The question contained in the title is only seemingly absurd. If you look at the map of the world you can see how, stretched from one end of the globe almost to the other, it overwhelms with its enormity and weight the rest of the Earth. This is the effect of the representation of a sphere (globe) on the surface. Pure geometry makes the 2.166 million square kilometre Greenland appear almost as big as Africa. On many maps the borderlands of Russia appear even on the left/west side - the frontiers of Chukotka through the Bering Strait almost touch America - Alaska and overlap the western hemisphere, as if Russia encircled the whole world. From the American Little Diomedes Island you can see the Russian Ratmanova Island, 3 km away. There you can look into the "future" and "see tomorrow". - For between the islands lies the date change line. So Russia is big, huge. But perhaps this is only an appearance of greatness, and in fact it is a great emptiness and only individual points in a vast nothingness.

If one were to measure the size of Russia by its GDP, it would not be a small country, perhaps even quite a large one. Something like South Korea, but smaller than Italy or Benelux. The USD 1.48 trillion gross domestic product (figures from before the pandemic) does not make much of an impression on the world - it is like two Taiwanes. Some experts, in black, i.e. very optimistic, scenarios, predict that, due to the attack on Ukraine and the war waged there, Russia's economy will go back to the 1995 level. That is, it will be smaller than the Polish or Belgian.

WAR IN UKRAINE

Sky over Moscow

Russia is a country of acute, permanent poverty. Four per cent of the population, or 21 million people, live below the minimum subsistence level of USD 165, 35 million have no toilet in their homes and 29 million have no access to running water. Every day of warfare costs this economy at least a billion dollars, on top of the loss of resources that are difficult to replace. Equipment is one thing, but where are the helicopter pilots to replace those killed during the invasion, or the 100 000 IT specialists who have left the country since the war began?

Some point out that Russia is doing very well for itself, because the exchange rate of the rouble is almost back to pre-war levels. However, if sanctions work, no amount of money, reserves accumulated in the National Welfare Fund, gold stocks in vaults will launch the Uralvagonzavod factory, which in theory produces tanks, but now precisely nothing, because there is a shortage of imported components, so everything in Nizhny Tagil has come to a standstill. Diana Kaledina, president of the Baltic Industrial Company, which works for the military complex, says that Russia does not produce such "unattractive things" as bearings, spindles, ball screws, etc. and therefore is unable to carry out almost any production on its own.

Soon all the airlines will also come to a standstill. The great sky above Russia will become empty. Clouds will float by, birds will fly, and occasionally a rocket will fly by. Aeroflot's low-cost airline Pobieda (or Victory) has announced a 40 per cent reduction in its Boeing fleet. Those grounded are to be dismantled for spare parts for those flying.

Russia produces its own aircraft, but even for them there will be a shortage of foreign parts. Yuri Lapin, the head of the IrAero airline, told the authorities that in 5-6 months it will be impossible to repair An-24 and An-26 aircraft. It is true that Russia has stolen (confiscated, in retaliation for sanctions) 500 leased aircraft, but these machines cannot leave the territory of the Federation and without service they will also become useless.

Kamil Galeev, an analyst from the American think tank Wilson Center, points out that even ordinary railway carriages may be in short supply, because in order to produce them, servicing them they need parts that Russia does not produce itself. Perhaps France, Germany and the Netherlands will again try to deceive the world and secretly trade with the criminal regime, perhaps China will administer a drip, but the costs of these procedures will be enormous.

The geographical size of this country, the boundlessness of its space, will once again become a curse. For the whole of this vast country is bound together by aeroplanes and practically a single railway line to Vladivostok. Almost everything that lives east of the Urals centres around this line. Above - in the north - there is emptiness, endless nothing.

Raw materials and people's lives

For hundreds of years, Russia was the land of the North. When Henryk Sienkiewicz, restricted by censorship bans, could not write about the invasion of Moscow in "Potop" (Delluge) - it was in battles against Moscow that the young Orsha warrant officer Andrzej Kmicic gained fame - he wrote about his skirmishes with the mysterious Hyperboreans, as the northern peoples were called by ancient historians.

Until 350 years ago, most of Moscow's subjects lived in the sub-Arctic areas. All lines of communication connecting the European part of Russia with Siberia ran north. Novgorod's expeditions to Siberia took place along the polar rivers. Settlement flourished around them because they were not only a source of protein - fish - but also transport routes, even in winter, when sledges were used to move on the ice.

This is largely the case to this day. The great rivers of Siberia - the Lena, the Ob, the Yenisey, etc. - are ice-covered great arteries. Between the rivers lay strips of land over which goods and boats were transported on their backs - literally. This land and the very act of moving it was called volokha. This term is still preserved in the names of many cities - Vologda, Volokolamsk, Vyshniy Volochok etc.

In the north were the largest urban centres of the lands that were later christened as Russia - Pskov, Novgorod the Great. It was with them that the West traded, and the goods were furs and, until the 14th century, slaves.

Certain things have not changed in Russia to this day - it has mainly raw materials and the lives of its own people to offer the world. Hanseatic merchants did not want to buy sewn furs. They took what was simplest and cheapest - just hides and people as livestock. The northward expansion of Moscow was also developing. First by capturing Novgorod, and then by the Oka to the Volga to Kazan, the conquest of which opened the way to the Urals and further to Siberia.

A little to the south of the city the Kama flows into the Volga, and going up the river one can reach today's Perm, the northern Urals and the gates to Siberia. It is possible that the Russians owe their contemptuous name of "Kacaps" [pron. katsaps - ed.] to the conquest of the Kazan Khanate and the massacre of the city itself committed by the then Muscovites in 1552.

The Tatars were promised their lives if they surrendered Kazan (today the capital of Tatarstan) without a fight. So they laid down their arms, opened the gates of the city and the Muscovites - the army of Ivan IV the Terrible - having contempt for their own word, carried out a massacre. In the Turkish languages, "hassap" or "kassap" means hycel, torturer, butcher. Others say that the Ukrainians called the Russians "kacaps", mocking their beards as if they were caps - old goats. In the Lviv dialect, "kacap" means "fool".

The city - a symbol

The second event that helped Moscow to conquer the north was an English expedition in search of sea routes to China. In 1553, i.e. a year after the massacre and displacement of the inhabitants of Kazan, three ships set off north from England under the command of Hugh Willoughby, but a storm off the coast of Norway broke up the convoy. After circumnavigating the Scandinavian peninsula the "Bona Esperanca" reached the vicinity of Novaya Zemlya, but on the way back the ship got stuck in the ice off the Kola peninsula. None of the crew, including Willoughby, managed to survive the winter.

A similar fate befell the sailors of the "Bona Confidentia". The expedition ended happily only for the ship "Edward Bonaventura" commanded by Richard Chancellor. Escaping from winter the ship sailed south, entered the White Sea, until it reached the coast to the settlements of the Pomors, near the place, which today is a port of Arkhangelsk. The fishermen somehow explained to the English that they were not in China, but in the Moscow state. Ivan the Terrible invited the Chancellor to Moscow, granted him the privilege of free trade and so the first English colonial corporation was founded - the Moscow Company.

So began the trade of the northern route with the English and the Dutch. Goods, which had hitherto been transported by lakes, the Volkhov River, the Neva marshes to the Baltic, could now be sailed across the open sea. By order of the Tsar, the port of Archangelsk began to be built, and the Arctic part of Russia had access to Siberia by its northern rivers, and the White Sea to Europe. Moscow reached as far as the Pacific and founded its first city on this ocean - Ochotsk, which became the base for the Danish traveller Vitus Bering, who was in the service of the tsars. From Ochotsk, now dead, they set off for the Pacific islands and Alaska.

At that time, the North was flourishing, as the taxpayers' registers testify. The largest city in Siberia and its capital was Tobolsk, almost forgotten today. The real metropolis was Vyatka, located at the foot of the Urals. Today it is Kirov - a symbolic city. In 1934, after the death of communist activist Sergei Kirov, who was killed in an assassination attempt, probably on the orders of his comrade Stalin, Vyatka was renamed in honour of this Bolshevik.

In 1993, already after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the inhabitants of Kirov decided in a referendum to keep the communist name. They got what they wanted - Kirov is now a symbol of poverty and economic decline in Russia, just like Detroit in the USA. The status of Tobolsk is similar. All of this is due, in a nutshell, to the fact that Russia has turned from the north to the south.

Of course, expansion had already taken place in that direction before. It was also made possible by the conquest of Kazan and the trail down the Volga to the Caspian Sea. Then the conquest of Ukraine, the conquest of the Crimea and the Caucasus, but the real turn by 180 degrees with all the consequences occurred only at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the Trans-Siberian Railway that was supposed to turn Russia around.

Belt along the tracks

The country developed dynamically throughout the 19th century. The industrial centres established by the British in Lugansk and Donetsk, among others, drove its economy. In 1897, Russia had 125.6 million inhabitants - almost twice as many as the United States and over 22 million kilometres in area. In 1914, the French economist Edmond Thery predicted that if the Empire maintained its pace of economic development, it would become the world's greatest economic power in 1948.

In order to consolidate the territories stretching from Kalisz in the west to the Pacific (Alaska had already been sold) Tsar Alexander II in 1890 ordered the laying of a railway line from Moscow to the then small Vladivostok. A year later, although the route had not yet been decided, construction was opened by his son and heir to the throne Nicholas. Some wanted to direct trains through the north, through already developed and rich areas, above all Tobolsk. Others argued that the connection should be built to take advantage of the still underdeveloped resources of southern Siberia.

The merchants of Tobolsk, the largest and richest city in Siberia, offered huge bribes to have the route go through their city, but to no avail. Eventually, the second - southern - route was chosen. Along the railway line, settlements and towns sprang up like mushrooms after the rain. The best example of the effects of Russia's pole reversal is a comparison of two cities - Tobolsk and Novosibirsk. The latter did not exist 140 years ago and was only founded in 1893 as a camp for railway workers when construction began on a bridge over the Ob River. Today Novosibirsk is Russia's third largest city, the capital of Siberia, and has 1.6 million inhabitants.

Less than 100 000 people live in Tobolsk. The situation is similar in the Far East. Vladivostok, which was founded in 1860 and granted city rights 20 years later, today has almost 700,000 inhabitants and, together with Nakhodka, is Russia's window on the Pacific. 2 thousand kilometres north of Vladivostok lies Ochotsk - the first Russian city in the Far East. It has 2 thousand inhabitants.

Let us therefore return to the fundamental question: is Russia great and how great is it? Or is Russia only its European part, the strip along the Trans-Siberian Railway, the cities in the Urals and those scattered somewhere in the emptiness of Siberia and the icy deserts of the Arctic?

Russia today has an area of 17 million square metres, 5 million less than in the 'heyday' of the Russian Empire and the USSR. It has 143 million inhabitants - barely 18 million more than in 1897. There were 76 million Americans then, and there are 330 million today.

Nearly 80 percent of Russians live in the European part of the country. This covers 4.2 million square kilometres and accounts for 25 per cent of Russia's area. The remaining 28 million live in several major centres of Siberia and the Far East, or are scattered over the 16.8 million square kilometres of the Asian part of Russia.

Price of size

The life expectancy of the Russian male is 60 years, consumed by disease and alcoholism, so demographically nothing will improve. So there is an emptiness in the lands of Russian Asia with only a few islands of Russian civilisation. Between them endless forests, tundra, mud, ice fields. In these areas deposits of oil or gas are being found, which the French are helping to extract, as the Russians themselves would not be able to. The world remembers Nord Stream 2, which was built together with Germany, but does not appreciate the French company Total, which, together with Gazprom and its 'appendages', is exploiting further oil and gas fields.

Of course, it was not the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway that caused Russia to completely turn its back on the north, to abandon it, to turn this area into a cursed, inhuman land. It was the Communist revolution, the crimes of the Communist regime that interrupted Russia's development. The last great effort in the north was the exploitation of millions of slaves by Stalin and the communist criminals.

Since these millions of human beings can no longer serve as sleepers for railway tracks or shuttering boards, the Soviet Union and then its heir Russia have abandoned the north. They do not have the resources, the strength to make it their own, as they did centuries ago. So there is a great nothing in the north. Russia has shrunk like a balloon in which no one supports the air. It has collapsed from the north.

So how big is Russia? Geographically it is enormous - it has endless marshes that freeze over in winter, icy deserts and impassable forests. It is a country of great distances. Perhaps it is some consolation for those millions of its inhabitants who have never had a bathroom or a tap in their flat or burrow that their country stretches from the Kuril Islands, annexed by Japan, to Kaliningrad, rotting in the ruins of the former German Kingdom.

Surely the regime is telling these millions that a life of squalor, stench and filth is a price worth paying to have one more pile of mud in the Kuriles, to seize one more piece of land from Georgians - such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia - and to maintain bantustans such as the Republics of Transnistria, Luhansk, Chechnya and Ingushetia. There is a stockpile of cannon fodder there in case of another invasion.

Demographically, Russia is also large, though smaller than Bangladesh, Nigeria, Indonesia or Pakistan. It is still shrinking, however, because alcoholics refuse to stop dying and soldiers sent to slaughter in Ukraine keep dying. They are doing so at a faster rate than the British or Americans did in World War II. Perhaps the Russian regime will improve its statistics by adding the population of the conquered territories, as was done with Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk. However, it will still have to maintain them.

Season for Pushkin?

Economically, Russia is still in the premier league due to its mass, but with a position firmly in the relegation zone. If the gloomy (and therefore optimistic for the world) forecasts come true, it will be weaker than Poland, which is 55 times smaller than it is, and weaker than Belgium, which is 510 times smaller in area. Millions of square kilometres of mud and ice will not change that.

Perhaps Russia is great with its culture? This is what Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wanted to suggest recently. after Polish culture minister Deputy Prime Minister Piotr Glinski said that now "is not a good season for Chekhov or Pushkin", that Russian culture should disappear from the public space for the duration of the war, because "it is the crimes in Bucha and not Russian ballet that are the true face of Putin".

How to explain it to you, comrade Zakharova. Well, we don't know if Deputy Prime Minister Gliński will live a billion years, but it is certain that Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Tchaikovsky are dead. The latter even had his house in the Ukrainian town of Sumy demolished by the Russians themselves recently. Also dead are the members of the Alexandrov Choir, who died in a plane crash in 2016 when they were flying to Syria to sing to the Russians committing slaughter there.

On the other hand, Putin, Shoygu and some zealot ready to take part in the parade on 9 May, at which dummy military equipment will be displayed, are still alive. And still alive is Nikita Mikhalkov, once a prominent Soviet director, now a symbol of the decline and prostitution of Russian artists, babbling something about Ukrainians and Americans who release infected birds from laboratories that fly, shit on Russia and spread disease, Also alive are the flocks of celebrities who praise the great Russian work: War and Crime.

– Dariusz Matuszak

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists

– Translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski