Russian Climate: Winter

What comes first to your mind when you think about Russian winter? Tons of snow, bears walking around, cold and temperature always around -40? I can't say you are completely wrong, but we definitely don't have bears walking on the street.

In order to understand Russian winter or summer, you need to open Google maps or Wikipedia and look at the massive size of the country. We have the Central or European part of Russia that is located until the Ural mountains. Ural mountains are a natural boundary between Europe and Asia. Moving to the centre of the country on the map, we have West and Central Siberia. It's not all forest, we actually have large cities there too. Moving to the right, there are Northeast Siberia and Kamchatka. It is close to Japan, Korea and China. South of Russia is located in the European part, 1000 km down from Moscow.

Here is a Köppen climate types of Russia. You don't have an expert to notice that the top of the European part, Central, Northeast Siberia are mostly cold regions (during winter). European part is mostly warm, with a little bit cold winter, but hot summer. Some parts if the Northeast of Siberia and Kamchatka have similar climate to the European part.

All this information is useful when you look at the map that has biggest cities on it. Cities are mostly located in the part of regions that have best climate: in the European part, in Siberia mostly near the border and others the Northeast where the climate ressembles to the one in Central Russia. It does make sense, right? But don't think, there are no towns or cities around the mentioned cities. There are, but they are pretty small.

Winter in Russia is different, depending on where you are, as you have already understood. Of course, Siberia is certainly the coldest part that gets a lot of snow every year (-10 to -40 degrees C). In European part it snows, but it doesn't get that cold (0 to -20 degrees). In the South of Russia it doesn't snow that often and winter is like in most European cities (0 to -5 degrees).

What's interesting about our winter is that for some reason December and January are not the coldest month. It's actually in February or in the end of January it starts to snow heavily in all the country and it goes down to -50 in Siberia. In the South and European part, March is often a month of snow and rain - last cold before the spring comes.

Best month to go to Russia during the winter are December or January. Or you can wait until it gets really warm in May :)

P.S. I'm not an expert, all what was written is based on my knowledge and experience.