Of the 16 Russian cities with over 1 million inhabitants, 12 lie within European Russia: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Voronezh, Perm and Volgograd (the remaining four are Yekaterinburg, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk).

The historical population of European Russia was composed of Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Germanic, Turkic, Jewish, Scythian, North Caucasian, Hunnic and Baltic peoples.

[6][7] Some theories say that some early Eastern Slavs arrived in modern-day western Russia (also in Ukraine and Belarus) sometime during the middle of the first millennium AD.

From the late 9th to the mid-13th century a large section of today's European Russia was part of Kievan Rus'.

[10] The elements of East Slavic paganism and Christianity overlapped each other and sometimes produced even double faith in Muscovite Rus'.