Live Stock and Fisheries.—The steppes of the south are the great pastoral lands of Russia, which possess more than forty-five millions of sheep, about twenty-five per cent yielding fine wool; twenty-five millions of cattle; and twenty millions of horses. Russian leather is famous. Swine are also kept in very large numbers all over the land; the export of bristles and brushes from Russia is very large. Reindeer form the wealth of the Lapps and Samoyeds in the north; camels of the Tartars in the southeastern steppes. Hunting the bear, wolf, fox, and deer, and trapping the sable in the forests for their skins, give employment to many. The Caspian, as well as the Sea of Azof, the Black Sea, and the great rivers, are rich in fish—tunny, sturgeon, salmon, anchovy. Most caviare is made at Astrakhan on the Caspian.
Minerals.—The Obdorsk and Ural Mountains contain very great mineral riches, and, with the Altai range, are the principal seat of mining and metallic industry, producing gold, platinum, copper, iron of very superior quality, rock-salt, marble, and kaolin, or china-clay. Silver, gold, and lead are also obtained in large quantities from the mines in the Altai Mountains. Russia is now the largest producer of petroleum in the world. Great supplies of petroleum and naptha are found in the Baku, Kerch, and Taman. An immense bed of coal, both steam and anthracite, and apparently inexhaustible, has been discovered in the basin of the Donetz (between the rivers Donetz and Dnieper). Other mineral products are: gold, platinum, pig iron, steel and rails, copper, quicksilver, salt and lead.
Education.—From the close of the sixteenth century onward till 1861, the greater portion of the inhabitants of Russia were serfs, belonging either to the crown or to private individuals. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the masses of the people in Russia are without education. Finland is in advance of all other parts of the empire in respect of education; it possesses a separate system. Probably not more than ten per cent of the population have received instruction of any kind. The control and maintenance of primary schools is divided between the Ministry of Public Instruction and the Holy Synod. Conditions are, however, improving. Secondary institutions comprise gymnasia and good schools, but numbers and attendances are small. Special schools are increasing in number, especially in the European cities. There are universities at Kazan, Kieff, Kharkoff, Moscow, Odessa, Petrograd, Saratoff, Tomsk, Yurieff and Warsaw.
Religion.—The great bulk of the Russians—excepting a few White Russians professing the Union—belong to the Greek-Russian Church, or to one of its numberless sects of dissenters. The Poles and most of the Lithuanians are Roman Catholics; while the Finns, the Esthonians, and other Western Finns, the Swedes, and the Germans, are Protestant (about four millions).
Cities and Towns.—The largest towns in European Russia are Petrograd (2,018,596), Moscow (1,173,427), Warsaw (756,426), Riga (500,000), Odessa (449,673), Lodz (351,570), Kieff (329,000), Kharkoff (197,405), Vilna (162,633), Saratoff (143,431), Kazan (143,707), Ekaterinoslav (135,552), Rostoff (119,889), Astrakhan (121,580), Tula (109,279), and Kishineff (125,787); while Nijni Novgorod, Nikolaieff, Samara, and Minsk have populations between 90,000 and 95,000. In Asiatic Russia the Caucasus contains two towns with over 100,000 inhabitants: Baku (179,133), and Tiflis (160,645); Turkestan contains five large towns, Tashkend (156,000), Namangan, Samarkand, and Andijan; in Siberia Vladivostok has 90,000 (one-third Chinese), Tomsk, Irkutsk, and Ekaterinburg have each about 50,000 inhabitants. Nijni Novgorod, though small, is a station on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and has annually the largest fair in the world.
PALACE OF PETER THE GREAT, FOUNDER OF PETROGRAD
Petrograd, the splendid looking metropolis of the Russian Empire, is situated on the River [542] Neva, near its entrance into the Gulf of Finland. The flat and low marshy ground upon which the city is built only recently emerged from the sea. The mighty Neva, which flows thirty-six miles from Lake Ladoga, subdivides into many branches, thus forming some one hundred islands.
VIEW OF PETROGRAD, RUSSIA, FROM THE ISLAND