The Soviet Union incorporated an area of over , covering approximately one-sixth of Earth's land surface. It spanned most of Eurasia. Its largest and most populous republic was the Russian SFSR which covered roughly three-quarters of the surface area of the union, including the complete territory of contemporary Russia.
The Soviet Union was the world's largest country throughout its entire existence (1922–1991). It had a geographic center further north than all independent countries other than Canada, Iceland, Finland, and the countries of Scandinavia. About three-quarters of the country was above the 50th parallel north.Library of Congress Country Studies United States government publications in the public domain
Geographical particulars Area The country's 22,402,200 square kilometers (8,649,537.8 sq mi) included one-sixth of the Earth's land surface. Its western portion covered more than half of the land area of Europe but only a quarter of the total land area of the Soviet Union. This area was where the majority (about 72 percent) of the people lived and where most industrial and agricultural activities were concentrated. It was here, roughly between the Dnieper River and the Ural Mountains, that its predecessor, the Russian Empire, took shape and gradually over centuries expanded to the Pacific Ocean and into Central Asia. After the Russian Civil War, the newly formed Soviet Union took control over most of the empire's former territories.
Borders and neighbors The Soviet Union had the longest borders of any contemporary country, extending approx. . They measured some 10,000 kilometers (6,213.7 mi) from Kaliningrad on Gdańsk Bay in the west to Ratmanova Island (Big Diomede Island) in the Bering Strait - the rough equivalent of the distance from Edinburgh, Scotland, westwards to Nome, Alaska. From the tip of the Taymyr Peninsula on the Arctic Ocean to the Central Asian town of Kushka near the Afghan border extended almost 5,000 kilometers (3,106.8 mi) of mostly rugged, inhospitable terrain. The east–west expanse of the United States would easily have fit between the northern and southern borders of the Soviet Union at their extremities.
The Soviet Union had sixteen countries along its nearly 20,000 kilometers (12,427.4 mi) of land borders.
In Asia it had neighbors (from east to west) in: Japan (1922–1945) Manchukuo (1932–1945) North Korea China Mongolia Tuva (1922–1944; incorporated to USSR in 1944) Afghanistan Iran Turkey
In Europe it had borders with (from south to north): Romania Hungary Czechoslovakia Poland Lithuania (1939–40, 1991) Latvia (1922–40, 1991) Estonia (1922–40, 1991) Finland Norway (1947–1991)
Seacoast Soviet shorelines were contiguous with a dozen seas and part of the water systems of three oceans — the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific. More than two-thirds of its borders were seacoast, making it the world's longest coastal boundary during its time. More than two-thirds of the coastline were well above the Arctic Circle. With the important exception of Murmansk, which received the warm currents of the Gulf Stream, the coast north of the Arctic Circle was usually locked in ice, frozen for up to ten months each year. Despite the extensive coastline, access to the world's oceans was both difficult and expensive.
In addition to having the world's longest coastline, the U.S.S.R. had the longest frontiers. To the north the country was bounded by the seas of the Arctic Ocean, and to the east were the seas of the Pacific. On the south the U.S.S.R. was bordered by North Korea, Mongolia, China, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. On the southern frontier there were three seas: the Caspian Sea, the world's largest inland sea, as well as the almost completely landlocked Black Sea and Sea of Azov. Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Finland, and Norway lay to the west.
Topography and drainage Most geographers divide the vast Soviet territory into five natural zones that generally extend from west to east: the tundra zone; the taiga or forest zone; the steppe or plains zone; the arid zone; and the mountain zone. Most of the Soviet Union consisted of three plains (East European Plain, West Siberian Plain, and Turan Lowland), two plateaus (Central Siberian Plateau and Kazakh Upland), and a series of mountainous areas, concentrated for the most part in the extreme northeast or extending intermittently along the southern border. The West Siberian Plain, the world's largest, extended east from the Urals to the Yenisey River. Because the terrain and vegetation were uniforms in each of the natural zones, the Soviet Union, as a whole, presented an illusion of uniformity.
Tundra Nevertheless, the Soviet territory contained all the major vegetation zones with the exception of tropical rain forest. Ten percent of Soviet territory is tundra, that is, a treeless marshy plain. The tundra was the Soviet Union's northernmost zone of snow and ice, stretching from the Finnish border in the west to the Bering Strait in the east and then running south along the Pacific coast to the earthquake and volcanic region of northern Kamchatka Peninsula. It was the land made famous by herds of wild reindeer, by white nights (dusk at midnight, dawn shortly thereafter) in summer, and by days of total darkness in winter. The long harsh winters and lack of sunshine allowed only mosses, lichens, and dwarf willows and shrubs to sprout low above the barren permafrost. Although the great Siberian rivers slowly traversed this zone in reaching the Arctic Ocean, drainage of the numerous lakes, ponds, and swamps was hampered by partial and intermittent thawing. Frost weathering is the most important physical process here, shaping a landscape modified by extensive glaciation in the last ice age.
Forests
The northern forests of spruce, fir, pine, and larch, collectively known as the taiga, made up the largest natural zone of the Soviet Union, an area about the size of the United States. Here too the winter is long and severe, as witnessed by the routine registering of the world's coldest temperatures for inhabited areas in the northeastern portion of this belt. The taiga zone extended in a broad band across the middle latitudes, stretching from the Finnish border in the west to the Verkhoyansk Range in northeastern Siberia and as far south as the southern shores of Lake Baykal. Isolated sections of taiga are found along mountain ranges, as in the southern part of the Urals, and in the Amur River Valley in the Far East. About 33 percent of the population lives in this zone, which, with the mixed forest zone, included most of the European part of the Soviet Union and the ancestral lands of the earliest Slavic settlers.
Steppes Long associated with traditional images of Russian landscape and cossacks on horseback are the steppes, which are treeless, grassy plains. Although they covered only 15 percent of Soviet territory, the steppes were home to roughly 44 percent of the population. They extend for 4,000 kilometers from the Carpathian Mountains in the western Ukrainian Republic across most of the northern portion of the Kazakh Republic in Soviet Central Asia, between the taiga and arid zones, occupying a relatively narrow band of plains whose chernozem soils are some of the most fertile on earth. In a country of extremes, the steppe zone, with its moderate temperatures and normally adequate levels of sunshine and moisture, provides the most favorable conditions for human settlement and agriculture. Even here, however, agricultural yields were sometimes adversely affected by unpredictable levels of precipitation and occasional catastrophic droughts.
Arid zone Below the steppes, and merging at times with them, was the arid zone: the semideserts and deserts of Soviet Central Asia and, particularly, of the Kazakh Republic. Portions of this zone became cotton- and rice-producing regions through intensive irrigation. For various reasons, including sparse settlement and a comparatively mild climate, the arid zone became the most prominent center for Soviet space exploration. One-quarter of the Soviet Union consisted of mountains or mountainous terrain. With the significant exceptions of the Ural Mountains and the mountains of eastern Siberia, the mountains occupy the southern periphery of the Soviet Union. The Urals, because they have traditionally been considered the natural boundary between Europe and Asia and because they are valuable sources of minerals, were the most famous of the country's nine major ranges. In terms of elevation (comparable to the Appalachians) they do not serve as a formidable natural barrier.
Alpine terrain Truly alpine terrain was found in the southern mountain ranges. Between the Black and Caspian seas, for example, the Caucasus Mountains rose to impressive heights, marking a continuation of the boundary separating Europe from Asia. One of the peaks, Mount Elbrus, is the highest point in Europe at 5,642 meters. This range, extending to the northwest as the Crimean and Carpathian mountains and to the southeast as the Tien Shan and Pamirs, formed an imposing natural barrier between the Soviet Union and its neighbors to the south. The highest point in the Soviet Union, at 7,495 meters, was Mount Communism (Pik Kommunizma) in the Pamirs near the border with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China. The Pamirs and the Tien Shan were offshoots of the tallest mountain chain in the world, the Himalayas. Eastern Siberia and the Soviet Far East are also mountainous regions, especially the volcanic peaks of the long Kamchatka Peninsula, which jutted down into the Sea of Okhotsk. The Soviet Far East, the southern portion of Soviet Central Asia, and the Caucasus were the Soviet Union's centers of seismic activity. In 1887, for example, a severe earthquake destroyed the city of Verny (present-day Almaty), and in December 1988 a massive quake demolished the Armenian city of Spitak and large sections of Kirovakan and Leninakan. The 1988 quake, one of the worst in Soviet history, claimed more than 25,000 lives.
Hydrosystems The Soviet Union possessed both scarce and abundant water resources. With about 3 million rivers and approximately 4 million inland bodies of water, the Soviet Union held the largest fresh, surface-water resources of any country. But most of these resources (84 percent), as with so much of the Soviet resource-base, lay at a great distance from the majority of potential users; they flowed through sparsely populated territory and into the Arctic and Pacific oceans. In contrast, areas with the highest concentrations of the population (and therefore the highest demand for water supplies) tended to have the warmest climates and highest rates of evaporation. This resulted in barely adequate (or in some cases inadequate) water-resources in the areas of most need.
Nonetheless, as in many other countries, the earliest settlements sprang up on the rivers, where the majority of the urban population preferred to live. The Volga, Europe's longest river, became by far the Soviet Union's most important commercial waterway. Three of the country's twenty-three cities with more than one million inhabitants stood on its banks: Gorky, Kazan, and Kuybyshev.