- This video was sponsored by Skillshare, which is a place where you
can learn basically anything you want for less than $10 a month. Anyway, let's get to it. (papers rustle) Russia here we go. It's like this page and
this page, this is Russia. It's huge. It doesn't even fit on one of these pages. I ripped the page. Let's look at Russia (upbeat music) (guns bangs) But wait. Yes this is Russia, but
Russia is also this and this and this, this one country encompasses
over a 100 languages spread across 11 times zones. I mean the place is freaking huge. Countries aren't really
supposed to be this big. So how did this happen? How did Russia become so damn big. Countries come in all shapes and sizes. You have really small
countries like here in Europe the country of Monaco is tiny. It's literally two square kilometers like smaller than most cities. Now that's obviously an outlier. So let's look at a more average
size country like Belgium. More like 11,000 square kilometers. Then you have even bigger
countries like France that like 550,000 square kilometers. Over here in the United States, where everything is apparently bigger. You have States that
are bigger than France. Like the state of Texas is
695,000 square kilometers. All 48 of these continental
United States are huge by European standards at least. This whole continental United States is 8 million square kilometers. So you have all these
different sizes of countries. The average sort of looks like this and then you have the second
largest country on earth which is Canada huge. But now take a look at the size of the largest country on earth. Russia is huge. It is more than double the size of the continental United States. 17 million square kilometers. Makes up one eighth of the
total habitable area on earth. And it's almost double
the next biggest country on this list, I mean it's mindblowing. Russia is a part of Europe. It also shares a beach line with Turkey but then you go all the way over here and it has an extensive border
with China and North Korea. Keep going and it stretches
all the way up here to where you could literally swim from Russia to the United
States assuming you can swim, like two and a half miles. So yeah, Russia is (beep)
getting huge, it's giant. But not that long ago Russia wasn't huge. In fact, relative to
empires and their borders Russia was kind of a small fish. That's the story I wanna tell you. (upbeat music) A thousand years ago
Russia looked like this, a loose group of Slavic peoples who were a growing and prosperous
society here in Eastern Europe but they had a pretty big weakness. And that weakness looked like this. These are flat grasslands,
which are very easy to cross if you're an army looking to pillage land. And that's exactly what a group of horse-riding warriors did. These guys were the Mongols and
they basically use this path of flat grasslands to traverse across Asia
and expand their empire. 40,000 of these Mongo guys on
horses with bows and arrows eventually made it all the way here to the Slavic peoples of Russia. Here's an image of them
invading the cities and burning them down
conquering these people. Look how scared these people look. I mean, I would be too if
40,000 Mongols on horseback rode into my city. (speaks foreign language) (men chant) Anyway so the Mongols takeover, this little block of Slavic people and it really weakens their society. It breaks up all the cities
that were sort of collaborating with each other. And now they're paying
taxes to the Mongols like this empire that
was from super far away, like on the other side of the world. But there was one city
in this area that was particularly ready to fight back. They were quietly getting more powerful. This city was called Muscovy
or Moscow eventually. And it became the regional
epicenter for trading fur which is a thing that
was becoming all the rage in Europe. Moscow was also learning
how to use gunpowder and guns and technology
from Europe and before long, they were able to punch
back against the Mongols whose big empire was getting really big and hard to maintain. And it sort of starting to
crack and Moscow was there to take advantage of this. I mean, let's be honest. There's only so long
you can keep an empire that looks like this together way too big. I mean, this is the biggest
land empire in history, but it didn't last long, even though they had these bad-ass warriors on a horseback anyway. So yeah, Moscow started punching back. They had fur money and they had gunpowder and they were having success
pushing the Mongols out and moving east. One thing's for sure said Moscow which was soon becoming
the Russian empire. "We're not gonna to let
anyone sneak up on us again "like the Mongols did." And everyone over here sort of chuckled in European and said don't you realize that the only way to keep people out is to have like mountains
and water to protect you. And the Russians were like, oh yeah you mean like these and the Europeans were like, nice. So Moscow, which was just a city but now becoming the Russian
empire starts expanding towards these mountains and soon they have like a nice
empire sized set of borders. Some mountains for protection
have an economy of fur they have technology and commerce. They're getting rich things
were looking good for Russia but wait a minute, can we
overlay that green layer on the map that shows the
super highway of grasslands that the Mongols use to invade? Yeah that one, that one. (indistinct) look, there's
a flaw in the plan. Nice try Russia. But you see that this natural border, which is great has a huge gap of flat grasslands that
people can easily pass directly on their way to Moscow. So it's the middle of the 15 hundreds. Moscow has beat back the
Mongols, is expanding east. They're doing their fur thing. They find kind of a natural border, but it doesn't really work. So they're still looking for
a natural border or water or something to buffer
their country to the east. And then this terrible
guy comes into power. His name was literally Ivan the terrible. And he had some pretty big
ambitions for expanding Russia. He's like dude, we don't need
to stop at these mountains. Let's see how far we
can push this thing east way past the mountains. What he finds on the other
side of these mountains is a very sparsely populated
land of ice called Siberia. There wasn't a lot of people here and the people that were
there weren't super resistant to this Russian takeover. The main thing that the
Russians had to fight against was the cold. But with cold comes furry animals who have thick coats of fur which again was incredibly
valuable in European markets. And that helped fuel this race to just keep going east. (upbeat music) Is it just me or are they
sort of overcompensating? Like yeah, we get it You
got invaded by the Mongols. And like, you wanna like make
sure it doesn't happen again, but like settled down
they just kept moving east till eventually they
reached the Pacific ocean the edge of the world. But they didn't stop there
they just kept going. I mean, listen, this is so far away from the original
starting point of Moscow. And it started to get to the point where the government back in Moscow was sort of sending out expeditions not really sure what they were doing and what they were taking over because they couldn't really
like stay in touch with them. They were just sort of hoping for the best after one Russian dude
went out on an expedition and conquered some remote
city in the far east the government official
back in Moscow said, nobody really knows why he
did that and to what end. There is, however, something erotic taking place in the borders of our empire Erotic I guess that's
one way to talk about it. But here's the most interesting part to me about this Russian imperialism
that is very different than most imperialism
that I've looked into. When the Russians would find a tribe or a people or a culture that
was very different than theirs because they were so far from home. They first tried to negotiate with them and convince them to
join the Russian empire. If people resisted it got very predictable
imperialism very quickly but a lot of tribes didn't resist and they found it beneficial to be a part of this growing empire. So this empire grew
without a lot of conflict and in the process in
developing a lot of cultures that sort of kept their
identity their language, their culture far, far away from Moscow because of this Russia today
is yes, this huge land mass but perhaps a better way
to look at it is this. (upbeat music) Russia today is divided
into 85 territories. 22 of these territories are
actually called republics have their own official
language, their own legislature and basically are totally
independent from Russia except for in international affairs. It's like 22 countries within a country all with their own unique style. So yeah, well Russia is this. There's also other versions of Russia. And I wanna show you some of those. Stop one let's look at
the Republic of Sakha. It's located way in
the east and it's huge. 3.1 million square kilometers massive. This place is in a time zone
six hours ahead of Moscow. The people here don't
look like Putin at all. Their ancestors are not from
the original Moscow Russia area and they speak their own
Northern Siberian Turkic language as well. The capital of this Russian
Republic is way up here. It's called Yakutsk. It's the coldest large city on earth with an average temperature of minus eight degrees centigrade. And this whole region is
full of these giant holes. In these holes they're
looking for diamonds, 25% of the world's diamonds
are mined in this Republic. So yeah, this is Russia. Next stop down here is Dagestan which borders the countries
of Azerbaijan and Georgia. The climate here is so
different than what I think of when I think of Russia, it is hot and dry and people here speak 13
different official languages besides Russian plus there's a bunch of
unofficial languages. And 83% of the people
here identify as Muslim, which again like I don't
think of Muslims in Russia, but this is Russia. It's right next to Chechnya which is another part of Russia, which is politically and culturally very much doing its own thing. The people here declared
independence in the nineties which caused rebel groups to
militarize and there was war and terrorist attacks and people died and Putin may or may not
have planned a bombing to frame Chechnyan terrorists
to then go to war with them so he could get approval ratings. So he could take over the country. Becoming (indistinct). No, no, wait, no I'm not going down the
freaking rabbit hole. I'm doing one of those
fun geography videos where we talk about cultural
diversity and like borders and history and not this stuff come on. Just is once can I just go into a video
without having to talk about the fact that some people
are really terrible? (sighs) Anyway so Dagestan down here has all these different
languages and people so different than what I think
about when I think of Russia. Plus, I mean, look at
this fashion culture. Okay so there's a Republic
here, right on these mountains, these mountains that we talked about that were sort of a good natural border but had a big hole in
them, the Ural mountains this is the Komi Republic. The main thing about this Republic is it doesn't look like the sort of ice swept Moscow streets
that I'm used to Russia. This place is known for its natural beauty beautiful landscapes and
where the gulags where@ the brutal Russian prisons
during the Soviet times where they would do terrible things. Anyway, there's these
beautiful rock formations that are super unique and people aren't supposed to climb on them because there's some
legend that it's bad luck, but of course, foreigners
show up and do stupid things and they couldn't resist
and here they are. Anyway, this is Russia. Okay a couple more, you have
this Republic of come Kalmykia. You just need to look at this place and its people to know that
this feels very different than what you think of as Russia. And yet this is Russia. Mother Russia has been sort
of brutal to these people over the years trying
to erase their culture, but even still, they persist. Last one I wanna talk
about is called Tuva. It's down here. Here's Putin visiting Tuva a while back. This is another place where
Russian ethnicity and language is a minority. The people here are more
related to the Mongols and they speak a Turkic
language called Tuvan which sounds like this. (speaks in foreign language) (soft music) So yeah, the upshot here
is that this is Russia but so is this and this and this and this. Russia got really big as they
were searching for a border and for fur and they just
kept expanding their empire enveloping all of the people
and cultures that came with it. Okay let me just be clear about something. Russia is giant this video
is not 15 hours long. And so I was able to give
a very brief overview of the history. The history is so much more
mind bendingly complicated. It's like Game of Thrones on steroids not to mention today's Russia
is also so much more diverse like a mosaic of cultures and languages that I was able to give
a little overview for. But I know that a lot of
you watching are thinking why isn't he mentioning,
fill in the blank. I wanna hear from you. Like, what are the parts of
Russia that you know about that I didn't mention here
that are the most interesting or the most surprising
that are more different from the Russia that we sort of think of? Let me know in the comments. I got fascinated with Russia
as we did the Navalny video a while back and I'm now becoming deeper
and deeper into this place and where it came from and
what it looks like today. I've never visited and I want
to, so maybe I can't though because I did that the Navalny video and there'll be angry at
me if I go there anyway, hadn't thought about that. (soft music) Okay before you go, I want to
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being such great supporters and lots more videos to come soon. So I'll see you all in the next one. Bye bye. (upbeat music)
I haven't seen the video yet, but I'm kind of put off Harris after a recent video here showing the propaganda and misleading "journalism" he engages in.