Russia Genealogy

Russia is the largest country in the world, covering almost twice the territory of the next-largest country, Canada, and has the world's eighth-largest population (149 million people). The Russian Federation spans nine time zones. Russia shares land borders with the following countries (counter-clockwise from northwest to southeast): Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It is also close to the United States and Japan across relatively small stretches of water (the Bering Strait and La Pérouse Strait, respectively).

Russia was an independent country for many centuries, then following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 became the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), a republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russia is now known as the Russian Federation since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

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Imperial Russia was divided into gubernias/provinces, which were divided into uyezds/districts. Soviet Russia and Ukraine and other former Soviet republics were, and are still, divided into oblasts/provinces which were and are divided into raions/districts. Peripheral areas like the Caucasus sometimes use krai instead of raion for district. It is generally good to know both the old and the new jurisdictions in which a smaller place is located, because currently the Family History Library Catalog uses the new jurisdictions for Ukraine, but the old ones for Russia. Archives all over the former Soviet Union concentrate their holdings according to oblast borders. Old documents refer to the old jurisdictions, and most of our Russian and Ukrainian microfilms are from the old Imperial time.

Did you know?
Records of Russians Immigrating to U.S., 1834-1897 is now available at worldvitalrecords.com. This database consists of records of 527,394 passengers who arrived at the United States between 1834 through 1897 and identified their country of origin or nationality as Armenia, Finland, Galicia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Russian Poles, or Ukraine. Click here to access the database.

Research Tools

 * Beginning Russian Research
 * Calendar: Soviet
 * Emigration Records of Europe
 * Finding Places in the Former Russian Empire
 * boxpis.ru/
 * German Collections in Russian Archives
 * Guide to reading Old Church Slavonic
 * Russian Genealogical Word List and Resources by BYU*Russian Empire Genealogical Primer
 * Websites
 * Word List

Jurisdictions
Imperial Russia (Russian Empire) before 1917 was divided into gubernias or provinces. These were sub-divided into several uyezds or districts.

Current administrative division consist of 46 oblasts (oblastey, singular - oblast), 21 republics (respublik, singular - respublika), 4 autonomous okrugs (avtonomnykh okrugov, singular - avtonomnyy okrug), 9 krays (krayev, singular - kray), 2 federal cities (goroda, singular - gorod), and 1 autonomous oblast (avtonomnaya oblast') as follows.

Although retaining a lot of similarities, administrative-territorial division and regions boundaries undergo substantial changes during the 20th century, affecting the records storage sites.

Related Content

 * Hamburg Passenger Lists
 * Germans from Russia
 * www.wiki.svrt.ru/index.php
 * Russia, Samara Province Orthodox Church Records (FamilySearch Historical Records)