If you look at a standard wall map in a classroom, you'd think Russia is a monster that could swallow whole continents without breaking a sweat. It looks bigger than Africa. It looks like it takes up half the planet. Honestly, maps are kinda liars. Because of something called the Mercator projection, things near the poles get stretched out like taffy, making northern countries look way more massive than they actually are.
But here’s the thing: even when you strip away the map distortions and look at the raw, hard numbers, the largest country by land mass is still Russia.
It isn't even a close race. Russia is so big it’s basically in a league of its own, covering over 16.3 million square kilometers of actual land. To put that into perspective, you could fit the entire United States into Russia... twice. Well, almost. You’d have a little bit of Russia left over, maybe a space the size of Mexico.
The Massive Gap Between First and Second Place
When we talk about the largest country by land mass, people often get confused between "total area" and "land area." Total area includes all the lakes, reservoirs, and rivers. Land area is just the dirt, rocks, and trees.
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If you look at total area, Canada usually takes the silver medal. But Canada is basically the land of a million lakes. If you drain all that water and just measure the land, China actually jumps ahead of Canada. It’s a weird quirk of geography that most people miss. Russia, however, stays at the top of the podium no matter how you measure it. It accounts for about 11% of the entire world's landmass.
Think about that. One out of every nine acres of dry land on Earth is Russian.
Russia spans eleven different time zones. When someone is eating breakfast in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, someone else is probably getting ready for bed in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on the Pacific coast. It’s a 9,000-kilometer trek from one side to the other. If you decided to walk it, you’d be walking for a very, very long time.
Why is Russia the Largest Country by Land Mass?
It wasn't always this way. In the 1400s, the Grand Duchy of Moscow was actually pretty small. It was surrounded by powerful rivals and dealt with the remnants of the Mongol Empire. So how did it explode into this giant?
The Push East
Basically, it comes down to the "Wild East." While Europeans were sailing across the Atlantic to find the Americas, Russian explorers and fur traders were pushing East into Siberia.
Siberia is the reason Russia is the largest country by land mass today. It is a staggering 13 million square kilometers on its own. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Cossack explorers like Yermak Timofeyevich moved across the Ural Mountains. They weren't looking for gold as much as they were looking for "soft gold"—sable fur.
The expansion was incredibly fast. They reached the Pacific Ocean in less than 60 years. Because the area was so sparsely populated and the climate was so brutal, there wasn't a centralized empire to stop them. They just kept building forts (ostrog) further and further east until they ran out of land.
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The Geography of the Steppe
Unlike Europe, which is crisscrossed by mountain ranges that create natural borders, much of Russia is flat. The Great European Plain flows right into the West Siberian Plain. Without big mountains to act as walls, borders in this part of the world tended to move a lot. Russian rulers, from Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great, felt that the only way to be safe was to keep pushing the borders further out.
The Top 5 Land Giants (The Real Rankings)
If we're looking strictly at land area (excluding internal waters), the leaderboard looks a bit different than what you might remember from geography class. According to data from the UN Statistics Division and the CIA World Factbook, here is how the top players stack up:
- Russia: Approximately 16,376,870 sq km. The undisputed heavyweight.
- China: Roughly 9,388,211 sq km. China is massive, but it has much less internal water than its neighbors to the north and east.
- United States: About 9,147,420 sq km. This includes the 48 contiguous states plus Alaska and Hawaii.
- Canada: Around 9,093,510 sq km. This is where people get tripped up. Canada is the second-largest country by total area, but because it has so much water, it drops to fourth in pure land mass.
- Brazil: 8,358,140 sq km. Brazil is the giant of the Southern Hemisphere, and almost all of its territory is contiguous land.
It’s interesting to note that the gap between Russia and China (the #1 and #2 spots) is nearly 7 million square kilometers. That gap alone is larger than the entire country of Australia.
The Problems with Being the Largest
You’d think having all that land would be a dream. And sure, it means Russia has a ridiculous amount of natural resources—oil, gas, timber, and enough minerals to last centuries. But being the largest country by land mass is actually a logistical nightmare.
Most of that land is "taiga" (boreal forest) or "tundra" (frozen wasteland). Building a road across Siberia is nearly impossible because of permafrost. In the summer, the top layer of ground thaws into a muddy swamp, but the ground underneath stays frozen solid. This "active layer" expands and contracts, which literally snaps roads and pipelines like toothpicks.
Then there's the population problem. Russia is huge, but it's empty. About 75% of the population lives in the European part of the country, which makes up only about 25% of the land. Once you cross the Ural Mountains, the population density drops off a cliff. There are parts of Siberia where you could fly for hours and not see a single soul or a single light at night.
How Map Projections Mess with Your Head
We have to talk about the Mercator projection again because it really does warp our perception of the largest country by land mass.
Gerardus Mercator created this map in 1569. He wasn't trying to make some countries look more important than others; he was trying to help sailors navigate. On a Mercator map, a straight line is a line of constant bearing. That's great for a ship captain in the 16th century. It’s terrible for showing the actual size of things.
If you take Russia on a digital map tool (like The True Size Of) and drag it down to the equator, it shrinks. It’s still big—bigger than Brazil—but it no longer looks like it’s going to eat the world. Similarly, Greenland looks the same size as Africa on a standard map, but Africa is actually 14 times larger.
What You Should Actually Remember
When you're looking at the world, size is a bit of a shell game. Russia is the largest country by land mass, and that won't change anytime soon. But that size comes with strings attached. It’s a land of extremes where most of the territory is too cold or too remote to easily live in.
If you want to get a real sense of how these countries compare, stop looking at the rectangular maps in your office. Find a globe. Or better yet, look at an equal-area projection like the Gall-Peters or the Mollweide. They look "squashed" and weird at first because we aren't used to them, but they show the land for what it really is.
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Next Steps for Geography Nerds
Check out the "True Size Of" interactive tool online. Drag Russia over Africa or the US. It is the fastest way to un-learn the bad geography habits we all picked up in elementary school. You can also look up the "Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line," which was the historical goal for many invaders who realized that conquering the world's largest country was a physical impossibility.