(Created by Sergey P., Svetlana M. and Anya B. Form 11. Tarkhanovo Secondary School)
Mordovia was organized on the 10th of January, 1930, as an independent district and transformed in autonomous republic on the 20th of December, 1934. Since 1991 it is called the Mordovian Soviet Republic, since 1993 – the Republic of Mordovia. Now-a-days it is the member of Volgo-Vyatsky economic district and Privolzhsky Federal Region.
The highest public servant in Mordovia is the Head of the Republic; the highest legislative unit is the State Assembly of the Republic.
Republic of Mordovia is situated in the east of Eastern European plain and covers the territory of 26, 2 thousands square kilometers. It spreads from the Ryazan country in the west to the Chuvash lands in the east, and from Nizhny Novgorod Region in the north to the Ulyanovsk and Penza country in the south.
Since ancient times this area between the Volga, Oka, Sura and Moksha rivers has been inhabited by the industrious, warm-hearted Mordovian people whose language belongs to the Finno-Ugric family. The first mention of the Mordovians in written sources relates to the 6th century. The Mordovians are divided into main two linguistic groups – the Mordva-erzya and Mordva-moksha, each with its own literary language.
The population of Mordovia (by the data of the 1st of June, 2004) is 876,100 people and 432,100 of inhabitants are active. The state languages are Mordovian (moksha, erzya) and Russian, and the third part of people speaks only Mordovian. Predominate religion in republic is the Orthodox Christianity.
The republic is the industrial and agricultural region and keeps the steady positions in Russia and in international market by producing the power transistorized techniques, electronics, excavators, rubber-elastic techniques, medical preparations, light sources, railway carriages and half-carriages. The large Mordovian forests are the raw base for wood manufacturing industry. Agricultural sector in Mordovia is specialized on producing of corn, potatoes, sugar beet, vegetables, and also in the main kinds of stock-breeding.
Mordovian nature is various; there are deep thick forests, partially wooded steppe, marshes and sands, rivers and lakes, chalk mountains and black earths. The natural plant cover is mostly needle and broad deciduous forests. More than a thousand kinds of plants is counted in Mordovian flora. Also here you can find more than 200 kinds of birds and near 60 kinds of mammals.
Mordovia is the real ecologically clean corner of the Earth, there are a lot of beautiful and picturesque places. It is rich in green meadows boundless farm fields; there are clear, placid streams and lakes, thick oak woods alive with the chatter of birds and dotted with sunny clearings, groves and orchards that are in white bloom in spring. Children come here to rest with great pleasure. In the republic there are a great number of different sanitary camps, medicinal sanitary centers and sanatoriums.
The republic is very famous by its sportsmen, especially in such kinds of sport as sport walk, light athletics, Greek-roman wrestling, power-lifting, speedway. In 2004 the wrestler Aleksey Mishin firstly became the golden prizewinner of the Olympic Games in Athens. Now-a-days more than 500 kids are seriously trained in sport walk, and the group of the strongest fast runners of the Olympic training center obtained the great superiority between all the rivals in last 5 years. Denis Nizhegorodov’s silver medal and Aleksey Voevodin’s bronze medal that were brought from Athens in 2004 became the best evidence of good training and exposure of Mordovian walkers.
The great specialty of Mordovia is the fact that the population here includes some nationalities that have their own cultural roots, their specific cultural past and present and their individual way of evolution. But their combined living in peace and good neighbourhood on the common territory naturally affected on mutual enrichment of their cultural traditions that let them create the united cultural background for the whole republic.
Mordovia has well-developed infrastructure of cultural and artistic establishments, in which are the great number of theatrical and concert foundings, museums, libraries, palaces of culture, leisure-centers, musical schools, art houses and art-schools. The broad net of leisure-cultural centers not only helps in esthetic education of children and teenagers but also cares of training the future professionals. Thanks to the high professional and spiritual potentiality of our creative intelligent level the cultural life of Mordovian people is very rich and various. Saving and increasing of cultural heritage is the main task for today because of having the great national importance for Mordovian land.
Dozens of thousands of men and women with a specialized secondary or higher education are now employed in the republic’s economy.
One in every 5 Mordovians is studying. There are more than 1200 general education schools with a teaching stuff of about 14,000.
The State University in Saransk has a student body of more than 19,000. We also have a teachers’ training college. 30 trade and professional schools train skilled workers, teachers and medical nurses.
Our educational establishment and research institutes have 16 Doctors of Science degrees and more than 300 with candidate Degrees.
Mordovia is noted for its singers and dancers, painters and sculptors.
According to the data of the leading Russian rating agency “Expert RA”, on the degree of political risk Mordovia occupies the 3rd place in the Russian Federation, and according to criminal situation evaluation it gets into the ten of the most favourable regions of Russia. According to the data of Rating Centre AK&M, presently our Republic occupies the 21st place in the rating of solvency of the Russian Federation constituent entities.
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