Why Russia Looks Bigger Than It Really Is

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The full episode is on YouTube, about ten minutes long.

Updated: November 14, 2026

Look at the world map on a classroom wall, and run your eyes across the top. There it is, Russia, sprawled across the whole width of the map like a giant blanket thrown over the top of the world. It looks enormous, bigger than Africa, bigger than everything except the oceans. It looks like half the planet belongs to one country. Russia is genuinely huge, the biggest country on Earth, and it still is not nearly as big as it looks.

Here are the real numbers. Russia covers about 17.1 million square kilometres, the largest country on Earth. It is about 1.7 times the size of Canada, about 1.7 times the size of the United States, and about 1.7 times the size of Europe. It covers about 11 percent of all the land on Earth. It is still slightly smaller than the surface of Pluto, about 17.6 million square kilometres. The biggest country in the world loses a size contest to a dwarf planet.

The surprise, in numbers

Start with the comparison that breaks the map. Africa covers about 30.4 million square kilometres, almost twice the size of Russia. You could fit the whole of Russia inside Africa, and still have room left over for the entire United States. Russia plus the United States comes to about 26.9 million square kilometres, and Africa still has room to spare. On the classroom wall, Russia looks bigger than Africa. On a globe, Africa could swallow Russia and the United States together.

Most of Russia is one giant region most people never see. Siberia covers about 13.1 million square kilometres, roughly three quarters of the whole country. If Siberia were its own country, it would still be the largest on Earth, bigger than Canada. It is a land of taiga forest, frozen rivers and winters that last half the year. The thread that holds it together is the Trans-Siberian Railway, 9,288 kilometres from Moscow to Vladivostok, the longest railway in the world, started in 1891 and finished in 1916. The journey takes about seven days.

The honest map

The first reason Russia looks so big is the map itself. Gerardus Mercator published his world map in 1569. His map keeps local angles and shapes true, and it pays for that by stretching area further and further from the equator. Russia sits at the top of the map, far from the equator, at the far end of the stretching. The equator gets drawn honestly, and the far north gets drawn like pulled taffy. Russia pays one of the highest taxes on the wall, with almost the whole country between 41 and 81 degrees north.

Here is the Mercator tax by latitude. On the equator the tax is nothing, and the map is drawn to true scale. At 50 degrees north the map shows area about 2.4 times its true size. At 60 degrees north it shows about 4 times. At 70 degrees north it shows about 8.5 times. At 80 degrees north it shows about 33 times. At the North Pole itself the tax is infinite. Moscow sits at about 56 degrees north, so the map draws Moscow about 3 times too big. The far north of Siberia, near 70 degrees, is drawn about 8 times too big.

A country of distances

That stretching hides real distances. The Trans-Siberian Railway runs 9,288 kilometres from Moscow to Vladivostok, about seven days on the train and about eight hours by plane. Russia stretches about 9,000 kilometres from Kaliningrad to the far east, further than flying from New York to Los Angeles and back again. It shares land borders with 14 countries, from Norway to North Korea. And in the middle of all that distance sits Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world at 1,642 metres, holding about a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water.

The emptiness has a name, and it is enormous. The Sakha Republic, in eastern Siberia, covers about 3.1 million square kilometres, which makes it bigger than Argentina and almost as big as India. About one million people live there, which gives it a population density of less than one person per three square kilometres. Most Siberians live in a thin line of cities along the southern railway, and the rest is forest, tundra and rivers with hardly anyone in it.

No perfect map

There is no perfect flat map of a round world. Mercator tells the truth about direction and stretches area. The Gall-Peters map tells the truth about area and bends shape. Equal Earth splits the difference and gets both mostly right. On a Mercator map Russia looks twice the size of Africa. On an equal area map it is still the biggest country on Earth, about 17.1 million square kilometres, just not the giant the wall promised. Remember the numbers: Russia 17.1 million, Africa 30.4 million, almost twice as much. Once you have seen Russia at its true size, the classroom wall never looks the same again.

Sources and further reading

The facts behind this episode, from the sources that tell the story best.

Keep reading

Two books that go with this episode. If you buy through these links, the site may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

Tim Marshall

The chapter on Russia explains exactly what the episode shows: how Russia's geography, its size, its flat borders and its Arctic coast, drives its history.

See it on Amazon