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Everything about the country is monumental: its turbulent history, its cultural achievements and, above all, its size

Russia cannot be understood
With the mind,
Nor can she be measured
By a common yardstick.
A special character she has:
In Russia one can only have faith.

Such understanding has never come easily to outsiders. “Russia is impenetrable,” wrote the American historian Henry Adams in 1895, “and any intelligent man will deal with her better, the less closely he knows her.” Sir Winston Churchill, trying to predict Russia’s behaviour in 1939, coined the masterly description: “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Such mystery always fascinates, and since the raising of the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1980s, curious tourists have poured into Russia, many of them venturing beyond the cities of St Petersburg and Moscow to find out what provincial and rural Russia is like. Just as Russians are discovering that foreigners are not, in the words of the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “all spies with cameras in their buttons, radio transmitters in the heels of their shoes, and pockets full of Colorado beetles”, so Westerners are having their own preconceived ideas overturned. Siberia, for example, is shedding its Gulag Archipelago image and revealing itself as a stunningly beautiful and diverse land so vast that a pocket of Old Believers – a branch of the Orthodox Church – was unaware of the fall of the tsar when it was stumbled upon in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, Russia’s pre-Revolution culture has emerged from cold storage. Religion has resumed its important role in society, and art, music and literature are rediscovering their pre- and immediate post-Revolutionary vigour. Added to these is the explosive energy of Russia’s “New Culture”, in which young Muscovites and St Peters-burgers are experimenting with new modes of expression – and not all of them copied from the West. There is a darker side, too: the gap between rich and poor has widened alarmingly, while economic uncertainty and organized crime have had a destabilizing effect.

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