50 free Russia trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Russia spans how many time zones?
Eleven
When the sun is setting in Kaliningrad, it is already the next morning in Kamchatka. Russia also covers more than an eighth of the world's inhabited land.
Q 02Which mountain range is traditionally taken as the boundary between European and Asian Russia?
Ural Mountains
About three-quarters of Russians live west of the range even though most of the country's land lies east of it.
Q 03At 5,642 metres, which peak is the highest point in both Russia and Europe?
Mount Elbrus
It is a dormant volcano in the Caucasus with two summits, and it beats Mont Blanc by more than 800 metres.
Q 04Which river is the longest in Europe?
Volga
Eleven of Russia's twenty largest cities sit in its basin, and it drains into the world's largest inland body of water.
Q 05What is the maximum depth of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world?
1,642 m
It holds roughly 22-23% of the planet's fresh surface water, more than all the North American Great Lakes combined, and at 25-30 million years old it is also the oldest lake.
Q 06What is the nerpa, an animal found only in Lake Baikal?
A freshwater seal
Nobody is sure how a seal ended up in a lake thousands of kilometres from any ocean. Baikal became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.
Q 07Which Russian territory on the Baltic coast has no land connection to the rest of the country?
Kaliningrad
Formerly the German city of Königsberg, it was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945 and now sits wedged between Poland and Lithuania.
Q 08Klyuchevskaya Sopka, Russia's tallest active volcano at 4,750 metres, stands on which peninsula?
Kamchatka
The peninsula is home to dozens of active volcanoes and one of the world's densest populations of brown bears.
Q 09How long is the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok?
9,289 km
Construction started in 1891 and the through route opened in 1904. It remains the longest railway line in the world.
Q 10How much did the United States pay Russia for Alaska in 1867?
$7.2 million
That worked out to about two cents an acre. Critics called it 'Seward's Folly' after the Secretary of State who negotiated it, though most newspapers actually supported the deal.
Q 11At which world's fair did Russian matryoshka nesting dolls win a bronze medal and first gain attention?
Paris 1900
The first set was turned in the 1890s by Vasily Zvyozdochkin to a design by Sergey Malyutin. The name is a diminutive of Matryona.
Q 12How deep is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest hole humans have ever drilled?
12,262 m
Drilling began in 1970 near the Norwegian border and stopped in 1992 when temperatures hit 180 °C. The hole is only 23 centimetres wide.
Q 13In which year did the Tunguska explosion flatten some 2,150 square kilometres of Siberian forest?
1908
It is the largest impact event in recorded history, yet no crater was ever found. The first scientific expedition, led by Leonid Kulik, did not reach the site until 1927.
Q 21Catherine the Great, Russia's longest-reigning empress, was born in which country?
Prussia
Born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst in Stettin, she arrived in Russia at 15, married the future Peter III and deposed him in a 1762 coup. She annexed Crimea in 1783.
Q 22Catherine the Great founded the Hermitage in 1764 by buying paintings from a merchant in which city?
Berlin
Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky's paintings became the seed of a collection now topping three million items. The museum also keeps a resident population of cats.
Q 23How long did Yuri Gagarin's single orbit of Earth aboard Vostok 1 last on 12 April 1961?
108 minutes
He was 1.57 metres tall, handy for the cramped capsule. He died in a MiG-15 training crash in 1968, and April 12 is now Cosmonautics Day.
Q 14Which video game did Soviet engineer Alexey Pajitnov create in Moscow in the mid-1980s?
Tetris
He wrote it in about three weeks on an Elektronika 60. Nintendo bundled it with the Game Boy in 1989 and that version alone sold 35 million copies.
Q 15Alexey Pajitnov's falling-blocks game takes its name from 'tetra' plus which sport?
Tennis
Tetra for the four squares in every piece, and the sport because it was the creator's favourite. He saw no royalties until his rights reverted at the end of 1995.
Q 16Which village in the Sakha Republic is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth?
Oymyakon
Its weather station recorded -67.7 °C in February 1933. Schools close only when it drops below -55 °C.
Q 17Which tsar ordered St Basil's Cathedral built to celebrate capturing Kazan and Astrakhan?
Ivan the Terrible
Legend says he blinded the architect so the design could never be repeated, though the architects went on working afterwards. The building has been a museum since 1928.
Q 18How many days did the German siege of Leningrad last, from September 1941 to January 1944?
872
An estimated 1.5 million people died. Supplies came in across frozen Lake Ladoga on the 'Road of Life'.
Q 19In which year did Peter the Great found the city of Saint Petersburg on Hare Island?
1703
He moved the capital there from Moscow in 1712 and it stayed the capital until 1918. Peter himself stood around 2.03 metres tall.
Q 20Peter the Great imposed an annual tax of one hundred rubles on noblemen who refused to give up what?
Their beards
It was part of his campaign to Westernise the boyars after his incognito Grand Embassy tour of Europe, where he spent four months working in a Dutch shipyard.
Q 24How many letters are in the modern Russian alphabet?
33
Two of them, the hard sign and soft sign, have no sound of their own. The last major reform trimmed the alphabet in 1917-18.
Q 25Architects from which country built the current Moscow Kremlin walls and towers (1485-95)?
Italy
The red brick walls enclose about 27.7 hectares. The Kremlin's Tsar Bell, the largest in the world, has never been rung, and the Tsar Cannon has never been fired.
Q 26In what year were the illuminated red stars placed on top of the Kremlin towers?
1937
The Kremlin has twenty towers, and the star-topped Spasskaya Tower carries the clock whose chimes ring in the Russian New Year.
Q 27Which tsar commissioned the first Fabergé Easter egg, the Hen Egg, in 1885?
Alexander III
He gave it to his wife Maria Feodorovna. Fifty imperial eggs were made before the 1917 revolution stopped production; 44 survive in whole or part.
Q 28On which night does Ded Moroz, Russia's Grandfather Frost, deliver presents?
New Year's Eve
He is helped by his granddaughter Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, wears a heel-length coat in red or blue and rides a troika.
Q 29Which town in Vologda Oblast is regarded as the official home of Ded Moroz?
Veliky Ustyug
Children write to him there much as Western children write to Santa at the North Pole.
Q 30In which city were Nicholas II and his family shot in the basement of the Ipatiev House in July 1918?
Yekaterinburg
Their remains were located in a forest in 1979 and formally exhumed in 1991. The Russian Orthodox Church canonised the family in 2000.