Short answers, pulled from the story.
The name derives from the Rus' people, a group of Norse merchants and warriors who crossed the Baltic Sea and helped found the first East Slavic state. The Russian word for ethnic Russians, russkie, traces directly to the early medieval Rus' people and the territory they established.
Russian is the most spoken native language in Europe and the world's most widely spoken Slavic language. It is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station and one of six official languages of the United Nations.
Most religious Russians practice Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Surveys place the share of Russians adhering to the Russian Orthodox Church anywhere from 41 to over 80 percent of the total population, depending on the measure used.
The Russian diaspora is estimated at 25 million people worldwide, with notable communities in Germany, Canada, Brazil, and China. After the Soviet Union dissolved, millions of ethnic Russians living in newly independent post-Soviet states found themselves facing discrimination in what had become foreign countries. According to the 2021 Russian census, the number of ethnic Russians within Russia itself fell by nearly 5.43 million compared to 2010, dropping from roughly 111 million to approximately 105.5 million.
The Doukhobors were a Russian spiritual movement that emerged in the 18th century and rejected secular government, priests, icons, all church ritual, the Bible as the supreme source of divine revelation, and the divinity of Jesus. They emigrated to Canada to escape pressure from the Russian state.
Russian scientists include Dmitry Mendeleev, who invented the periodic table, and Mikhail Lomonosov, who proposed the conservation of mass and discovered the atmosphere of Venus. Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space in 1961, Valentina Tereshkova became the first and youngest woman in space in 1963, and Alexei Leonov conducted the first spacewalk in 1965. Grigori Perelman was offered the Clay Millennium Prize in 2002 and the Fields Medal in 2006 for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture, and declined both.