IN 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics disintegrated. The Russian
empire that stretched from Poland to the Pacific suddenly lost much of the
land acquired over centuries of expansion. No longer could one look at a
map of "Russia" and include the Baltic Sea republics of Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania; in the south, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan; in the west, Mol-
dova; or the five "stans" in central Asia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. Even the other East Slavic-speaking lands
of Belarus (which means "white Russia") and Ukraine (which means "bor
derland," also known as "little Russia") could no longer be thought of as part
of the Russian empire. Russia nominally still belonged to, and to some extent
dominated, a postcommunist entity called the Commonwealth of Indepen-
dent States, but that was a very fluid and loosely organized arrangement and
could not really be thought of as a unified country any longer.

Russia (Rossiia,) or Russian Federation (Rossiiskaia Federatsiia) as it is of-
ficially called, seems almost shrunken on the new maps, yet it is still the
largest country in the world, with a total of 6,592,741 square miles, nearly
1.8 times the size of the United States. Distances are huge. Americans travel
from Maine to California and cross four time zones. Russia spreads across
eleven time zones, sprawling nearly halfway around the world. Population
centers are linked by air, rail, water, and road, although the roads are often
poor. Riding the Trans-Siberian railway is one of the great rail adventures in
the world, crossing thousands of miles on a six-day journey across most of

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