Russia's main river, the Volga, flows all the way to the Caspian Sea. Generally, Russian rivers stretch for 3 million km, dumping nearly 4,000 cu. km. of water annually. The largest lakes are the Caspian, Baikal, Ladoga, Onega and Taimyr. Forests cover some 40 per cent of the entire Russian land mass, with total timber reserves of 79 billion cu. The largest forests can be found in the Siberian taiga, the Far East and the northern European territories.
Mixed forests are typical of mid-Russian regions.
For the most part Russia has turf and podzol soils. Black-soil regions can also be found here, with the richest soils in this category located in the steppes of southeastern European Russia, and along the Western Siberian Plain. It is populated by approximately 130 nations and ethnic groups, including some 130 million Russians, over 5 million Tartars, nearly 4 million Ukrainians, 1.7 million Chuvashs, 1.7 million Jews, approximately 1.3 million Bashkirs, over 1 million Byelorussians and more than 1 million Mordovians. The Russian Federation has 1,067 major cities, with 13 of them inhabited by one million and more people each. The largest cities are Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg.