Russia


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Russia, or officially the Russian Federation is a country that stretches over a vast expanse of eastern Europe and northern Asia. With an area of 17,075,400 km² (6,592,800 sq mi), it is the largest country in the world as well as the ninth most populous nation in the world with 142 million people. Once the preeminent republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russia has been an independent country since the dissolution of the union in December 1991. Under the Soviet system it was called the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). As the primary successor of the Soviet Union, Russia is still an influential country, in particular in the Commonwealth of Independent States, comprised of many other ex-Soviet Union states. Its capital city is Moscow.

Ancient Scythia

 * Main Article: Scythians

The Scythians or Scyths were an ancient, nomadic Indo-European people who inhabited the lands north and east of the Black Sea in the accounts by Herodotus and others, and ranged from the Carpathian Mountains to the west, to the Don River to the east known as Scythia. Apparently they displaced the original inhabitants of the region, called Cimmerii, by invading from the east (from the direction of Central Asia).

The first mention of them refers to their wars, on or about 634 BC, in which they gained control of Asia for twenty-eight years and marched as far west as Egypt, where they demanded tribute of the then-ruling Pharaoh and withdrew. The Scythians eventually lost a key battle with Cyaxeres, king of the Medes. In 512 BC, the Persian king Darius I invaded that country but could not hold it because of the constant harassment of his men by an enemy that practiced hit-and-run tactics that a Roman general named Fabius would later make famous. Alexander the Great is said to have received envoys from them in 324 BC while he resided in Babylon. The Roman historian Horace mentions Scythians as paying tribute to Emperor Augustus in 25 BC, five years after the end of the Second Roman Civil War.

By the 2nd or 1st century BC, they were supplanted in southern Russia by the related Sauromatæ or Sarmatians, and part of their empire became Sarmatia. Considering the overlap of tribal names between the Scythians and the Sarmatians, it is not likely any new displacements took place. The people were the same Indo-Europeans they used to be, but now under yet another name. The history of the region from that point to the 14th century AD is sketchy, beyond the region's having been overrun and dominated by Mongols for at least two hundred years.

Possible Biblical origin
Multiple sources, including Flavius Josephus and the British monk Nennius, suggest that the Scythians descend from Magog, the second-named of the sons of Japheth. Others regard them as being descended from Ashkenaz, the son of Gomer. Let us note the usage of the word "Scythian"—several peoples were known as Scythians ; at least one was European in race (these later migrated into central Europe, and were not descendants of Magog or Ashkenaz), and at least two were Asiatic in race. The descendants of Magog and Ashkenaz then, formed the two branches of Asiatic Scythians. Modern scholars such as E. Raymond Capt and Steven M. Collins provide much evidence that the Indo-European Scythians and other related peoples who grave rise to the Proto-Germanic and Proto-Slavic peoples were, in fact, descended from of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

Kievan Rus'
The Kievan Rus' was the earliest Slavic state in the region. The region adopted Christianity in 988 AD by the official act of public baptism of Kiev inhabitants by Prince Vladimir I. Compared with the languages of European Christendom, the Russian language was little influenced by the Greek and Latin of early Christian writings. This was due to the fact the Slavic was used directly in liturgy instead. Old Church Slavonic was the first literary and liturgical Slavic language employed by the 9th century missionaries, Saints Cyril and Methodius. The Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state because of the armed struggles among members of the princely family that collectively possessed it. Conquest by the Mongols in the 13th century was the final blow. In later centuries, a number of states claimed to be the heirs to the civilization and dominant position of Kievan Rus'. The Grand Duchy of Moscow, the eventual heir, was located at the far northern edge of the former cultural center.

Grand Duchy of Moscow
The Grand Duchy of Moscow (also known as the Principate of Muscovy) came to being in the 1283 AD. For two hundred years they fought against Mongol domination until at last they were able to shake it. The Muscovites added to their holdings little by little until they finally, in the 17th century, gained a leader with the ambition of a Caesar and a military genius to match. His name was Ivan IV of the Rurik dynasty.

Czardom of Russia
The Czardom of Russia begins with Grand Duke Ivan IV Vasilyevich, known to his contemporaries as Ivan Grozny or "Ivan the Terrible" (literally, "Ivan the Thunderer"). In 1547, he was the first to take the title variously spelled in English as Czar or Tsar, which is a variant of "Caesar." He was a brutal man from a brutal age, and so were most of his successors.

Russian Empire
Under Peter I ("Peter the Great") of the Romanov dynasty, Russia was proclaimed an Empire in 1721 and became recognized as a world power. The Romanov dynasty held continuous sway in Russia for nearly three hundred years. Some of the most famous of all the Czars of Russia include:


 * Peter I the Great (r. 1682-1721), who gave the Russian Empire its name and presided over an Empire from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific.
 * Catherine II the Great (r. 1762-1796), a German princess who was sent to marry Czar Peter III. She helped engineer his removal from the throne and afterwards took power as the Czarina or Empress.
 * Alexander III (r. 1881-1894) was assassinated in October of 1894. His son was:
 * Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917), who lost the Russian Empire and his life to the Russian Revolution.

The Russian Revolution
Nicholas II's disastrous decision to go to war with Germany proved his undoing. His army suffered multiple defeats at German hands, and this demoralization of the troops finally broke their loyalty. They revolted and imprisoned the Czar and all the royal family.

Subsequently Vladimir Ilyich Lenin led his Bolshevik faction to seize power from the weak democracy of Alexander Kerensky. He named the country the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, and later announced the formation of a new polity called the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (the words "Socialist" and "Soviet" in that name were later interchanged). Lenin later had Nicholas and all his family executed by firing squad and the bodies chopped into multiple pieces and cremated. Rumors persisted for decades that the Romanov family had a sole survivor of the mass execution, namely the Grand Duchess Anastasia. However, her death has since been established by positive DNA analysis of her remains.

The Soviet Union between wars
Despite an unbroken history of despotism under the combined government and economic system called Communism the Soviet Union enjoyed great favor among intellectuals in the Western world. They seemed to be enamored as they were with the socialistic ideals of Karl Marx, the spiritual father of the Communist and Soviet movements.

At least one instance of deliberate misreporting is alleged against an award-winning reporter for a major Western newspaper in connection with the tenure in office of Josef Stalin as Communist Party General Secretary, the highest actual office in the Soviet Union. The motive for this misreporting is alleged to be the hiding of the truth of a tremendous famine that broke out in the late 1930's. A famine that some say, Stalin deliberately engineered.

The Great Patriotic War
Stalin and Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland signed non-aggression pacts with Adolf Hitler the Chancellor and Führer (literally, "Leader") of Germany. Hitler later broke his agreements and went to war culminating in what we refer to the Second World War. Its aim was against all his neighbors including the Soviet Union. This was the so-called Great Patriotic War as it was known in the Soviet Union and was the only time that the Soviet Union ever had a military alliance with the United States of America. Hitler's losses on his Russian front, where his armies bogged down in the harsh Russian winter, arguably enabled the rest of the Allied Powers to drive Hitler out of Europe.

The Cold War
At the end of the war Stalin's armies rushed into and dominated all the Slavic countries of eastern Europe and also helped organize the Russian Zone of occupied Germany as the German Democratic Republic know as "East Germany" for decades thereafter. Stalin's intelligence apparatus also stole from the United States (or perhaps had furnished to them by the accused American traitors Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) the secret of the atomic bomb and constructed one of their own. Thus began the Cold War, essentially a standoff between two powers, each of which had the power to destroy not only the infrastructure but the very civilization of the other.

Stalin died and his successors pursued a policy largely designed to gain the confidence of Western intellectuals while also creating spectacular demonstration projects, such as Sputnik, to show off Soviet engineering prowess. The Soviets were actually the first to place a man into outer space, and the first to place a man into orbit around the earth. These demonstrations caused the Americans to fear that the Soviets might build a low-earth-orbit strategic bomber to deliver nuclear payloads to devastating effect against American cities. The Americans hastily created a space program of their own, under the newly renamed National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which created Project Mercury.

Project Mercury ended when Nikita S. Khrushchev signed a treaty with US President John F. Kennedy for a mutual ban on the testing of nuclear weapons in space, on land, or at sea—though not underground. But the arms race and space race between the two powers continued. Both powers first raced to place men on the moon—and with the successful landing of American astronauts on the moon under Project Apollo, the Soviets conceded that race. The Soviets were first to build a semi-permanent space station. In the early 1980s, NASA planned Space Station Freedom as a counterpart to the Soviet Salyut and Mir space stations, but it never left the drawing board and was canceled at the end of the Space race. Mir currently holds the record for longest continuous human presence in space at just short of 10 years.

Reagan Administration
In 1981 Ronald W. Reagan became President of the United States. At his orders, the United States cast aside all restraint in the building of its nuclear arsenal. The Soviets frantically tried to keep pace, but could not. Faced with that, or perhaps also faced with the deaths of three General Secretaries in six years (Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko), the Soviet Communist Party ultimately chose Mikhail Gorbachev as its leader. Gorbachev made a last desperate attempt to gain Western confidence with his new policy that he called glasnost, or "openness," and perestroika, or "restructuring." The measures he took, whether they were sincere or not, led to a sudden collapse of Soviet institutions, and ultimately to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. Except for the vast Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, all fourteen of the other "republics" demanded and gained their independence. In addition, sympathetic regimes throughout Western Europe were, almost without exception, overthrown, some violently. In Germany, the German Democratic Republic dissolved, and the Federal Republic of Germany, or "West Germany," finally reabsorbed it.

Russian Federation
The former RSFSR is now known as the Russian Federation. Its first head-of-state was Boris Yeltsin. His government was quite turbulent and was marred by at least one episode in which he ordered a squadron of tanks to fire their turrets at the Duma (parliament) building in Moscow.

Citizen Yeltsin is also famous for restoring the tri-colored flag that dates back to the Romanov's (the "Czarist Flag"). He never attempted to re-establish the Romanov-era national anthem, and instead attempted to establish a new anthem—which, however, remained unpopular, perhaps because it had no words. Subsequently the Duma established the "State Hymn of the Russian Federation," essentially the old "State Hymn of the USSR" with three all-new stanzas and an equally new refrain.

The last head of the government, Vladimir Putin and his successor Dmitriy Medvedev has now begun re-centralizing power and, some say, attempting to re-create the Soviet Union as the viable and powerful entity it once was. This includes a renewal of independent diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East (see below). The idea of this politics say that "World must be multipolar" against the "one world policeman" situation. Russian Government is trying to be influential to World peace and stability with co-ordination between USA, Europe, Central Asia and Arabic World, China, India and other states.

Russian Science
The specific scientific school is forming in Russia over the past 300 years formed. Russian biologists, chemists, engineers, equipment, astronomers have made a significant contribution to the development of scientific thought. Many world famous scientists of the past and present, such as Dmitry Mendeleyev (the author of the periodic table of elements) grew up and received their education in Russia. One of the first great scientists of Russia and the whole world, is Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov. Karl Ernst von Baer well-known biologist who is one of the founders of Embryology worked in the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in the Russian Empire at the border of 19th and 20th centuries.

There are many universities, institutes, laboratories and other research organizations for many kinds of science in Russian Federation. One such university—M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University—in Moscow is the largest in Russia and is world famous. Founded in 1755, it also claims to be the oldest university in Russia and to have the tallest educational building in the world.

Currently the university employs more than 4,000 academic staff and 15,000 other staff members. There are about 5,000 researchers engaged in various researches in its various institutes and departments. More than 40,000 undergraduates and 7,000 postgraduates are currently enrolled in the university and more than 5,000 specialists are participating in their refresher courses for up-gradation and/or career enhancement purposes. Around 2,000 overseas students form a main part of the student body of the university.

Unfortunately creation science is restricted and ridiculed in Russia as well as for whole world. Recently creation organizations are starting to grow and are gaining popularity. Russian and Ukrainian creation organizations are concerting efforts to collaborate on scientific facts and promote creationism.

They are: Note: Most of these sites are in Russian language and additionally contain English sections.
 * ScienceAndApologetics.com - Christian Center of Science and Apologetics
 * BiblicalDiscovery.info - Christian science and popular Internet magazine "Bible Discovery"
 * Creatio.Orthodoxy.ru - Orthodox Society Shestodnev (literally sixday)
 * www.mtu-net.ru/creation/ - Scientific and Educational Society "Kreazio"
 * www.apologet.ru - Scientific Biblical Center "The Apologist"

There are many blogs and sites regarding creationism and evolution controversy topics in Russian segment of Internet.

At present there is a trial with the Ministry of Education of Ukraine concerning the teaching of atheism in schools

The Place of Russia in Bible Prophecy
describes a prince named "Gog" as the reluctant leader of a Russo-Arab-Iranian-North African alliance that will attack Israel on all sides, only to be defeated ignominiously, with eighty-three percent casualties and such losses of materiel that the inhabitants of Israel will "burn the weapons of war with fire for seven years." This could be a reference to the blending-down of weapons-grade uranium into reactor-grade uranium in fallen and non-detonated nuclear warheads. That Iran is now working, by all accounts, to develop a nuclear-weapons program of its own, together with the current posture of the Russian Federation, leads many observers to fear that Ezekiel's War will break out at any moment, and perhaps herald the Last Things that John the Revelator predicted would occur at the end of the Church Age.

This opinion that Gog means "Russian King" was far-famed by announces of American preachers in the Cold War period when the relations between USA and Soviet Union was terrible. Such interpretation of the Biblical prophecy does not based on any corroboration facts.

Religion
After the failing of the Iron Curtain several American preachers (e.g. David Wilkerson) have changed theirs position about role of Russian nation and call Slavs as "the future of the revival in alive Christianity". True pure Christianity was high growing in the Russian Federation and in the Ukraine, Belorussian in the end of 20th century as opening many evangelical churches (Baptist and Pentecostal) and in turning people to God. Right now this process is slowing. The Orthodox Church in Russia is trying to be the state religion and bind Christian moral and Orthodoxy world view to everyone but without good response from other confessions and atheists. The heads of the Russian Government are regular visiting the Orthodox Temple and the actual president Dmitriy Medvedev is public orthodox believer.

Orthodox Christianity is the traditional and largest religion of Russia, deemed part of Russia's "historical heritage" in a law passed in 1997. The Russian Orthodox Church is by far the most dominant Orthodox Church in Russia while there are a number of smaller Orthodox Churches present such as the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, the Old Believers, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyivan Patriarchate, the Molokans, and the Armenian Apostolic Church. Smaller Christian denominations such as the Catholic Church (as well as the Eastern rite Russian Catholic Church) and various Protestants churches like [|Adventists], baptists, pentacostals and charismatics also exist.

According to a 2002 survey by the All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion, 58% of the Russian population are Russian Orthodox, 5% are Muslim, a little more than 1% are Protestants (including 0.3% who are Lutherans) and little less than 1% are Catholics. A 2002 census found 230,000 (0.16%) ethnic Jews in the country, but only 8% of them (0.01% of the total population) identify as followers of Judaism. About 0.1% are adherents of Buddhism. 32% self-described as non-religious, agnostic or atheist. Slavs (ethnic Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) are typically Christian and people of Turkic descent are typically Muslims, although several Turkic groups in Russia (such as the Chuvash) are not. Buddhism is common among the Mongolian-speaking Buryats and Kalmyks as well as the Turkic-speaking Altays and Tuvans. Some residents of the Siberian and Far Eastern regions of Yakutia and Chukotka practice shamanist, pantheistic, and pagan religions, often syncretized with either Christianity or Islam.

Russia in the News Today

 * Iranian and Syrian Government Papers on Renewed Superpower Role for Russia to Counter U.S. in Middle East. Middle-East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch 1423, January 12, 2007. Columnists in those two government organs openly speculate, in an almost gloating tone, about the renewal of Russian great-power ambitions and diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East.