The I'm gonnae. ...you know ... Russia.

It's a country bigger than three continents, a mass of resources difficult to comprehend,

a theater of glory that few have seen the edges of, and so it seems a dark place.

It has the feel of the unknown about it, a fairy tale place stuck in a different time and world,

where immeasurable wildernesses are interrupted only by the odd settlement

here and there those settlements could range from a few ramshackle houses to concrete ruins left

over from a checkered past and even to colorful castles that inspire whimsy in awe to dream world an

ocean of unknowns painted green and brown and gray. It is a rope

tugged between the two poles of Europe and Asia, the great west and the farthest east, and the

strain of this tug of war has left its marks on the land. Tossing here and there between pagan history

and Christian settlement and godless communist uprising

has beaten the country to a pulp time and time again, leaving it bloodied in the face and bleeding from the vitals.

Yet it remains. It lingers on, sometimes confusedly, dancing its dance of orthodoxy and dealing still with the rampant sin that few have

been immune to in this modern age. Even its modernity shows signs of its incompleteness,

for that is what Russia really feels like, somehow incomplete, unfinished, waiting.

The Metropolitan Titans of Moscow and St. Petersburg shine with lights as bright as any major center of modern human development in our day.

But bright as they may be, they cannot hide the shadow that covers the land's bulk.

Again, it is like a fairy world caught between what modern man wants to make of it and what it actually is, what it perhaps used to be.

And despite its true and glorious history, its courageous stands against the onset of Islam,

its conquering of the Mongol horde by the Christian Tsar, its tragic fight to the death and the first great war to end all wars.

The thing it is perhaps most known for is a thing it did not really consent to at all.

At least, not its common man.

...