The chief islands of the Baltic are: the Aland Archipelago, Dago, Oesel, Mohn, Hochland, and Kotlin, which contains the fortress of Cronstadt.
The Black Sea is becoming of more and more importance every year. The coast lands are being developed, and as the produce of the interior becomes greater so the importance of the Black Sea increases.
The Sea of Azov is the greatest inlet of this sea, but on the whole the importance of the Black Sea is lessened by the fact that it has so few good ports. The best are those of the peninsula of the Crimea, but these are too remote to be of any great importance.
Odessa is the second port of Russia and the greatest port of the Black Sea. Sebastopol is the great naval station, and Batum owes its importance to the fact that it is the port of the oil fields of the Caucasus.
The great inland sea of Russia, the Caspian, lacks importance chiefly because of the fact that it is an inland sea. It forms a good means of communication from the Transcaucasian provinces to Central Asia, and also between Central Asia and Persia; but although attempts have been made to unite it with the Black Sea, the fact that it lies seventy feet below sea-level prevents any real good from being done. It is, however, of vast importance as a fishing center, and supplies almost the whole of Russia with fish.
Climate.—In European Russia, except in the Baltic provinces, the south of the Crimea, and a narrow strip of land on the Black Sea, the climate is continental. A very cold winter, followed by a spring which sets in rapidly; a hot summer; an autumn cooler than spring; early frosts; and a small rainfall, chiefly during the summer and autumn, are the main features. The winter is cold everywhere. All the rivers are frozen over early in December, and they remain under ice for from one hundred days in the south to one hundred and sixty days in the north.
Products and Industries.—Excepting along the tundra belt on the Arctic coasts, in Finland, and in the saline steppes of the southeast, the cultivation of grain extends all over the great Russian plains.
Agriculture and Forests.—Rye and barley, oats and flax, are the chief crops in the north; wheat and vines, hemp and tobacco, the products of the center and the south. The south central governments, extending from the Upper Oka to the Ukraine on the Dnieper, may be regarded as the granary of Russia, for they produce a third of all its corn supply. Russia is thus most important of all as a grain-producing country.
Its forests extend over about forty per cent of the surface—pine and fir and birch in the north; oak and elm and lime in the center and south. The timber is sent down the Niemen and Vistula to the Baltic, and to Archangel in the White Sea, in enormous quantities for the supply of western Europe. In Russia itself the larger portion of the houses are built of wood.