learning)]
- [http://www.applelanguages.com/en/learn/russian.php Russian courses]
- [http://dmoz.org/Science/Social_Sciences/Linguistics/Languages/Natural/Indo-European/Slavic/Russian/ ODP Russian Language category]
- [http://www.language-usa.com/ Russian Translation USA]
- [http://runglish1.narod.ru Runglish]
- [http://www.orlandorussians.com/ Russian Language Groups in America]
- [http://www.russki-mat.net/ Multilingual Russian slang dictionaries]
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Russian-english/ Russian English Dictionary] from [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org Webster's Online Dictionary] - the Rosetta Edition
Category:Languages of Belarus
Category:Languages of Finland
Category:Languages of Russia
Category:Languages of Ukraine
Category:Languages of Kazakhstan
Category:Languages of Georgia
Category:Languages of Armenia
Category:Languages of Azerbaijan
Category:Languages of Turkmenistan
Category:Languages of Uzbekistan
Category:Languages of Moldova
Category:Languages of Tajikistan
Category:Languages of Kyrgyzstan
Category:Languages of Estonia
Category:Languages of Latvia
Category:Languages of Lithuania
Category:Languages of China
Category:Languages of Mongolia
Category:Languages of Afghanistan
Category:Languages of Bulgaria
Category:Russian language
Category:East Slavic languages
ko:러시아어
ms:Bahasa Russia
ja:ロシア語
simple:Russian language
th:ภาษารัสเซีย
O/SIn computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. Additionally, it provides a foundation upon which to run application software such as word processing programs, web browsers and others.
Network operating system and firmware are other types of operating systems.
Introduction
Early computers lacked operating systems. A human operator would manually load and run programs. When programs were developed to load and run other programs, it was natural to draw their name from the human job they replaced.
Most current usage of the term "operating system" today, by both popular and professional sources, refers to all the software that is required in order for the user to manage the system and to run third-party application software for that system. That is, the common understanding includes not only the low-level "kernel" that interacts directly with the hardware, but also libraries required by applications as well as basic programs to manipulate files and configure the system.
The exact delineation between the operating system and application software is not precise, however, and is occasionally subject to controversy. For example, one of the key questions in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust trial was whether Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser was part of its Windows operating system or if it was a separable piece of application software. As another example, the GNU/Linux naming controversy is, in part, due to disagreement about the relationship between the Linux kernel and the Linux operating system.
The lowest level of any operating system is its kernel, the first layer of software loaded into computer memory when it starts up. As the first software layer, all other software that gets loaded after it depends on this software to provide them with various common core services. These common core services include, but are not limited to: disk access, memory management, task scheduling, and access to other hardware devices. Like the term "operating system" itself, the question of what exactly should form the "kernel" is subject to some controversy—with various camps advocating "microkernels", "monolithic kernels", and so on—with debates over whether things like file systems should be included in the kernel.
System Calls
System calls are operations/services that are requested by applications from the operating system. As noted on the System Call page, "System calls often use a special machine code instruction which causes the processor to change mode (e.g. to "supervisor mode" or "protected mode")."
Common core services
As operating systems evolve, ever more services are expected to be common core. Since the 1990s, OS's have often been required to provide network and Internet connectivity. They may be required to protect the computer's other software from damage by malicious programs, such as viruses. The list of common core services is ever expanding.
Programs communicate with each other through application programming interfaces, similar to how humans interact with programs through user interfaces. This is especially true between application programs and the OS. The OS's common core services are accessed by application programs through the OS's APIs. Thus an OS enables the communication between hardware and software.
CPU scheduling is also a main function of the operating system.
See also: POSIX
Today's operating systems
Firstly, there is a distinction between console OS's, using only the keyboard for input, such as DOS, and the modern visual OS's, focusing on the mouse and using a GUI (sometimes implemented as a shell around the former). Secondly, which OS can be used often depends on the hardware architecture, most specifically the CPU that is used, with only Linux and BSD running on almost any architecture. In the past there have been many types of OS's, but starting in the 1990's the choice for personal computers has come to be largely restricted to the Microsoft Windows family and the Unix-like family, of which Linux is becoming the major representative. Mainframe computers and embedded systems use a variety of different operating systems, many with no direct connection to Windows or Unix, but mostly closer to Unix than Windows.
- Personal computers
- IBM PC compatible - smaller Unix-variants, like Linux and BSD, and Microsoft Windows
- Apple Macintosh - Mac OS X, Linux and BSD
- Mainframes - Unix variants, Microsoft Windows and a score of other OS's, mostly related to Unix
- Embedded systems - a variety of dedicated OS's, and limited versions of Linux or other OS's
Unix-like systems
Embedded system.]]
The Unix-like family is a diverse group of operating systems, with several major sub-categories including System V, BSD, and Linux. The name "Unix" is a trademark of The Open Group which licenses it for use to any operating system that has been shown to conform to the definitions that they have cooperatively developed. The name is commonly used to refer to the large set of operating systems which resemble the original Unix.
Unix systems run on a wide variety of machine architectures. They are used heavily as server systems in business, as well as workstations in academic and engineering environments. Free software Unix variants, such as Linux and BSD, are increasingly popular. They have made inroads on the desktop market as well, particularly with "user-friendly" Linux distributions such as Ubuntu Linux.
Some proprietary Unix variants like HP's HP-UX and IBM's AIX are designed to run only on that vendor's proprietary hardware. Others, such as Solaris, can run on both proprietary hardware and on commodity x86 PCs. Apple's Mac OS X, a BSD variant derived from NeXTSTEP and FreeBSD, has replaced Apple's earlier (non-Unix) Mac OS in a small but dedicated market, in the process becoming the most popular proprietary Unix system.
Over the past several years, free Unix systems have supplanted proprietary ones in many markets. For instance, scientific modeling and computer animation were once the province of SGI's IRIX. Today, they are dominated by Linux-based clusters.
Microsoft Windows
IRIX
The Microsoft Windows family of operating systems originated as a graphical layer on top of the older MS-DOS environment for the IBM PC. Modern versions are based on the newer Windows NT core that first took shape in OS/2. Windows runs on 32- and 64-bit Intel and AMD computers, although earlier versions also ran on the DEC Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC architectures (and there was work in progress to make it work also on the SPARC architecture).
Today, Windows is a popular desktop operating system, enjoying a near-monopoly of around 90% of the worldwide desktop market share. It is also widely used on low-end and mid-range servers, supporting applications such as web servers and database servers. In recent years, Microsoft has spent significant marketing and R&D money to demonstrate that Windows is capable of running any enterprise application (see the TPC article).
Other operating systems
Mainframe operating systems, such as IBM's z/OS, and embedded operating systems such as QNX, eCos, and PalmOS, are usually unrelated to Unix and Windows, except Windows CE, Windows NT Embedded 4.0 and Windows XP Embedded which are related to Windows and several
- BSDs and Linux distributions tailored for the requirements of an embedded system.
Older operating systems which are still used in niche markets include the Windows-like OS/2 from IBM; VMS from Hewlett-Packard (formerly DEC); Mac OS, the non-Unix precursor to Apple's Mac OS X; RISC OS, which is specifically designed to run on ARM processor architectures; and AmigaOS, the first graphical user interface (GUI) based operating system with advanced multimedia capabilities available to the general public.
Research and development of new kinds of operating systems is an active subfield of computer science. Microsoft Singularity is a research project to develop an operating system with better memory protection.
Examples of operating systems
- Mac OS
- Microsoft Windows
- Unix (including BSD and its derivatives, and "unix-like" OSes such as Linux and GNU)
- yellowTAB Zeta, based on BeOS
- DOS (and its fore-runner CP/M)
For more examples, see the list of operating systems.
Classifications and terminology
:
An operating system is conceptually broken into three sets of components: a user interface (which may consist of a GUI and/or a command line interpreter or "shell"), low-level system utilities, and a kernel--which is the heart of the operating system. As the name implies, the shell is an outer wrapper to the kernel, which in turn talks directly to the hardware.
Hardware <-> Kernel <-> Shell <-> Applications
| |
+----------+
1 2 3
In some operating systems the shell and the kernel are completely separate entities, allowing you to run varying combinations of shell and kernel (e.g. UNIX), in others their separation is only conceptual.
Kernel design ideologies include those of the monolithic kernel, microkernel, hybrid kernel(modified micro kernel) and exokernel. Many of the major commercial systems such as UNIX, Windows (dos based), and Linux use a monolithic approach, some systems use a microkernel (such as in AmigaOS, QNX, and BeOS) and others like Apple's Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows NT line use the hybrid approach. The microkernel approach is also very popular among research operating systems. Both approaches have produced successful systems and have their advantages. Many embedded systems use ad hoc exokernels.
See also
General topics
- Operating systems category
- History of operating systems
- List of operating systems
- Comparison of operating systems
- Operating systems timeline
- Important publications in operating systems
Other topics
- Monolithic Kernel – Microkernel – Exokernel – Virtual machine – System call
- Asymmetric and Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) – Clustering – Distributed computing
- Real-time operating system – Time-sharing – Multitasking – Embedded system – Single-user – Multi-user
- Orthogonally persistent capabilities versus access control lists
- Object-oriented operating system
- Disk operating systems
- Hard disk drive partitioning
- LiveCD OS (Gnoppix and Knoppix Linux).
- Operating system advocacy
- OS-tan (Personification of operating systems)
- [http://opensource.eu.com/colinux Open Colinux - Running Linux inside Windows]
External links
- [http://www.world-os.com World-Os.com a website dedicated the operating system]
- [http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/ Operating systems at dmoz.org]
- [http://cliki.tunes.org/Operating%20Systems Operating systems at TUNES] - wiki with reviews of operating systems
- [http://www.cbi.umn.edu/iterations/haigh.html Multics History] and the history of operating systems
- [http://www.elook.org/computing/operating-system.htm operating system at elook.org] - explains what an operating system is and provides various examples
- [http://mega-tokyo.com/osfaq2/ The "Write Your Own Operating System" OS Developer FAQ]
- [http://computer.howstuffworks.com/operating-system.htm How OSs Work]
- [http://www.groovyweb.uklinux.net/index.php?page_name=Operating%20system%20programming Operating System Programming] - tutorials and source code
- [http://www.osdata.com Operating Systems Technical Comparison]
- [http://www.osdcom.info/ OSDEV Community] - Amateur OS Development
- [http://www.osdever.net/ BonaFide OS Development] - resource for operating system developers
- [http://www.oshistory.net/ OS History] - Historic timeline of Non-Unix OS Developments
- Humor: [http://www.webaugur.com/bibliotheca/field_stock/os-airlines.html If OS's Were Airlines]
zh-min-nan:Chok-gia̍p hē-thóng
als:Betriebssystem
ko:운영 체제
ms:Sistem pengoperasian
ja:オペレーティングシステム
simple:Operating system
th:ระบบปฏิบัติการ
Russia
The Russian Federation (, transliteration: Rossiyskaya Federatsiya or Rossijskaja Federacija), or Russia (Russian: Росси́я, transliteration: Rossiya or Rossija), is a country that stretches over a vast expanse of Europe and Asia. With an area of 17,075,200 km² (6,595,600 mi²), it is the largest country in the world (by land mass), covering almost twice the territory of the next-largest country, Canada. It ranks eighth in the world in population. It shares land borders with the following countries (counter-clockwise from NW to SE): Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland (only through Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. It is also close to the United States and Japan across stretches of water: the Diomede Islands (one controlled by Russia, the other by the United States) are just 3 km apart, and Kunashir Island (controlled by Russia but claimed by Japan) is about 20 kilometers from Hokkaido.
Formerly the dominant republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russia is now an independent country, and an influential member of the Commonwealth of Independent States, since the Union's dissolution in December 1991. During the Soviet era, Russia was officially called the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Russia is usually considered the Soviet Union's successor state in diplomatic matters.
Most of the area, population, and industrial production of the Soviet Union, then one of the world's two superpowers, lay in Russia. After the breakup of the USSR, Russia's global role was greatly diminished, and cannot be compared to that of the former Soviet Union. In October 2005, the federal statistics agency reported that Russia's population has shrunk by more than half a million people dipping to 143 million.
History
Ancient Rus
:This section covers the pre-Russ ancient history of present Russia and its early medieval period, which is historically referred to as Ancient Rus.
The vast lands of present Russia were home to disunited tribes who were variously overwhelmed by invading Goths, Huns, and Turkish Avars between the third and sixth centuries C.E. The Iranian Scythians populated the southern steppes, and a Turkic people, the Khazars, ruled the western portion of these lands through the 8th century. They in turn were displaced by a group of Scandinavians, the Varangians, who established a capital at the Slavic city of Novgorod and gradually merged with Slavic ruling classes. The Slavs constituted the bulk of the population from the 8th century onwards and slowly assimilated both the Scandinavians as well as native Finno-Ugric tribes, such as the Merya, the Muromians and the Meshchera.
Meshchera
The Varangian dynasty lasted several centuries, during which they affiliated with the Byzantine, or Orthodox church and moved the capital to Kiev in 1169 A.D. In this era the term "Rhos", or "Russ", first came to be applied to the Varangians and later also to the Slavs who peopled the region. In the 10th to 11th centuries this state of Kievan Rus became the largest in Europe and was quite prosperous, due to diversified trade with both Europe and Asia.
Nomadic Turkic people Kipchaks (Polovtsi) conquered southern Russia at the end of 11th century and founded a nomadic state in the steppes along the Black Sea (Desht-e-Kipchak).
In the 13th century the area suffered from internal disputes and was overrun by eastern invaders, the Golden Horde of the pagan Mongols and Muslim Turkic-speaking nomads who pillaged the Russian principalities for over three centuries. Also known as the Tatars, they ruled the southern and central expanses of present-day Russia, while its western zone was largely incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland. The political dissolution of Kievan Rus divided the Russian people in the north from the Belarusians and Ukrainians in the west.
The northern part of Russia together with Novgorod retained some degree of autonomy during the time of the Mongol yoke and was largely spared the atrocities that affected the rest of the country. Nevertheless it had to fight the Germanic crusaders who attempted to colonize the region.
Like in the Balkans and Asia Minor long-lasting nomadic rule retarded the country's economic and social development. Asian autocratic influences degraded many of the country's democratic institutions and affected its culture and economy in a very negative way.
In spite of this, unlike its spiritual leader, the Byzantine Empire, Russia was able to revive, and organized its own war of reconquest, finally subjugating its enemies and annexing their territories. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 Russia remained the only more or less functional Christian state on the Eastern European frontier, allowing it to claim succession to the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Imperial Russia
While still nominally under the domain of the Mongols, the duchy of Moscow began to assert its influence, and eventually tossed off the control of the invaders late in the 14th century.
In the beginning of the 16th century the Russian state set the national goal to return all Russian territories lost as a result of the Mongolian invasion and to protect the borderland against attacks of hordes. The noblemen, receiving a manor from the sovereign, were obliged to serve in the army. The manor system became a basis for the nobiliary horse army.
The Russian state persistently battled against Nogai-Horde and Crimean khanat which were successors of the Golden Horde. Russians, captivated by nomads, were on sale on Crimean slave markets. In 1571 Crimean khan Devlet-Girei, with a horde of 120 thousand horsemen, devastated Moscow. Annually thousands of Russians became victims of attacks by nomads. Tens of thousand of soldiers protected the southern borderland--a heavy burden for the state--which slowed its social and economic development.
Ivan the Great first took the title Tsar (from the Roman Caesar, also written Czar) of Moscow following his marriage to Sofia, a Byzantine Princess (niece of the last Byzantine Emperor) consolidated surrounding areas under Moscow's dominion. At the end of 16 centuries Russian cossacks established the first settlements in Western Siberia. To the middle of 17th century Russian settlements were in Eastern Siberia, on Chukotka, the river Amur, coast of Pacific ocean. In 1648 Cossack Semyon Dezhnev opened the passage between America and Asia. The Russian Empire was born.
Russian Empire]
Muscovite control of the nascent nation continued after the Polish intervention 1605-1612 under the subsequent Romanov dynasty, beginning with Tsar Michael Romanov in 1613. Peter the Great, who ruled from 1689 to 1725, succeeded in bringing ideas and culture from Western Europe to a Russia which had been affected by primitive nomadic cultures. Catherine the Great, ruling from 1762 to 1796, enhanced this effort, establishing Russia not just as an Asian power, but on an equal footing with Britain, France, and Germany in Europe. She enlarged the Russian territory by the Partitions of Poland. Russia has taken territories with the ethnic Belarus and Ukrainian population, earlier parts of the medieval Kievan Rus'. As a result of victorious Russian-Turkish wars Russia reached to Black sea and has set as the purpose protection of Balkan Christians against a Turkish yoke. In 1783 Russia and Georgian Kingdom (which was almost totally devastated by Persian and Turkish invasions) have signed the treatise of Georgiev according to which Georgia has received protection of Russia.
In 1812, having gathered nearly half a million soldiers from France, as well as from all of its vassal states in Europe, Napoleon entered Russia and was defeated by Russian troops. In 1813 Russian army defeated the French armies in Germany.
Russia has won in the War of 1877-1878 and Ottoman Empire recognized the independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro and autonomy of Bulgaria.
Unrest of the peasants and suppression of the growing Intelligentsia were continuing problems however, and on the eve of World War I, the position of Tsar Nicholas II and his dynasty appeared precarious. Repeated devastating defeats of the Russian army in World War I led to widespread rioting in the major cities of the Russian Empire and to the overthrow in 1917 of the Romanovs.
At the close of this Russian Revolution of 1917, a Marxist political faction called the Bolsheviks seized power in St. Petersburg and Moscow under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. The Bolsheviks changed their name to the Communist Party. A bloody civil war ensued, pitting the Bolsheviks' Red Army against a loose confederation of anti-socialist monarchist and bourgeois forces known as the White Army. The Red Army triumphed, and the Soviet Union was formed in 1922.
Russia as part of Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was to be a transnational worker's state free from nationalism, which Leninism teaches is a ruse used by the bourgeoisie to keep the international working classes from realizing their common exploited position and overthrowing the bourgeois. The concept of Russia as a separate national entity was therefore downplayed in the early Soviet Union. Although Russian institutions and cities certainly remained dominant, many non-Russians participated in the new government at all levels.
One of these was a Georgian named Joseph Stalin. A brief power struggle ensued after Lenin's death in 1924. Stalin gradually eroded the various checks and balances which had been designed into the Soviet political system and assumed dictatorial power by the end of the decade. Leon Trotsky and almost all other Old Bolsheviks from the time of the Revolution were killed or exiled. As the 1930s began, Stalin launched the Great Purges, a massive series of political repressions. Millions of people who Stalin suspected of being a threat to his power in some way were executed or exiled to Gulag labor camps in remote areas of Siberia.
Stalin forced rapid industrialization of the largely rural country and collectivization of its agriculture. Stalin also strengthened Russian dominance within the Soviet Union as he buttressed his own hold on power. In 1928, Stalin introduced his "First Five-Year Plan" for modernizing the Soviet economy. Most economic output was immediately diverted to establishing heavy industry. Civilian industry was modernized and heavy weapon factories established with German and US assistance. The plan worked, in some sense, as the Soviet Union successfully transformed from an agrarian economy to a major industrial powerhouse in an unbelievably short span of time, but widespread misery and famine ensued for many millions of people as a result of the severe economic upheaval.
In 1939 the USSR was in strong opposition to nazi Germany, and supported the republicans in Spain who struggled against German and Italian troops. However, in 1938 Germany and the other major European powers signed the Munich treaty. Germany then divided Czechoslovakia with Poland. The Soviet government, being afraid of a German attack to the USSR, began diplomatic maneuvers. In 1939 Poland refused to participate in any measures of collective safety, so the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. On September, 17, 1939, when German armies were within 150 kilometers of the Soviet border, the Soviet army invaded eastern portions of Poland, populated by ethnic Ukrainians and Belorussians.
The Soviet Union staged an artillery attack it claimed had come from neighboring Finland, and invaded it in an attempt to secure itself against future invasion by Germany (which Finland had good relations with) and to gain control of the country, separating it from Europe, and most importantly, from Germany. This conflict is now known as the Winter War. The invasion was a slight disappointment as only the eastern parts of Finland (Karelia) were occupied. This lead to Finland allying with Germany in order to gain revenge.
Germany and its allies (Hungary, Italy, Finland, Romania) invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Although the Wehrmacht reached the outskirts of Moscow, the Red Army stopped the Nazi offensive at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, which became the decisive turning point for Germany's fortunes in the war. The Soviets drove through Eastern Europe and captured Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945 (see Great Patriotic War). About 10 million Soviet citizens became victims of the oppressive policies and war crimes of Germany and its allies in the occupied territory.
Although ravaged by the war, the Soviet Union emerged from the conflict as an acknowledged great power. The Red Army occupied Eastern Europe after the war, including the eastern half of Germany. Stalin installed loyal Communist governments in these satellite states.
During the immediate postwar period, the Soviet Union first rebuilt and then expanded its economy, with control always exerted exclusively from Moscow. The Soviets extracted heavy war reparations from the areas of Germany under their control, mostly in the form of machinery and industrial equipment. The Soviet Union consolidated its hold on eastern Europe (see Eastern bloc). The United States helped the western European countries establish democracies, and both countries sought to achieve economic, political, and ideological dominance over the Third World. The ensuing struggle became known as the Cold War, which turned the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, into its foes.
Stalin died in early 1953 without leaving any instructions for the selection of a successor. His closest associates officially decided to rule the Soviet Union jointly, but secret police chief Lavrenty Beria appeared poised to seize dictatorial control. General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev organized an anti-Beria alliance and staged a coup d'etat. Beria was arrested in June of 1953 and executed later that year; Khrushchev became the undisputed leader of the USSR.
Under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the earth. Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive, and foreign policy toward China and the United States suffered reverses, notably the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he began installing nuclear missles in Cuba and nearly provoked a war with the United States. Over the course of several angry outbursts at the United Nations, Khrushchev was increasingly seen by his colleagues as belligerent, boorish, and dangerous. The remainder of the Soviet leadership removed him from power in 1964.
Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of rule by collective leadership ensued, lasting until Leonid Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent figure in Soviet political life. Brezhnev is frequently derided by historians for stagnating the development of the Soviet Union. In contrast to the revolutionary spirit that accompanied the birth of the Soviet Union, the prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was one of aversion to change.
In the mid and late 1980s, the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. He introduced the landmark policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), in an attempt to modernize Soviet communism. Glasnost meant that the harsh restrictions on free speech that had characterized most of the Soviet Union's existence were removed, and open political discourse and criticism of the government became possible again. Perestroika meant sweeping economic reforms designed to decentralize the planning of the Soviet economy. However, his initiatives provoked strong resentment amongst conservative elements of the government, and an unsuccessful military coup that attempted to remove Gorbachev from power instead led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin seized power in Russia and declared the end of exclusive Communist rule. The USSR splintered into 15 independent republics, and was officially dissolved in December of 1991 (see History of the Soviet Union (1985-1991)).
Since then, Russia has struggled in its efforts to build a democratic political system and a market economy to replace the strict centralized social, political, and economic controls of the Soviet era.
Post-Soviet Russia
market economy
Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin had been elected President of Russia in June 1991 in the first direct presidential election in Russian history. In October 1991, as Russia was on the verge of independence, Yeltsin announced that Russia would proceed with radical market-oriented reform along the lines of Poland's "big bang," also known as "shock therapy."
After the disintegration of the USSR, the economy of Russia went through a crisis. Outside Russia, in the newly independent states, were most of the nonfreezing ports, consumer goods factories, former Soviet pipelines, and significant numbers of the hi-tech enterprises (including the atomic power station). In Russia there was mainly heavy and military industry. Russia has taken up the responsibility for payment of the USSR's external debts, though its population is 50% of the population of the USSR. The largest state enterprises (a petroleum industry, metallurgy) have been privatized for the small sum of $US 600 million, which is far less than they were worth.
Russia's Congress of People's Deputies attempted to impeach Yeltsin on 1993-03-26. Yeltsin's opponents gathered more than 600 votes for impeachment, but fell 72 votes short. On 1993-09-21, Yeltsin disbanded the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People's Deputies by decree, which was illegal under the constitution. On September 21 there was a military showdown, the Russian constitutional crisis of 1993. With military help, Yeltsin held control. The conflict resulted in a number of civilian casualties, and was resolved in Yeltsin's favor. Elections were held on 1993-12-12.
Since the Chechnyan seperatists declared independence in the early 1990s, an intermittent guerrilla war (First Chechen War, Second Chechen War) has been fought between disparate Chechen groups and the Russian military. Some of these groups have become increasingly Islamist over the course of the struggle. It is estimated that over 200,000 people have died in this conflict. Minor conflicts also exist in North Ossetia and Ingushetia.
After Yeltsin's presidency in the 1990s, Vladimir Putin was elected in 2000. Under Putin, the intensified state control of the Russian media has raised Western concerns over Russian civil liberties. At the same time, the rising oil prices, tensions, and war in the Middle East have helped increase Russia's revenue from oil production and export, and have stimulated economic expansion. Putin's presidency has shown improvements in the Russian standard of living, as compared to the 1990s; despite acute crises, human rights abuses, and largely criticized government failures.
Politics
The Russian Federation is a federal republic with a president, directly elected for a four-year term, who holds considerable executive power. The president, who resides in the Kremlin, nominates the highest state officials, including the prime minister (or premier), who must be approved by the State Duma, the lower house of Russian parliament, and governors, who must be approved by regional legislatures. The president can pass decrees (executive orders) without consent from Parliament and is also head of the armed forces and of the Russian National Security Council.
Russia's bicameral parliament, the Federal Assembly (Russian: Федеральное Собрание, English transliteration: Federalnoye Sobraniye) consists of an upper house known as the Federation Council (Совет Федерации, Sovet Federatsii), composed of 178 delegates, which are appointed by executive and legislative bodies of each of 89 federal subjects for the term of four or five years, and a lower house known as the State Duma (Государственная Дума, Gosudarstvennaya Duma), comprising 450 deputies also serving a four-year term, of which 225 are elected by direct popular vote from single member constituencies and 225 are elected by proportional representation from nation-wide party lists.
From the next elections, which are to be held in December 2007, all 450 members of the Duma will be elected from party lists.
Subdivisions
:See also: Federal districts of Russia, Federal subjects of Russia, Republics of Russia, Oblasts of Russia, Krais of Russia, Autonomous Oblasts of Russia, Autonomous Districts of Russia, Federal cities of Russia.
Federal cities of Russia
The Russian Federation consists of a great number of different federal subjects, making a total of 88 constituent components. There are 21 republics within the federation that enjoy a high degree of autonomy on most issues and these correspond to some of Russia's ethnic minorities. The remaining territory consists of 48 oblasts (provinces) and 7 krais (territories), as well as 9 autonomous okrugs (autonomous districts), and 1 autonomous oblast. Beyond these there are two federal cities (Moscow and St. Petersburg). Recently, seven extensive federal districts (four in Europe, three in Asia) have been added as a new layer between the above subdivisions and the national level.
Geography
federal districts
The Russian Federation stretches across much of the north of the supercontinent of Eurasia. Although it contains a large share of the world's Arctic and sub-Arctic areas, and therefore has less population, economic activity, and physical variety per unit area than most countries, the great area south of these still accommodates a great variety of landscapes and climates. Most of Russia is in zones of a continental and Arctic climate. Russia is the coldest country of the world. Mid-annual temperature is −5,5 °C (for comparison, in Iceland +1,2 °C, in Sweden +4 °C).
Most of the land consists of vast plains, both in the European part and the Asian part that is largely known as Siberia. These plains are predominantly steppe to the south and heavily forested to the north, with tundra along the northern coast. The permafrost (areas of Siberia and the Far East) occupies more than half of territory of Russia. Mountain ranges are found along the southern borders, such as the Caucasus (containing Mount Elbrus, Russia's and Europe's highest point at 5,633 m) and the Altai, and in the eastern parts, such as the Verkhoyansk Range or the volcanoes on Kamchatka. The more central Ural Mountains, a north-south range that form the primary divide between Europe and Asia, are also notable.
Russia has an extensive coastline of over 37,000 km along the Arctic and Pacific Oceans, as well as more or less inland seas such as the Baltic, Black and Caspian seas. Some smaller bodies of water are part of the open oceans; the Barents Sea, White Sea, Kara Sea, Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea are part of the Arctic, whereas the Bering Sea, Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan belong to the Pacific Ocean.
Major islands found in them include Novaya Zemlya, the Franz-Josef Land, the New Siberian Islands, Wrangel Island, the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin. (See List of islands of Russia).
Many rivers flow across Russia. See Rivers of Russia.
Major lakes include Lake Baikal, Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega. See List of lakes in Russia.
Borders
The most practical way to describe Russia is as a main part (a large contiguous portion with its off-shore islands) and an exclave (at the southeast corner of the Baltic Sea).
The main part's borders and coasts (starting in the far northwest and proceeding counter-clockwise) are:
- borders with the following countries: Norway and Finland,
- a short coast on the Baltic Sea, facing eight other countries on its shores from Finland to Estonia and including the port of St. Petersburg,
- borders with Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine,
- a coast on the Black Sea, facing five other countries on its shores from Ukraine to Georgia,
- borders with Georgia and Azerbaijan,
- a coast on the Caspian Sea, facing four other countries on its shores from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan,
- borders with Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea,
- an extensive coastline that provides access with all the maritime nations of the world, and stretches
- from the North Pacific Ocean including
- the Sea of Japan (where the west shore of Russia's Sakhalin lies),
- the Sea of Okhotsk (where the east shore of Sakhalin and its Kurile Islands lie), and
- the Bering Sea,
- through the Bering Strait (where its minor island of Big Diomede is separated by only a few miles from Little Diomede, a part of the US state of Alaska),
- to the Arctic Ocean, including
- the Chukchi Sea (where the south and east shores of its Wrangel Island lie),
- the East Siberian Sea (where its west shore, and the east shores of its New Siberian Islands lie),
- the Laptev Sea (where their west shores lie),
- the Kara Sea (where the east shore of its Novaya Zemlya lies),
- the Barents Sea (where their west shore, the south shores of its Franz-Josef Land the port of Murmansk and important naval facilities lie, and where the White Sea reaches far inland).
The exclave, constituted by the Kaliningrad Oblast,
- shares borders with
- Poland to its south and
- Lithuania to its north and east, and
- has a northwest coast on the Baltic Sea.
The Baltic and Black Sea coasts of Russia have less direct and more constrained access to the high seas than its Pacific and Arctic ones, but both are nevertheless important for that purpose. The Baltic gives immediate access with the nine other countries sharing its shores, and between the main part of Russia and its Kaliningrad Oblast exclave. Via the straits that lie within Denmark, and between it and Sweden, the Baltic connects to the North Sea and the oceans to its west and north. The Black Sea gives immediate access with the five other countries sharing its shores, and via the Dardanelles and Marmora straits adjacent to Istanbul, Turkey, to the Mediterranean Sea with its many countries and its access, via the Suez Canal and the Straits of Gibraltar, to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The salt waters of the Caspian Sea, the world's largest lake, afford no access with the high seas.
Spatial extent
The two most widely separated points in Russia are about 8,000 km (5000 mi) apart along a geodesic (i.e. shortest line between two points on the Earth's surface). These points are: the boundary with Poland on a 60-km-long (40-mi-long) spit of land separating the Gulf of Gdańsk from the Vistula Lagoon; and the farthest southeast of the Kurile Islands, a few miles off Hokkaido Island, Japan.
However, this is confusing because the points which are furthest separated in longitude are "only" 6,600 km (4,100 mi) apart along a geodesic. These points are: in the West, the same spit; in the East, the Big Diomede Island (Ostrov Ratmanova).
It is also often mentioned that the Russian federation spans eleven time zones.
Cities
As of 2005 Russia has 13 cities with over a million inhabitants (from largest to smallest): Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Omsk, Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Rostov-on-Don, Ufa, Volgograd and Perm.
See also: List of cities in Russia
Economy
More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia is now trying to establish a market economy and achieve more consistent economic growth. Russia saw its comparatively developed centrally-planned economy contract severely for five years, as the executive and legislature dithered over the implementation of reforms and Russia's industrial base faced a serious decline. Moreover, an emergency livestock shortage in 1987, which triggered large-scale international aid, severely bruised the ego, as well as the economy, of the emerging Russian state.
After the breakup of the USSR, Russia's first slight recovery, showing the signs of open-market influence, occurred in 1997. That year, however, Asian financial crisis culminated in the August depreciation of the ruble in 1998, a debt default by the government, and a sharp deterioration in living standards for most of the population. Consequently, the year 1998 was marked by recession and intense capital flight.
Nevertheless, the economy started recovering in 1999. Then it entered a phase of rapid economic expansion, the GDP growing by an average of 6.7% annually in 1999-2005 on the back of higher petroleum prices, weaker ruble, and increasing service production and industrial output. The economic development of the country, however, has been extremely uneven: the capital region of Moscow contributes a third to the country's GDP having only a tenth of its population.
The recent recovery, made possible due to high world oil prices, along with a renewed government effort in 2000 and 2001 to advance lagging structural reforms, has raised business and investor confidence over Russia's prospects in its second decade of transition. Russia remains heavily dependent on exports of commodities, particularly oil, natural gas, metals, and timber, which account for about 80% of exports, leaving the country vulnerable to swings in world prices. In recent years, however, the economy has also been driven by growing internal consumer demand that has increased by over 12% annually in 2000-2005, showing the strengthening of its own internal market.
The country's GDP shot up to reach €1.2 trillion ($1.5 trillion) in 2004, making it the ninth largest economy in the world and the fifth largest in Europe. If the current growth rate is sustained, the country is expected to become the second largest European economy after Germany (€1.9 trillion or $2.3 trillion) and the sixth largest in the world within a few years.
The greatest challenge facing the Russian economy is how to encourage the development of SME (small and medium sized enterprises) in a business climate with a young and dysfunctional banking system, dominated by Russian oligarchs. Many of Russia's banks are owned by entrepreneurs or oligarchs, who often use the deposits to lend to their own businesses.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank have attempted to kick-start normal banking practices by making equity and debt investments in a number of banks, but with very limited success.
Other problems include disproportional economic development of Russia's own regions. While the huge capital region of Moscow is a bustling, affluent metropolis living on the cutting edge of technology with a per capita income rapidly approaching that of the leading Eurozone economies, much of the country, especially its indigenous and rural communities in Asia, lags significantly behind. Market integration is nonetheless making itself felt in some other sizeable cities such as Saint Petersburg, Kaliningrad, and Ekaterinburg, and recently also in the adjacent rural areas.
Encouraging foreign investment is also a major challenge due to legal, some cultural, linguistic, economic and political peculiarities of the country. Nevertheless, there have been significant inflow of capital in recent years from many European investors attracted by cheaper land, labor and higher growth rates than in the rest of Europe. Amazingly high levels of education and societal involvement achieved by the majority of the population, including women and minorities, secular attitudes, mobile class structure, better integration of various minorities in the mainstream culture set Russia far apart from the majority of the so-called developing and even some developed nations.
So far, the country is also benefiting from rising oil prices and has been able to pay off much of its formerly huge debt. Equal redistribution of capital gains from the natural resource industries to other sectors is also a problem. Still, since 2003, exports of natural resources started decreasing in economic importance as the internal market has strengthened considerably largely stimulated by intense construction, as well as consumption of increasingly diverse goods and services. Yet teaching customers and encouraging consumer spending is a relatively tough task for many provincial areas where consumer demand is primitive, although some laudable progress has already been made in larger cities especially in clothing, food, entertainment industries.
The arrest of Russia's wealthiest businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky on charges of fraud and corruption in relation to the large-scale privatizations organized under then-President Yeltsin has caused many foreign investors to worry about the stability of the Russian economy. Most of the large fortunes currently prevailing in Russia seem to be the product of either acquiring government assets particularly at low costs or gaining concessions from the government. Other countries have expressed concerns and worries at the "selective" application of the law against individual businessmen.
However, some international firms are investing heavily in Russia. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Russia had nearly $26 billion in cumulative foreign direct investment inflows during the 2001-2004 period (of which $11.7 billion occurred last year alone).
Demographics
Despite its comparatively very high population, Russia has a low average population density due to its enormous size. Population is densest in the European part of Russia, in the Ural Mountains area, and in the south-western parts of Siberia; the south-eastern part of Siberia that meets the Pacific Ocean, known as the Russian Far East, is sparsely populated, with its southern part being densest. The Russian Federation is home to as many as 160 different ethnic groups and indigenous peoples. As of the 2002 census, 79.8% of the population is ethnically Russian, 3.8% Tatar, 2% Ukrainian, 1.2% Bashkir, 1.1% Chuvash, 0.9% Chechen, 0.8% Armenian, and the remaining 10.3% includes those who did not specify their ethnicity as well as (in alphabetical order) Avars, Azerbaijanis, Belarusians, Buryats, Chinese, Evenks, Georgians, Germans, Greeks, Ingushes, Inuit, Jews, Kalmyks, Karelians, Kazakhs, Koreans, Maris, Mordvins, Nenetses, Ossetians, Poles, Tuvans, Udmurts, Uzbeks, Yakuts, and others. Nearly all of these groups live compactly in their respective regions; Russians are the only people significantly represented in every region of the country.
The Russian language is the only official state language, but the individual republics have often made their native language co-official next to Russian. Cyrillic alphabet is the only official script, which means that these languages must be written in Cyrillic in official texts.
The Russian Orthodox Church is the dominant Christian religion in the Federation; other religions include Islam, various Protestant faiths, Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Buddhism. Division into different religions takes place primarily along ethnic lines: majority of Russians are Orthodox, majority of people of Turkic descent are Muslim, Judaism is very uncommon among non-Jews. Neopaganism is on the rise, especially among Slavic people. See Religion in Russia for more.
Culture
- Cinema of Russia
- List of famous Russians
- Music of Russia
- Russian architecture
- Russian cuisine
- Russian humour
- Russian literature
- List of Russian language poets
- Russian formalism
- Russian folklore
- Russian music
- Russian painting
- Russian theatre
Name
:Main article: Etymology of Rus and derivatives.
The name of the country derives from the name of the Rus' people. The origin of the people itself and of their name is a matter of controversy.
Miscellaneous topics
- Communications in Russia
- Education in Russia
- Foreign relations of Russia
- Law of the Russian Federation
- List of Russian companies
- Military of Russia
- Postage stamps and postal history of Russia
- Public holidays in Russia
- Russian Association of Scouts/Navigators
- Tourism in Russia
< | | |
