Russia Trivia
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97 free Russia trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
46 free Russia trivia questions with answers. Russia is the largest country on Earth, and this Russia trivia quiz tries to do it justice: geography (the deepest lake, the longest river in Europe, the exclave with no land link to the rest of the country), history (Peter the Great's beard tax, the Romanovs' last night, the siege that lasted 872 days), and culture (nesting dolls, Fabergé, Grandfather Frost, and the Moscow programmer who invented Tetris). Questions range from easy warm-ups to hard ones for people who already know their Yekaterinburg from their Veliky Ustyug. Difficulty is shown on every question, so you can pull out the easy set for a family night or the hard set for a pub quiz. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and every question carries its citation, so the numbers, dates and names here can be trusted.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Russian scientist won a Nobel Prize for studying digestion?
Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Pavlov: his digestion research led him on to conditioned reflexes, the dog experiments he's best remembered for.
Q 02Which mountain range is traditionally taken as the boundary between European and Asian Russia?
Ural Mountains
Ural Mountains: most Russians live west of the range, even though about three-quarters of the country's land lies east of it.
Q 03At 5,642 metres, which Caucasus volcano is Russia's highest mountain?
Mount Elbrus
Mount Elbrus is often called Europe's highest peak, but whether it beats Mont Blanc depends on where you draw the line between Europe and Asia.
Q 04Which river is the longest in Europe?
Volga
Volga: despite being Europe's longest and biggest river, it has no natural connection to any of the world's oceans.
Q 05Which Siberian lake holds more fresh water than all of North America's Great Lakes combined?
Lake Baikal
Lake Baikal sits in a rift where the Earth's crust is slowly pulling apart, which is how it became the deepest lake in the world.
Q 06What is the nerpa, an animal found only in one Siberian lake?
A freshwater seal
A freshwater seal: when the lake freezes over, it keeps breathing holes open in the ice, and its pups are born on the ice too.
Q 07Which Russian territory on the Baltic coast has no land connection to the rest of the country?
Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad was the German city of Königsberg until the Soviet Union annexed the territory after Nazi Germany's defeat.
Q 08Klyuchevskaya Sopka, the highest active volcano in Eurasia, stands on which Russian peninsula?
Kamchatka
Kamchatka was a closed military zone for decades, and even Soviet citizens needed special permission to go there until it opened up in 1990.
Q 09The Trans-Siberian, the world's longest railway line, runs from Moscow to which Pacific port?
Vladivostok
Vladivostok: the distances were so vast that crews built different sections at the same time, before a bridge over the Amur completed the line in 1916.
Q 10Which US Secretary of State negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia, mocked by critics as his 'Folly'?
William Seward
William Seward agreed a price of $7.2 million, and after gold was found in the Yukon in 1896, sparsely settled Alaska became the gateway to the Klondike.
Q 11At which world's fair did Russian matryoshka nesting dolls win a bronze medal and first gain attention?
Paris 1900
Paris 1900: the Mamontov family showed the dolls at the Exposition Universelle, and soon regions across Russia were making matryoshkas in their own styles.
Q 12About how deep is Russia's Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest hole humans have ever drilled?
About 12 km
About 12 km: drilling was halted when the rock turned out far hotter than expected, at around 180 °C.
Q 13What most likely caused the 1908 Tunguska blast that flattened 2,150 square kilometres of Siberian forest?
An exploding space rock
Q 21Catherine the Great, Russia's longest-reigning empress, was born in which country?
Prussia
Prussia: born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst in Stettin, now Szczecin in Poland, she seized the Russian throne in a 1762 coup against her husband.
Q 22Catherine the Great founded the Hermitage in 1764 by buying paintings from a merchant in which city?
Berlin
Berlin: merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky had gathered the paintings for Frederick the Great, who stopped buying during the Seven Years' War.
Q 23Which Soviet space hero died in a 1968 plane crash, seven years after his famous flight?
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin: at the end of his officially 108-minute flight, he ejected from his capsule and came down separately by parachute.
An exploding space rock: it blew up several kilometres above the ground rather than hitting it, which is why no impact crater was ever found.
Q 14Which video game did Soviet engineer Alexey Pajitnov create in Moscow in the mid-1980s?
Tetris
Tetris earned Alexey Pajitnov nothing for years: as an employee of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he received no royalties until 1996.
Q 15Which Soviet dog became the first animal to orbit Earth, aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957?
Laika
Laika died of overheating within hours, but the story that she had survived for days in orbit held until the truth came out in 2002.
Q 16Which village in the Sakha Republic is often called the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth?
Oymyakon
Oymyakon has a monument in its square boasting of −71.2 °C, a reading that was never officially recognised.
Q 17Which tsar ordered St Basil's Cathedral built to celebrate capturing Kazan and Astrakhan?
Ivan the Terrible
Ivan the Terrible, legend says, blinded the architect so he could never repeat the design, but records show the builder kept working afterwards.
Q 18Which composer's Seventh Symphony was performed in besieged Leningrad and broadcast by loudspeaker to the German lines?
Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich: New York heard the symphony before Leningrad did, when the NBC Symphony Orchestra played it there in July 1942.
Q 19Peter the Great founded Saint Petersburg on the site of a fortress captured from which country?
Sweden
Sweden: Peter was fighting the Great Northern War to break Sweden's grip on the Baltic, and he later made his new city Russia's capital.
Q 20Peter the Great made men pay an annual tax for refusing to give up what?
Their beards
Their beards: Peter brought the tax in during 1698, after touring Western Europe, and men who paid it carried a token as proof.
Q 24Which Russian novelist was led out to be shot in 1849, only to be reprieved at the last moment?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky: the tsar's reprieve arrived as the prisoners waited, and he was sent to a Siberian prison camp for four years instead.
Q 25Architects from which country built the Moscow Kremlin's current walls and towers?
Italy
Italy: builders such as Pietro Antonio Solari took their lead from castles back home, including Milan's Castello Sforzesco.
Q 26Which tsar commissioned the first imperial Fabergé Easter egg, the Hen Egg, in 1885?
Alexander III
Alexander III gave it to his wife as an Easter surprise, and his son Nicholas II kept the tradition going for both his mother and his wife.
Q 27On which night does Ded Moroz, Russia's Grandfather Frost, traditionally bring children their presents?
New Year's Eve
New Year's Eve: early Soviet authorities denounced Christmas figures, so Ded Moroz and the fir tree were recast around a secular New Year festival.
Q 28Which town in Vologda Oblast is regarded as the official home of Ded Moroz?
Veliky Ustyug
Veliky Ustyug has Ded Moroz's own post office, where letters to him get answers, and his 'residence' draws tourists, especially in winter.
Q 29In which city were Nicholas II and his family shot in the basement of the Ipatiev House in July 1918?
Yekaterinburg
Yekaterinburg: in 1977 local party boss Boris Yeltsin had the Ipatiev House demolished on Politburo orders, to stop it becoming a shrine.
Q 30Stalin's grand Moscow Metro stations were meant to serve as underground what for the people?
Palaces
Palaces: when German bombs fell on Moscow in 1941, the stations became air-raid shelters where Muscovites took refuge.