EastERN EURoPE RUSSIA

We begin our grand tour of Eastern Europe in the only logical place to start -- Russia. Russia is massive in every respect and has always known it.  Russia has never been shy about exerting its influence, never timid about being a dominant power; every country we're going to explore this session has spent decades, if not centuries, under Russian rule.  Today's Russia, which has substantially less global influence than it did throughout most of the 20th century, is still a behemoth. Even with Russia's reemergence on the world stage one can could conceivably discount Russia as a once-great nation that has seen its best days...but that would be a mistake.  Maybe the era of Imperial Russia is in the past, but a nation so essential to the global power structure, one with a thousand years of hard-fought, heartfelt history...one should never discount Russia.