125-635: Poklonnaya Gora ( Russian : Покло́нная гора́ , literally "Bow-Down Hill"; metaphorically "Worshipful Submission Hill"') is, at 171.5 m, one of the highest natural spots in Moscow . Its two summits were separated by the Setun River until one of the summits was razed in 1987. Since 1936, the area has been part of Moscow, and it now contains the Victory Park, with many tanks and other vehicles that were used during World War II on display. Historically,
250-674: A constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%. Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools. On 29 September 2022, Saeima passed in
375-516: A great power ; and one of the most powerful states in Europe after the victory over Napoleon . Peasant revolts were common, and all were fiercely suppressed. The Emperor Alexander II abolished Russian serfdom in 1861, but the peasants fared poorly and revolutionary pressures grew. In the following decades, reform efforts such as the Stolypin reforms of 1906–1914, the constitution of 1906 , and
500-519: A new education law which requires all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian, with provisions while allow indigenous languages and languages of national minorities to be used alongside the national language. The law faced criticism from officials in Russia and Hungary. The 2019 Law of Ukraine "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" gives priority to
625-427: A rave band, has gained popularity in Russia and across Europe. Russian and later Soviet cinema was a hotbed of invention, resulting in world-renowned films such as The Battleship Potemkin . Soviet-era filmmakers, most notably Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky , would go on to become among of the world's most innovative and influential directors. Eisenstein was a student of Lev Kuleshov , who developed
750-717: A coalition of liberals and moderate socialists, but their failed policies led to seizure of power by the communist Bolsheviks on 25 October 1917 (7 November New Style ). In 1922, Soviet Russia, along with Soviet Ukraine , Soviet Belarus , and the Transcaucasian SFSR signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR , officially merging all four republics to form the Soviet Union as a country. Between 1922 and 1991,
875-487: A formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows: (C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) Russians Russians ( Russian : русские , romanized : russkiye [ˈruskʲɪje] ) are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Eastern Europe . Their mother tongue is Russian , the most spoken Slavic language . The majority of Russians adhere to Orthodox Christianity , ever since
1000-473: A greater variety of artistic styles in Soviet cinema. The comedies of Eldar Ryazanov and Leonid Gaidai of that time were immensely popular, with many of the catchphrases still in use today. In 1961–68 Sergey Bondarchuk directed an Oscar -winning film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's epic War and Peace , which was the most expensive film made in the Soviet Union. In 1969, Vladimir Motyl 's White Sun of
1125-558: A hard or soft counterpart, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels . Stress , which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically , though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress – such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [ zamók , 'lock'] and за́мок [ zámok , 'castle']), or to indicate
1250-484: A language that "belongs to the European cultural space". The financing of Russian-language content by the state will cease, which the concept says create a "unified information space". However, one inevitable consequence would be the closure of public media broadcasts in Russian on LTV and Latvian Radio, as well as the closure of LSM's Russian-language service. In Lithuania , Russian has no official or legal status, but
1375-486: A lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel . Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken native language in Europe , the most spoken Slavic language , as well as the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia . It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers , and the world's ninth-most spoken language by total number of speakers . Russian
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#17327907109691500-588: A lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic , Turkic , Persian , Arabic , and Hebrew . According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between
1625-622: A minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Azerbaijan , Russian has no official status, but is a lingua franca of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Georgia , Russian has no official status, but it
1750-526: A qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society. In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in
1875-405: A solo mission on Vostok 6 . In 1965, Alexei Leonov became the first human to conduct a spacewalk , exiting the space capsule during Voskhod 2 . Until the 18th century, music in Russia consisted mainly of church music and folk songs and dances. In the 19th century, it was defined by the tension between classical composer Mikhail Glinka along with other members of The Mighty Handful , and
2000-417: A state as a result of in-fighting between members of the princely family that ruled it collectively. After the 13th century, Moscow became a political and cultural center. Moscow has become a center for the unification of Russian lands . By the end of the 15th century, Moscow united the northeastern and northwestern Russian principalities, overthrew the "Mongol yoke" in 1480, and would be transformed into
2125-514: Is россияне ( rossiyane ), derived from Россия ( Rossiya , Russia), which denotes "people of Russia", regardless of ethnicity or religious affiliation. In daily usage, those terms are often mixed up, and since Vladimir Putin became president, the ethnic term русские has supplanted the non-ethnic term. The name of the Russians derives from the early medieval Rus' people , a group of Norse merchants and warriors who relocated from across
2250-548: Is Christianity —It has the world's largest Orthodox population . According to differing sociological surveys on religious adherence, between 41% to over 80% of the total population of Russia adhere to the Russian Orthodox Church . Non-religious Russians may associate themselves with the Orthodox faith for cultural reasons. Some Russian people are Old Believers : a relatively small schismatic group of
2375-539: Is Belarusian, among ethnic Belarusians this share is 28.5%; the highest share of those who speak Belarusian at home is among ethnic Poles — 46.0%. In Estonia , Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population, according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook, and is officially considered a foreign language. School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics, and in 2022,
2500-481: Is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan . The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group. In Tajikistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under
2625-401: Is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian , and a moderate degree of it in all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level. Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound: Older letters of
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#17327907109692750-610: Is a post-posed definite article -to , -ta , -te similar to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian. In the Southern Russian dialects , instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несл и is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi] , not [nʲɪsˈlʲi] ) – this
2875-488: Is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding , which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards. The Russian language was first introduced to computing after the M-1 , and MESM models were produced in 1951. According to
3000-624: Is called yakanye ( яканье ). Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/ , a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and /x⁓xv⁓xw/ , whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/ , /v/ , and final /l/ and /f/ , respectively. The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects). During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects. There
3125-573: Is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City , Philadelphia , Boston , Los Angeles , Nashville , San Francisco , Seattle , Spokane , Toronto , Calgary , Baltimore , Miami , Portland , Chicago , Denver , and Cleveland . In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially
3250-564: Is odd") – чу́дно ( chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц ( molodéts – "well done!") – мо́лодец ( mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю ( uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ ( uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть ( otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать ( otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра ( aféra , "scandal, affair"), гу́ру ( gúru , "guru"), Гарси́я ( García ), Оле́ша ( Olésha ), Фе́рми ( Fermi ), and to show which
3375-657: Is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russians . It was the de facto and de jure official language of the former Soviet Union . Russian has remained an official language of the Russian Federation , Belarus , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , and Tajikistan , and is still commonly used as a lingua franca in Ukraine , Moldova , the Caucasus , Central Asia , and to
3500-762: Is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station , one of the six official languages of the United Nations , as well as the fourth most widely used language on the Internet . Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script ; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has
3625-402: Is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language. In China , Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and
3750-508: Is remembered mainly for his novel Oblomov . Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote prose satire, while Nikolai Leskov is best remembered for his shorter fiction. In the second half of the century Anton Chekhov excelled in short stories and became a leading dramatist. Other important 19th-century developments included the fabulist Ivan Krylov , non-fiction writers such as the critic Vissarion Belinsky , and playwrights such as Aleksandr Griboyedov and Aleksandr Ostrovsky . The beginning of
3875-569: Is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin , Polish , Dutch , German, French, Italian, and English, and to
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4000-585: Is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Around 1.5 million Israelis spoke Russian as of 2017. The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in
4125-445: Is summed up in the popular phrase (sometimes attributed to Emperor Alexander III of Russia ) - Хочешь быть русским - будь им! ( transl. You want to be Russian - be that! ). Russian is the official and the predominantly spoken language in Russia. It is the most-spoken native language in Europe, the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, as well as the world's most widely spoken Slavic language . Russian
4250-518: Is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье? ( Tý syel pechenye? – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") – Ты съе́л печенье? ( Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – Ты съел пече́нье? ( Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using
4375-554: Is the third-most used language on the Internet after English and Spanish , and is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station , as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations . Russian literature is considered to be among the world's most influential and developed. It can be traced to the Middle Ages , when epics and chronicles in Old East Slavic were composed. By
4500-470: The 2011 Lithuanian census , Russian was the native language for 7.2% of the population. In Moldova , Russian was considered to be the language of interethnic communication under a Soviet-era law. On 21 January 2021, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law unconstitutional and deprived Russian of the status of the language of interethnic communication. 50% of the population
4625-806: The 2021 Russian census , the number of ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation decreased by nearly 5.43 million, from roughly 111 million people in 2010 to approximately 105.5 million in 2021. Among Russians, a number of ethnographic groups stand out, such as: the Northern Russians , the Southern Russians , the Cossacks , the Goryuns , the Kamchadals , the Polekhs , the Pomors ,
4750-533: The Age of Enlightenment , literature had grown in importance, with works from Mikhail Lomonosov , Denis Fonvizin , Gavrila Derzhavin , and Nikolay Karamzin . From the early 1830s, during the Golden Age of Russian Poetry , literature underwent an astounding golden age in poetry, prose and drama. Romanticism permitted a flowering of poetic talent: Vasily Zhukovsky and later his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to
4875-1000: The Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975. In March 2013, Russian was found to be the second-most used language on websites after English. Russian was the language of 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian was used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su . Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian
5000-575: The Baltic Sea and played an important part in the foudation of the first East Slavic state that later became the Kievan Rus' . The idea of a single " all-Russian nation " encompassing the East Slavic peoples , or a "triune nation" of three brotherly " Great Russian ", " Little Russian " (i.e. Ukrainian ), and " White Russian " (i.e. Belarusian ) peoples became the official doctrine of
5125-506: The Baltic states . A large Russian diaspora (sometimes including Russian-speaking non-Russians), estimated at 25 million people, has developed all over the world, with notable numbers in the United States , Germany , Brazil , and Canada . There are two Russian words which are commonly translated into English as "Russians". One is русские ( russkiye ), which in modern Russia most often means "ethnic Russians". The other one
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5250-617: The Christianization of Kievan Rus' , for several centuries it was influenced predominantly by the Byzantine Empire . Aristotle Fioravanti and other Italian architects brought Renaissance trends into Russia. The 16th century saw the development of the unique tent-like churches ; and the onion dome design, which is a distinctive feature of Russian architecture. In the 17th century, the "fiery style" of ornamentation flourished in Moscow and Yaroslavl , gradually paving
5375-413: The Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business. In Turkmenistan , Russian lost its status as the official lingua franca in 1996. Among 12% of the population who grew up in
5500-487: The Don , Terek , and Ural river basins, and played an important role in the historical and cultural development of parts of Russia. In accordance with the 2008 research results of Russian and Estonian geneticists, two groups of Russians are distinguished: the northern and southern populations. Central and Southern Russians, to which the majority of Russian populations belong, according to Y chromosome R1a, are included in
5625-789: The Hunger Plan and the Generalplan Ost , including one million civilian casualties during the Siege of Leningrad . After the victory of the Soviet Union and the Western Allies , the Soviet Union became a superpower opposing Western countries during the Cold War . By the mid-1980s, with Soviet economic and political weaknesses becoming acute, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on major reforms; these culminated in
5750-776: The Russian Chinese , the Siberians ( Siberiaks ), Starozhily , some groupings of Old Believers ( Kamenschiks , Lipovans , Semeiskie ), and others. The main ones are the Northern and Southern Russian groups. At the same time, the proposal of the ethnographer Dmitry Zelenin in his major work of 1927 Russian (East Slavic) Ethnography to consider them as separate East Slavic peoples did not find support in scientific circles. Russia's Arctic coastline had been explored and settled by Pomors , Russian settlers from Novgorod . Cossacks inhabited sparsely populated areas in
5875-668: The Russian Empire from the beginning of the 19th century onwards. The ancestors of modern Russians are the Slavic tribes , whose original home is thought by some scholars to have been the wooded areas of the Pinsk Marshes , one of the largest wetlands in Europe. The East Slavs gradually settled Western Russia with Moscow included in two waves: one moving from Kiev toward present-day Suzdal and Murom and another from Polotsk toward Novgorod and Rostov . Prior to
6000-817: The Russian Musical Society led by composers Anton and Nikolay Rubinstein . The later tradition of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky , one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era , was continued into the 20th century by Sergei Rachmaninoff , one of the last great champions of the Romantic style of European classical music. World-renowned composers of the 20th century include Alexander Scriabin , Alexander Glazunov , Igor Stravinsky , Sergei Prokofiev , Dmitri Shostakovich , Georgy Sviridov and Alfred Schnittke . Soviet and Russian conservatories have turned out generations of world-renowned soloists. Among
6125-516: The State Duma (1906–1917) attempted to open and liberalize the economy and political system, but the Emperors refused to relinquish autocratic rule and resisted sharing their power. A combination of economic breakdown, war-weariness , and discontent with the autocratic system of government triggered revolution in Russia in 1917 . The overthrow of the monarchy initially brought into office
6250-589: The Trinity as outlined by the Nicene Creed , Orthodox fasts , military service, and practices including water baptism . Other world religions have negligible representation among ethnic Russians. The largest of these groups are Islam with over 100,000 followers from national minorities, and Baptists with over 85,000 Russian adherents. Others are mostly Pentecostals , Evangelicals , Seventh-day Adventists , Lutherans and Jehovah's Witnesses . Since
6375-650: The Tsardom of Russia after Ivan IV was crowned tsar in 1547. In 1721, Tsar Peter the Great renamed his state as the Russian Empire , hoping to associate it with historical and cultural achievements of ancient Rus' – in contrast to his policies oriented towards Western Europe. The state now extended from the eastern borders of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to the Pacific Ocean , and became
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#17327907109696500-584: The Ukrainian language in more than 30 spheres of public life: in particular in public administration , media, education, science, culture, advertising, services . The law does not regulate private communication. A poll conducted in March 2022 by RATING in the territory controlled by Ukraine found that 83% of the respondents believe that Ukrainian should be the only state language of Ukraine. This opinion dominates in all macro-regions, age and language groups. On
6625-479: The United States . Brighton Beach, Brooklyn and South Beach, Staten Island in New York City are examples of large communities of recent Russian and Russian-Jewish immigrants. Other examples are Sunny Isles Beach , a northern suburb of Miami , and West Hollywood of the Los Angeles area. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, many Russians who were identified with the White army moved to China — most of them settling in Harbin and Shanghai . By
6750-507: The United States Census , in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States. Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following: The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to
6875-415: The atmosphere of Venus , and founded modern geology . Since the times of Nikolay Lobachevsky , who pioneered the non-Euclidean geometry , and a prominent tutor Pafnuty Chebyshev , Russian mathematicians became among the world's most influential. Dmitry Mendeleev invented the Periodic table , the main framework of modern chemistry . Sofya Kovalevskaya was a pioneer among women in mathematics in
7000-411: The de facto architectural style, and Nicholas I opened the gate of Eclecticism to Russia. The second half of the 19th-century was dominated by the Neo-Byzantine and Russian Revival style. In early 20th-century, Russian neoclassical revival became a trend. Prevalent styles of the late 20th-century were the Art Nouveau , Constructivism , and Socialist Classicism . Russia's largest religion
7125-462: The dissolution of the Soviet Union , leaving Russia again alone and marking the beginning of the post-Soviet Russian period. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic renamed itself the Russian Federation and became one of several successors to the Soviet Union . Ethnic Russians historically migrated within the areas of the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union , though they were sometimes encouraged to re-settle in borderland areas by
7250-578: The mixed economy and diverse society and culture of the 1920s through the command economy and repressions of the Joseph Stalin era to the "era of stagnation" from the 1960s to the 1980s. The actions of the Soviet government caused the death of millions of citizens in the famine of 1930–1933 and the Great Purge . The attack by Nazi Germany and the ensuing war , together with the Holocaust , again claimed millions of lives . Millions of Russian civilians and prisoners of war were killed or starved to death during Nazi Germany's genocidal policies called
7375-479: The 1930s, Harbin had 100,000 Russians. Many of these Russians moved back to the Soviet Union after World War II . Today, a large group in northern China still speak Russian as a second language. Russians ( eluosizu ) are one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China (as the Russ ); there are approximately 15,600 Russian Chinese living mostly in northern Xinjiang , and also in Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang . According to
7500-401: The 1960s, the Soviet authorities decided to put the area to use as an open-air museum dedicated to the Russian victory over Napoleon . The New Triumphal Arch , erected in wood in 1814 and in marble in 1827 to a design by Osip Bove , was relocated and reconstructed here in 1968. A loghouse in which Mikhail Kutuzov presided over the Fili Conference , which decided to abandon Moscow , to
7625-421: The 19th century. Grigori Perelman was offered the first ever Clay Millennium Prize Problems Award for his final proof of the Poincaré conjecture in 2002, as well as the Fields Medal in 2006, both of which he declined. Alexander Popov was among the inventors of radio , while Nikolai Basov and Alexander Prokhorov were co-inventors of laser and maser . Zhores Alferov contributed significantly to
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#17327907109697750-450: The 20th century ranks as the Silver Age of Russian Poetry . This era had poets such as Alexander Blok , Anna Akhmatova , Boris Pasternak , Konstantin Balmont , Marina Tsvetaeva , Vladimir Mayakovsky , and Osip Mandelstam . It also produced some first-rate novelists and short-story writers, such as Aleksandr Kuprin , Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin , Leonid Andreyev , Yevgeny Zamyatin , Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Andrei Bely . After
7875-405: The 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular former Warsaw Pact countries. In Armenia , Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as
8000-412: The Belarusian society the Russian language prevails, so according to the 2019 census 6,718,557 people (71.4% of the total population) stated that they speak Russian at home, for ethnic Belarusians this share is 61.4%, for Russians — 97.2%, for Ukrainians — 89.0%, for Poles — 52.4%, and for Jews — 96.6%; 2,447,764 people (26.0% of the total population) stated that the language they usually speak at home
8125-440: The Desert was released, a very popular film in a genre of ostern ; the film is traditionally watched by cosmonauts before any trip into space. In 2002, Russian Ark was the first feature film ever to be shot in a single take. Today, the Russian cinema industry continues to expand. The history of Russian architecture begins with early woodcraft buildings of ancient Slavs, and the architecture of Kievan Rus' . Following
8250-409: The Great and developed from the Moscow ( Middle or Central Russian ) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution , the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However,
8375-407: The Gulag camps. Russian philosophy has been greatly influential. Alexander Herzen is known as one of the fathers of agrarian populism . Mikhail Bakunin is referred to as the father of anarchism . Peter Kropotkin was the most important theorist of anarcho-communism . Mikhail Bakhtin 's writings have significantly inspired scholars. Helena Blavatsky gained international following as
8500-468: The Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent ( знак ударения ) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress . For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к ( zamók – "lock") – за́мок ( zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий ( stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий ( stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ ( chudnó – "this
8625-411: The Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada , Australia, and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers , after English, Mandarin, Hindi -Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. Russian is one of the six official languages of
8750-473: The Russian Orthodoxy that rejected the liturgical reforms introduced in the 17th century. Other schisms from Orthodoxy include Doukhobors which in the 18th century rejected secular government, the Russian Orthodox priests, icons, all church ritual, the Bible as the supreme source of divine revelation and the divinity of Jesus, and later emigrated into Canada. An even earlier sect were Molokans which formed in 1550 and rejected Czar's divine right to rule , icons,
8875-627: The Russian Revolution of 1917, Russian literature split into Soviet and white émigré parts. In the 1930s, Socialist realism became the predominant trend in Russia. Its leading figure was Maxim Gorky , who laid the foundations of this style. Mikhail Bulgakov was one of the leading writers of the Soviet era. Nikolay Ostrovsky 's novel How the Steel Was Tempered has been among the most successful works of Russian literature. Influential émigré writers include Vladimir Nabokov . Some writers dared to oppose Soviet ideology, such as Nobel Prize-winning novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , who wrote about life in
9000-807: The Russian alphabet include ⟨ ѣ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ е ⟩ ( /je/ or /ʲe/ ); ⟨ і ⟩ and ⟨ ѵ ⟩ , which both merged to ⟨ и ⟩ ( /i/ ); ⟨ ѳ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ф ⟩ ( /f/ ); ⟨ ѫ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ у ⟩ ( /u/ ); ⟨ ѭ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ю ⟩ ( /ju/ or /ʲu/ ); and ⟨ ѧ ⟩ and ⟨ ѩ ⟩ , which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨ я ⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/ . While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ ъ ⟩ and ⟨ ь ⟩ originally indicated
9125-483: The Russian ethnicity - and as a historic great power with imperial expansionist tendencies the Russian state has sometimes encouraged Russian-centred monoculturalism. Steppe peoples, Tatars, Baltic Germans, Lithuanians and native Siberians in Rus' , Muscovy or the Russian Empire could in theory become "Russians" ( Russian : русские ) simply by accepting Russian Orthodoxy as their faith. The attitude of ready inclusivity
9250-458: The Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences, and for a while, prevented the emergence of a standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the gradual re-emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for standardization came from
9375-444: The Russians is derived from the people of Rus' and the territory of Rus' . Russians share many historical and cultural traits with other European peoples, and especially with other East Slavic ethnic groups, specifically Belarusians and Ukrainians . The vast majority of Russians live in native Russia, but notable minorities are scattered throughout other post-Soviet states such as Belarus , Kazakhstan , Moldova , Ukraine , and
9500-809: The Slavic migration in the 6-7th centuries, the Suzdal-Murom and Novgorod-Rostov areas were populated by Finnic peoples , including the Merya , the Muromians , and the Meshchera . From the 7th century onwards, the East Slavs slowly assimilated the native Finnic peoples, so that by year 1100, the majority of the population in Western Russia was Slavic-speaking. Recent genetic studies confirm
9625-558: The Soviet Union that were awarded during the war. The Hall of Remembrance downstairs contains books of remembrance with the names of more than 26 million Soviet war dead. 55°43′54″N 37°30′24″E / 55.73167°N 37.50667°E / 55.73167; 37.50667 Russian language Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family . It
9750-405: The Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent. In Uzbekistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the lingua franca of the country and the language of the elite. Russian
9875-1122: The Tsarist and later Soviet government. Sometimes ethnic Russian communities, such as the Lipovans who settled in the Danube delta or the Doukhobors in Canada , emigrated as religious dissidents fleeing the central authority. There are also small Russian communities in the Balkans — including Lipovans in the Danube delta — Central European nations such as Germany and Poland , as well as Russians settled in China , Japan , South Korea , Mexico , Brazil , Argentina and Australia . These communities identify themselves to varying degrees as Russians, citizens of these countries, or both. Significant numbers of Russians emigrated to Canada , Australia and
10000-403: The United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics. In Belarus , Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus . 77% of
10125-503: The best known are violinists David Oistrakh and Gidon Kremer , cellist Mstislav Rostropovich , pianists Vladimir Horowitz , Sviatoslav Richter , and Emil Gilels , and vocalist Galina Vishnevskaya . During the Soviet times, popular music also produced a number of renowned figures, such as the two balladeers — Vladimir Vysotsky and Bulat Okudzhava , and performers such as Alla Pugacheva . Jazz , even with sanctions from Soviet authorities, flourished and evolved into one of
10250-403: The broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages. The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language ( современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter
10375-635: The contemporary Northern Russians also are genetically close of all Slavic peoples only to the Poles and similar to the Balts. However, this does not mean the northern Russians origin from the Balts or the Poles, more likely, that all the peoples of the Nordic gene pool are descendants of Paleo-European population, which has remained around Baltic Sea . Russians have sometimes found it useful to emphasize their self-perceived ability to assimilate other people to
10500-480: The country's most popular musical forms. The Ganelin Trio have been described by critics as the greatest ensemble of free-jazz in continental Europe . By the 1980s, rock music became popular across Russia, and produced bands such as Aria , Aquarium , DDT , and Kino . Pop music in Russia has continued to flourish since the 1960s, with globally famous acts such as t.A.T.u. In the recent times, Little Big ,
10625-572: The country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus . See also Russian language in Israel . Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan . In Vietnam , Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English. The Russian language
10750-560: The creation of modern heterostructure physics and electronics . Oleg Losev made crucial contributions in the field of semiconductor junctions , and discovered light-emitting diodes . Vladimir Vernadsky is considered one of the founders of geochemistry , biogeochemistry , and radiogeology . Élie Metchnikoff is known for his groundbreaking research in immunology . Ivan Pavlov is known chiefly for his work in classical conditioning . Lev Landau made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics . Nikolai Vavilov
10875-547: The dragon , both of which were designed by Zurab Tsereteli . The obelisk's height is exactly 141.8 metres (465 ft), which is 10 centimetres (3.9 in) for every day of the war. A golden-domed Orthodox church was erected on the hilltop in 1993-1995, followed by a memorial mosque and the Holocaust Memorial Synagogue . At the 60th V-Day celebrations in 2005, Russia President Vladimir Putin inaugurated 15 extravagant bronze columns, symbolizing
11000-462: The enemy, was designated a national monument. The huge panorama " Battle of Borodino " by Franz Roubaud (1910–1912) was installed here in 1962. The Victory Park [ ru ] and the Square of Victors are important parts of the outdoor museum. In 1987, the hill was levelled to the ground, and in the 1990s an obelisk was added with a statue of Nike , and a monument of Saint George slaying
11125-413: The factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, and the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of the worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingual, in the context of developing heavy industry,
11250-418: The fall of the Soviet Union various new religious movements have sprung up and gathered a following among ethnic Russians. The most prominent of these are Rodnovery , the revival of the Slavic native religion also common to other Slavic nations . Football is the most popular sport in Russia. The Soviet Union national football team became the first European champions by winning Euro 1960 , and reached
11375-456: The final reading amendments that state that all schools and kindergartens in the country are to transition to education in Latvian . From 2025, all children will be taught in Latvian only. On 28 September 2023, Latvian deputies approved The National Security Concept, according to which from 1 January 2026, all content created by Latvian public media (including LSM ) should be only in Latvian or
11500-423: The fore. Following Pushkin's footsteps, a new generation of poets were born, including Mikhail Lermontov , Nikolay Nekrasov , Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy , Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet . The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol . Then came Ivan Turgenev , who mastered both short stories and novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy soon became internationally renowned. Ivan Goncharov
11625-413: The formation of the Russian identity in the Middle Ages . By total numbers, they are the largest Slavic and European nation . Genetic studies show that Russians are closely related to Poles , Belarusians , Ukrainians , as well as Estonians , Latvians , Lithuanians and Finns . They were formed from East Slavic tribes, and their cultural ancestry is based in Kievan Rus' . The Russian word for
11750-571: The general "East European" gene cluster with the rest East and West Slavs (Poles, Czechs and Slovaks), as well as the non-Slavic Hungarians and Aromanians . Genetically, East Slavs are quite similar to West Slavs; such genetic similarity is somewhat unusual for genetics with such a wide settlement of the Slavs, especially Russians. The high unity of the autosomal markers of the East Slavic populations and their significant differences from
11875-631: The generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to
12000-480: The government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem. The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries. Since then, the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and
12125-503: The groundbreaking Soviet montage theory of film editing at the world's first film school , the All-Union Institute of Cinematography . Dziga Vertov 's " Kino-Eye " theory had a huge impact on the development of documentary filmmaking and cinema realism. Many Soviet socialist realism films were artistically successful, including Chapaev , The Cranes Are Flying , and Ballad of a Soldier . The 1960s and 1970s saw
12250-512: The hill had great strategic importance, as it commanded the best view of the capital of Russia . Its name is derived from the Russian for "to bow down" since everyone approaching the capital from the west was expected to do homage here. During the French invasion of Russia in 1812, it was the spot in which Napoleon in vain expected the keys to the Kremlin to be brought to him by Russians. In
12375-661: The history of Russia became essentially the history of the Soviet Union , effectively an ideologically based state roughly conterminous with the Russian Empire before the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk . From its first years, government in the Soviet Union based itself on the one-party rule of the Communists, as the Bolsheviks called themselves, beginning in March 1918. The approach to the building of socialism, however, varied over different periods in Soviet history: from
12500-491: The leading theoretician of Theosophy , and co-founded the Theosophical Society . Vladimir Lenin , a major revolutionary, developed a variant of communism known as Leninism . Leon Trotsky , on the other hand, founded Trotskyism . Alexander Zinoviev was a prominent philosopher in the second half of the 20th century. Mikhail Lomonosov proposed the conservation of mass in chemical reactions , discovered
12625-530: The main fronts and navies of the Red Army during World War II . Since the 1980s, the hill also includes the monumental museum to the Soviet victory during the Great Patriotic War . The main building of the museum was constructed between 1983 and 1995. The Hall of Glory holds reliefs of the 12 Soviet Hero Cities , and on its marmor walls are inscribed the names of several thousand Heroes of
12750-586: The neighboring Finnic, Turkic and Caucasian peoples were revealed. Northern Russians , according to mtDNA , Y chromosome and autosomal marker CCR5de132, are included in the "North European" gene cluster (the Poles , the Balts , Germanic and Baltic Finnic peoples ). Consequently, the already existing biologo-genetic studies have made all hypotheses about the mixing of the Russians with non-Slavic ethnic groups or their "non-Slavism" obsolete or pseudoscientific. At
12875-524: The northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region . Russian was also the main foreign language taught in school in China between 1949 and 1964. In Kazakhstan , Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of
13000-515: The other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while after the beginning of Russia's invasion the support for the idea dropped to just 7%. In peacetime, the idea of raising the status of Russian was traditionally supported by residents of the south and east . But even in these regions, only a third of the respondents were in favour, and after Russia's full-scale invasion , their number dropped by almost half. According to
13125-401: The other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect , although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century,
13250-446: The parliament approved a bill to close up all Russian language schools and kindergartens by the school year. The transition to only Estonian language schools and kindergartens will start in the 2024-2025 school year. In Latvia , Russian is officially considered a foreign language. 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 18 February 2012, Latvia held
13375-453: The peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky , who toward the end of his life wrote: "Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries. We have almost no studies of lexical material or
13500-459: The population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language. In October 2023, Kazakhstan drafted a media law aimed at increasing the use of the Kazakh language over Russian, the law stipulates that the share of the state language on television and radio should increase from 50% to 70%, at a rate of 5% per year, starting in 2025. In Kyrgyzstan , Russian
13625-418: The population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2019 Belarusian census , out of 9,413,446 inhabitants of the country, 5,094,928 (54.1% of the total population) named Belarusian as their native language, with 61.2% of ethnic Belarusians and 54.5% of ethnic Poles declaring Belarusian as their native language. In everyday life in
13750-518: The presence of a Finnic substrate in modern Russian population. Outside archaeological remains, little is known about the predecessors to Russians in general prior to 859 AD, when the Primary Chronicle starts its records. By 600 AD, the Slavs are believed to have split linguistically into southern , western , and eastern branches. The Rus' state was established in northern Russia in
13875-479: The pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/ , /ĭ/ . Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz , and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš' . Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration
14000-414: The proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names. Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family . It is a descendant of Old East Slavic , a language used in Kievan Rus' , which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid-13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language , its closest relatives are Ukrainian , Belarusian , and Rusyn ,
14125-491: The respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents). In Ukraine , Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 5 September 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed
14250-618: The same time, the long-standing identification of the Northern Russian and Southern Russian ethnographic groups by ethnologists was confirmed. The previous conclusions of physical anthropologists, historians and linguists (see, in particular, the works of the academician Valentin Yanin ) about the proximity of the ancient Novgorod Slavs and their language not to the East, but to west Baltic Slavs . As can be seen from genetic resources ,
14375-679: The survey carried out by RATING in August 2023 in the territory controlled by Ukraine and among the refugees, almost 60% of the polled usually speak Ukrainian at home, about 30% – Ukrainian and Russian, only 9% – Russian. Since March 2022, the use of Russian in everyday life has been noticeably decreasing. For 82% of respondents, Ukrainian is their mother tongue, and for 16%, Russian is their mother tongue. IDPs and refugees living abroad are more likely to use both languages for communication or speak Russian. Nevertheless, more than 70% of IDPs and refugees consider Ukrainian to be their native language. In
14500-459: The syntax of Russian dialects." After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism. On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to
14625-786: The two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern , Central (or Middle), and Southern , with Moscow lying in the Central region. The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye ( оканье ). Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic * ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/ , respectively. Another Northern dialectal morphological feature
14750-511: The use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language. However, English has replaced Russian as lingua franca in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as their first foreign language. In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008). According to
14875-514: The way for the Naryshkin baroque of the 1690s. After the reforms of Peter the Great, Russia's architecture became influenced by Western European styles. The 18th-century taste for Rococo architecture led to the splendid works of Bartolomeo Rastrelli and his followers. During the reign of Catherine the Great, Saint Petersburg was transformed into an outdoor museum of Neoclassical architecture . During Alexander I 's rule, Empire style became
15000-550: The year 862, which was ruled by the Varangians . Staraya Ladoga and Novgorod became the first major cities of the new union of immigrants from Scandinavia with the Slavs and Finns . In 882, the prince Oleg seized Kiev , thereby uniting the northern and southern lands of the East Slavs under one authority. The state adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988. Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as
15125-433: Was best known for having identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants. Many famous Russian scientists and inventors were émigrés . Igor Sikorsky was an aviation pioneer . Vladimir Zworykin was the inventor of the iconoscope and kinescope television systems. Theodosius Dobzhansky was the central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the modern synthesis . George Gamow
15250-468: Was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska , Russian
15375-421: Was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2014 Moldovan census , Russians accounted for 4.1% of Moldova's population, 9.4% of the population declared Russian as their native language, and 14.5% said they usually spoke Russian. According to the 2010 census in Russia , Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of
15500-589: Was one of the foremost advocates of the Big Bang theory. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is called the father of theoretical astronautics , whose works had inspired leading Soviet rocket engineers, such as Valentin Glushko , and many others. In 1961, the first human trip into space was successfully made by Yuri Gagarin . In 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first and youngest woman in space , having flown
15625-402: Was the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between
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