AN OVERWHELMING CULTURAL HERITAGE
Russia’s cultural heritage is overwhelming. Especially during the 19th century, great contributions were made in the areas of literature, architecture, ballet, and music. The St. Petersburg Mariinsky theatre school brought dancers Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky as well as choreographers Marisa Petipa and Mikhail Fokine into the limelight. The ‘Ballets Russes’ took Paris by storm in 1909, and later on, the Kirov theatre’s ensembles and the Moscow Bolshoi theatre added fame and honour. Well known composers such as Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich created concerts, symphonies, and other orchestral works. Among the most well known Russian novelists are Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Gorki and Tolstoy.

THE GIGANTIC DIMENSIONS OF THE COUNTRY
Even after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia is still a huge landmass, and extends from the border of Estonia, Latvia, White Russia, the Ukraine and Turkey in the West to Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China in the east, a distance of over 6000 kilometres. Russia is for the most part a large plain, which is only interrupted by the Ural Mountains with their highest peak at 1,900 metres, as well as some mountain ranges in the far eastern region. The three largest rivers west of the Urals – the Dnieper, the Don and the Volga – all originate within a 400 kilometre radius around Moscow and flow into the Black or the Caspian Sea. The whole Eastern part of Russia, Siberia, is a vast region symbolic for exile and unimaginable emptiness.