General Overview

Russia is the one of the biggest countries in the world. As the territory of the country is very large, many regions of Russia have great stocks of minerals and natural resources that help to build the economy of the country.
Russia is one of the world’s richest countries in natural resources, raw materials and minerals. It contains the greatest reserves of mineral resources of any country in the world. It is self-sufficient in nearly every major industrial raw material and has at least some reserves of every valuable non-fuel mineral, even after the productive mines of Ukraine, Kazakstan, and Uzbekistan are no longer directly accessible.
Russia possesses rich reserves of iron ore, manganese, chromium, nickel, platinum, titanium, copper, tin, lead, tungsten, diamonds, phosphates, and gold, and the forests of Siberia contain an estimated one-fifth of the world’s timber, mainly conifers. Tin, tungsten, bauxite, and mercury were among the few natural materials imported in the Soviet period. Oil and gas were primary hard-currency earners for the Soviet Union, and they remain so for the Russian Federation.
Traditionally, the European part of Russia has been more economically developed than Siberia, Russian Far East and the Northern regions of the country. Prior to the 1950s, exploitation of natural resources in Siberia and Far East had been largely limited by unfavorable location and inaccessibility by conventional modes of transportation. At that time, the European part of Russia had considerable stocks of coal and natural gas. But the European fuel base was largely depleted by the 1980s. This forces modern Russia to rely more on Siberian deposits explored quite far from the central part of the country.
Although minerals are abundant, many are in remote areas with extreme climate conditions, which makes them expensive to extract. Nevertheless, all of these make a solid input to the economy of the country.

Non-ferrous Metals

Russia is rich with non-ferrous metals.
Russia has some of the world’s largest gold reserves, primarily in Siberia and the Urals. There are mercury deposits in the northeastern part of Russia. Large asbestos deposits are in the central and southern Urals and central part of Siberia.
The aluminum ores are found primarily in the Urals, northwestern part of the European Russia and south of Siberia.
The largest copper deposits are located in the Kola Peninsula and the Urals. Reserves are also found in the Norilsk city area near the mouth of the Yenisey River. A large deposit east of Lake Baikal became commercially exploitable when the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) railroad was completed in 1989.
Lead and zinc ores are found in the North Ossetia, Northern Caucasus, Russian Far East and the western part of the Kuznetsk Basin in southern Siberia. These ores are commonly found with copper, gold, silver, and a variety of rare metals.

Mineral Fuel

Russia is especially rich in mineral fuels. The country holds about a half of the estimated world’s coal reserves and may hold larger reserves of petroleum than any other nation. Russia holds about 40 percent of the world’s reserves of the natural gas.
Coal deposits are widely scattered throughout the country. The largest fields lie in central and eastern Siberia, but the most developed fields are in western Siberia, the northeastern European region, the area around Moscow and the Urals.
The main natural gas deposits are located along the Arctic Coast of Siberia, in the North Caucasus region and in the North-West of Russia.
The major oil deposits are in western Siberia and the Volga and Ural Mountains region. Smaller deposits are found in many other parts of the country.
So, Russia accounts for around 20 percent of the world’s production of oil and natural gas and possesses large reserves of both fuels. This abundance has made Russia virtually self-sufficient in energy and a large-scale exporter of fuels.

Iron Ore

The primary iron ore deposits are found south of Moscow and close to the Ukrainian border in the area known as the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly. Smaller iron ore deposits are scattered throughout the country. For example, large iron ore deposits are located in the Kola Peninsula, Karelia, south and central parts of Siberia and the Far East.
The iron ore deposits of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, close to the Ukrainian border in the southwest, are believed to contain one-sixth of the world’s total reserves. The region of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly is very famous, because vast deposits of iron ore have caused a deviation in the Earth’s magnetic field. Intensive exploitation began there in the 1950s.

Other Raw Materials

The other minerals and raw materials found in Russia include potassium and magnesium salt deposits in the Kama River district, Western Urals.
Some of the world’s largest deposits of apatite lay in the central Kola Peninsula while other types of phosphate ores are found in different parts of the country. Common rock salt is found in the southwestern Urals and southwest of Lake Baikal.
Surface deposits of salt are derived from salt lakes along the lower Volga Valley. Sulphur is found in the Urals and the middle Volga Valley.
High-grade limestone, used for the production of cement, is found in many parts of the country, but particularly near Belgorod near the border with Ukraine, and in the Zhiguli Hills area of the middle Volga Valley.
The Ural Mountains contain minor deposits of manganese. Other important iron alloys such as nickel, tungsten, cobalt, and molybdenum occur in adequate or even abundant quantities.

Management of Natural Resources

Unfortunately, today Russia is the state that lives off the extraction and sale of its oil, gas, metals and other natural resources. Lack of international competitiveness of the other goods led to the larger exploitation and export of the natural resources. Military hardware has to be upgraded, industries are down, business competitiveness is decreasing. In these conditions raw materials are Russia’s only niche in the world economy. What’s more, gas, oil and metals are exported overseas raw, without any processing adding to their value.
However this actually does not bring much profit to the country’s budget and does not help to improve the living standards of the citizens.
In Russia, many ordinary people believe that “the natural rent” is distributed unfairly. In their view, the rent is taken by handful of oligarchs, who bought up natural resource companies in the early 1990s and the extensive government bureaucracy that remained in place after the fall of the Soviet state and expanded by nearly 15% as the overall population falls. This is why attacks on oligarchs and public servants are so popular.
Oligarchs — Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Gusinsky and others — managed to take advantage in the early years of reforms, cheap government loans and bought up resource companies for a fraction of their actual worth. The companies dealing with the exploitation and export of natural resources were partly privatized.
Modern tendencies of natural resources management are varied. From the one hand, with the December parliamentary election and the presidential vote scheduled for next March, arresting a highly visible oligarch and stripping him of his oil company plays well with the Russian public.
On the other hand, pretending to be a country with a free market economy protecting private property, Russia should get rid of the Soviet methods of hard management. Vladimir Putin sought to reassure other oligarchs, domestic public opinion and Western investors by stating that the early 1990s privatization will not be rolled back. This is probably true. On the other hand, it now seems a foregone conclusion that oil, metals and other natural resources will be re-nationalized in the coming years - just as YUKOS company owned by Khodorkovsky suffered a de-facto nationalization.
Management of natural resources use is considered very poor in Russia. According to some estimates, if the situation continues, Russian oil and gas deposits will exhausted by the middle of XXI century. Presently nothing is done by the government to change the way natural resources are used, as they are hard currency earners that make a solid input to the country’s budget.

More information at:

http://www.priroda.ru
http://www.russiansabroad.com/russian_history_200.html
http://www.gateway2russia.com/st/art_162502.php

Evgeniya Stroganova