The vast majority of the Russian population clearly lives in, around, and west of Moscow.
The vast majority of the area comprising Russia is clearly Asia.
Culturally, the vast majority of Russians are clearly much more European than Asian.
Which is it?
Both. Just like Kazakhstan and Turkey.
This has been a popular parlor debate since the Middle Ages. And they were usually discussing culture, even before Russia expanded geographically.
I’m voting Europe. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great steered the culture firmly westward.
Culturally Europe. Geographically Asia.
It’s Eurasian.
Quite so.
This is a geographical definition, not a cultural one.
European Russia is the western part of the Russian Federation, which is part of Eastern Europe.
If you really want to use cultural definitions, then Israel (and Australia) is in Europe. :smack:
Is Russia Europe or Asia?
Yes.
I voted “Both” - yes, there’s been some periods of Russia being “steered westward”, but just as often it turns its back on Europe or is actively antagonistic to it. And I don’t mean just Western Europe, there, I mean all of it.
I voted, “Depends on…” – in my view, culturally Russia and Russians are, (greatly) in the main, European; geographically, they are wherever they happen to live.
Topic-drifting; but I initially boggled a bit, at the mention of Kazakhstan here – thinking, “surely Kazakhstan is in Central Asia, period”. Consulting of sources reveals that nowadays anyhow, it is correct to regard the far western end of Kazakhstan – getting towards Astrakhan and Volgograd – as in Europe.
Along similar lines: I have trouble accepting, at a “gut” level, the present-day convention that Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are in Asia, not Europe. For most of my life, I’d strongly had the impression that they counted as in Europe: “at that end of things”, Turkey was where Asia began. That, likely, on the basis that G,A and A were long parts of the successive “Russian empires” – Tsarist, and then Soviet; but since the 1990s, such matters have become looser / more fluid. “Empires” stuff aside, there would seem to be no compelling sense-making reason for allocating these countries to one continent, rather than the other: just, for me, a matter of what I’d long been accustomed to.
Geographically Russia is in Asia by my own definition. Mentally I will always place the end of Europe somewhere in a line running from the Baltic states down to the Dnieper. Since it is an arbitrary line, my line is as good as anyone else’s even if most people think Europe ends at the Urals, which is just crazy to me. Look at it, the Urals are smack in the center of the Asian continent!
Hasn’t this very question been vexing Russia itself for centuries? Western Russians look like Europeans, but until the 20th century the physical distance between Moscow and the Atlantic made it kind of hard to keep abreast of the Euro clique. So Russia was always the weird kid from out of town–the one with the big bushy beard, the peculiar habits, and always behind on the news. They had the same problems if they looked east, but then they didn’t even look like their neighbors. They want to be European, but they’re just Russian.
Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia absolutely are in Asia, no two ways about it.
The 1937 novel Ali and Nino by Kurban Said, set in Azerbaijan just after the Russian Revolution, opens with a teacher telling his class that it has never been settled whether the three Transcaucasian nations are in Asia or Europe, and that now they have the chance to settle it on the side of Europe. He was wrong; they’re Asian.
When I was studying Magyar culture, inspired by Bartók’s music, I came to realize that Hungary identifies as a synthesis of East and West, while Russia by contrast defines itself in opposition to both East and West. The Magyars came from Asia and settled into Europe. The Russians hacked out a country by fighting both Asians and Europeans. Regardless, geographically Russia is both Asia and Europe.
The human-defined borders between Asia and Europe have been set at widely differing locations by different scholars, but the currently accepted boundaries make the most sense to me: the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, and the Caucasus divide. The ancient Greeks are to blame for wrongly defining Europe and Asia as different continents, and now we’re stuck with that. All they knew of was the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, the one part of the boundary that everybody agrees on.
It’s clear to me that attempts to define Armenia as European are really a proxy for the opposition between Christianity and Islam. Which is pretty useless, geographically, and a whole other can of worms.
Ironically, while Georgia and Azerbaijan have small areas on the European side of the Caucasus divide, Armenia is nowhere near it, so of the three only Armenia is 100% Asian.
It’s a European nation which has colonized Northern Asia and has never let go of its Northern Asian colonies.
Really, one can reckon that it’s “Humpty Dumpty” – anyone’s Europe vis-a-vis Asia, can be whatever they want it to be. A slightly hyperbolic extreme: around the time of Germany’s being re-unified, I learnt – rather to my delight – that the “Wessi’s versus Ossi’s” thing there is not all that new, and in fact antedates the events following from 1945. From a considerable time before that: in the realms of stereotypes, the people of the more westerly parts of Germany considered themselves sophisticated and forward-thinking and up with the continent’s latest cultural stuff; and regarded the German further east, as uncultured bumpkins / hidebound reactionaries. The eastern folks, meanwhile, saw the west of the country as Sodom and Gomorrah.
One gathers about Konrad Adenauer, a Rhinelander; that when a member of the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic era – when parliamentary duty called him to leave home for a spell in Berlin, he would say sadly to himself, as his eastbound train crossed the river Elbe: “Ah, me; here we go, back into Asia”.
Find myself now, half-wanting to read the above novel – if only because I’ve never read anything originating from Azerbaijan (a country about which I in fact know very little).
Those Greeks – they’ve got a lot to answer for 
…
Certainly then, Johanna, for you Asia has it for the Caucasian states. As said --really for me, it’s “just what I’ve been used to”.
Or, if one were going to “do it by religion”, then I suppose Azerbaijan, being Moslem, would be apportioned to Asia; and the other two, to Europe. Altogether, it feels tempting just to say, “let’s call the whole thing out” !
To me, geographically at least, anything in Eurasia east of the Black Sea is Asia. Ukraine’s easternmost border, such as it is, then makes a further starting point for defining the Europe/Asia border. I’d probably then say that a line from that northeast border to the Kara Sea inlet seems as good as any other geographical boundary.
As for whether Russia is Europe or Asia, I’m voting both.
Seems to me that the question is very much like “Is Texas Southern or Western?”
Seems more like asking “Is Mexico North America or Central America?” It’s technically North America, but shares far more in common with Central America than with the USA or Canada.
So, like **Two Many Cats **said, Russia is geographically Asian (most of it’s in Asia,) but most of the culture is European.
Depends on the part/region we’re speaking of and who is doing the talking/deciding. Under the laws of various states at various times I qualified as “other” and whole branches of my family Oriental. All because someone asked Great and Grand-Pap to point at a globe to show where they were from. :smack:
Never mind Texas, look at Missouri: It isn’t North. It isn’t South. It isn’t East. It isn’t West. It’s just… Missouri.