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Russia is a federation, and the parts it is a federation of are not all the same kind of thing: republics with their own languages, oblasts named after a city, territories called krais, autonomous okrugs inside other regions, and two cities that are regions in their own right. The name of one is written on the boundary sign of every road that crosses into it, and on the licence plate of most of the cars driving out. This page is the whole set, grouped the way the country groups them, and the game asks you to put each name where it belongs.
The collective word is federal subject, in Russian subyekt federatsii, and every one of them sits at the same level of government whatever it is called. The label attached to a name tells you its history rather than its powers:
Above the subjects, and not a layer of government so much as a way of organizing the ones below, sit the eight federal districts. They are what this game groups by, and they are the frame Russians themselves use when talking about the country at that scale.
The names are worth learning in Cyrillic as well as in English, because Cyrillic is what the boundary sign says. Turn on the local name in the start dialog and Tver becomes Тверская область, Tatarstan becomes Республика Татарстан, and Krasnodar becomes Краснодарский край. Three word endings do most of the work of reading one: -ская область is an oblast, -ский край is a krai, and Республика in front of a name is a republic.
The traps are almost all names rather than shapes. Novgorod is in the northwest and Nizhny Novgorod is 900km east of it on the Volga, and they are different places. Rostov Oblast is on the Sea of Azov, while the town of Rostov the Great is in Yaroslavl Oblast. There are two Altais side by side in southern Siberia, the Altai Republic in the mountains and Altai Krai on the plain to the northwest. Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan run west to east along the Caucasus in that order, and the first three are small enough that the order is the only thing that will save you.
Chukotka crosses the antimeridian, so the far northeast of the map is drawn past 180 degrees east rather than wrapped round to the other side of the world. It is a real region in its real place, not an inset.
Those are the eight federal districts, and they can be switched on and off individually in the game's start dialog, which makes the Ural district a short drill and the Central one a real sitting. One recent change is worth knowing: Buryatia and Zabaykalsky Krai moved from the Siberian district to the Far Eastern one in 2018, which is why the Far Eastern district now reaches all the way to Lake Baikal.
Three million square kilometres, a fifth of Russia, and larger than any other first level division anywhere. It fills the northeast: the Lena runs through it to the Arctic, Yakutsk is its capital, and it is the coldest inhabited place on the planet. If a Siberian region on the map looks too big to be one region, this is it.
The exclave on the Baltic between Poland and Lithuania, with no land border with the rest of the country. It was the northern half of East Prussia until 1945 and the city was Königsberg, which is why it looks nothing like the rest of Russia from the road and why it is the easiest region in the game to recognize in a photograph.
The oblast that surrounds the capital without including it. Moscow is a federal subject of its own and a hole in this one, so a click meant for the oblast has to land outside the ring road and a click meant for the city has to land inside it. On this map the city is about two pixels across with the whole country in view, which is why it is drawn with a click target a little wider than it is.
The only autonomous oblast left in Russia, on the Chinese border west of Khabarovsk, established in 1934 as a Jewish national homeland. Yiddish is still a co-official language and appears on the railway station sign in Birobidzhan, which makes it one of the few regions identifiable from a single photograph of a piece of text.
This game covers 83 federal subjects: 46 oblasts, 21 republics, nine krais, four autonomous okrugs, one autonomous oblast and the two federal cities of Moscow and St Petersburg. Russia also claims Crimea and Sevastopol as subjects; they are internationally recognized as Ukrainian and are not in this quiz, which follows the ISO 3166-2:RU list.
Very little in practice, and all three sit at the same level of government. An oblast is an ordinary region, usually named after its capital city. A krai is a territory, a title left over from when these were frontier lands, and it is administered the same way an oblast is. A republic is built around a titular non-Russian people and is the only one of the three that can make a second language official alongside Russian.
Eight groupings the federal subjects are organized into: Central, Northwestern, Southern, North Caucasian, Volga, Ural, Siberian and Far Eastern. They were created in 2000 and are an administrative layer for the federal government rather than a level of self government, but they are how Russians describe the country at that scale, and they are how this game groups the map. Buryatia and Zabaykalsky Krai moved from the Siberian district to the Far Eastern one in 2018.
Three endings cover most of them. A name ending in -ская область is an oblast, so Тверская область is Tver Oblast. A name ending in -ский край is a krai, so Краснодарский край is Krasnodar Krai. A name starting with Республика is a republic, so Республика Татарстан is Tatarstan. The autonomous okrugs end in автономный округ. The game can ask in either English or Russian, so you can practise the form you expect to read.
Novgorod in the northwest against Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga, which are 900km apart. The Altai Republic against Altai Krai, which are neighbours in southern Siberia. The four small Caucasus republics, which run North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Dagestan from west to east. And Moscow against Moscow Oblast, and St Petersburg against Leningrad Oblast, where the city and the region around it are separate answers.
The licence plate is the fastest way: the number on the right hand panel is a region code, and each code belongs to exactly one federal subject. After that, the boundary sign on the road, which names the region you are entering in Cyrillic, and official signage on public buildings. Knowing where each name goes turns any of those from a lookup into an instant guess.
The other very large countries in the same shape: Canada Dialing Codes and US Dialing Codes. More European administrative maps: Germany States, Poland Voivodeships and Germany Districts. More Asian ones: India States, Japan Prefectures and Thailand Provinces.
