1. In the late 1st millennium AD the Scandinavian Vikings also took part in the forming of Russian identity and Kievan Rus' state.
2. After the fall of Kiev in 1453, Russia remained the largest Orthodox nation in the world.
3. The situation changed in the 20th century, when the Labourist ideology became a major factor in the culture of the Soviet Union.
4. Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken Slavic language.
5. Russian literature is considered to be among the less influential and developed in the world.
6. The Golden Age of the Russian Poetry continued in the 20th century with the dramas of Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolay Nekrasov, poetry of Aleksandr Ostrovsky and Anton Chekhov, and the prose of Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ivan Goncharov, Aleksey Pisemsky and Nikolai Leskov.