ABSTRACT
Most of Russia has an extreme continental climate, with long, cold winters and short, warm summers. The remarkable uniformity of relief over much of the Soviet Union is reflected, as in climatic distribution, by the broad latitudinal belts of soil and vegetation types. The grasslands which extend across Southern European Russia, Southern Siberia, and in isolated patches into the Baykal lands, form a transition from forest to desert. Between the tayga and the grasslands lies a wedge of mixed forest in which broad-leaved trees predominate in the south. Broad-leaved forests of the Far East grow on varied soils. As the continuous forest cover thins and becomes more open, the traveller passes into the wooded steppe, with either patches of woodland or trees standing apart like parkland, while ' gallery forest' is also found in some places. Steppe climate is transitional between the forest and the desert.
