Question | Answer |
A term referring to the concept that increasing distances between places tend to reduce interactions among them. | Distance decay |
An enormous farm in the Soviet Union on which a large team of laborers were gathered to work together during Joseph Stalin’s reign. | Collective farms |
The selling of government-owned business to private citizens. | privatization |
Black topsoil, one of the world’s most fertile soils. | chernozem |
Permanently frozen ground. | permafrost |
The term used for the temperate grassland region in the Northern Hemisphere. | steppe |
A nearly continuous belt of evergreen coniferous forests across the Northern Hemisphere, in North America and Eurasia. | taiga |
A region’s distance from the moderating influence of the sea. | continentality |
The 4,000-mile route between China and the Mediterranean Sea, named for the costly silk acquired in China. | The Silk Road |
region south of the Caucasus mountains
consisting of the republics of Armenia,
Azerbaijan, and Georgia | Transcaucasia |
| |
range that separates the Northern European
and West Siberian plains, sometimes used
as the dividing line between Europe and
Asia
p 346 | Ural Mountains |
region that includes the republics of
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and
Uzbekistan | Central Asia |
frigid arctic and subarctic region of Russia | Siberia |
combined continent of Europe and Asia | Eurasia |
rainfall not absorbed by the soil that runs
into streams and rivers | Runoff |
rail route of more than 5700 miles,
transversing Russia from Moscow in the
East to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast | Trans-Siberian Railroad |
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania | Baltic republics |
emporer of Russia | Czar |
overthrow of the czar in 1917 by the Communists | Russian Revolution |
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, also known as the Soviet Union | USSR |
conflict between the United States and Soviet Union from the late 1940s to the 1980s; no open warfare resulted | Cold War |
economic system in which the central government makes all important economic decisions, including production of goods and prices | Command Economy |
dinner party, or occasion where people gather to eat or drink | Supra |
light and portable tents used by nomads | Yurt |
people who move from place to place with their animals in search of food, water, and grazing land | nomad |
region between the Black and Caspian Seas straddling the Caucasus Mountains | Caucasus |
Russian republic that has been the setting of violence since the 1990s. | Chechnya |