(It's definitely an acquired taste, and I haven't acquired it yet!)
Despite all of their challenges, Russians have spent over a thousand years adapting to their environment. Russians compensate for the cold outside with big jackets, snow boots and intense heating in all of their buildings. They learned to utilize waterways for trade and migrations and overcame the Ural mountains to migrate east. They compensate for the short growing season by pickling their foods.
Where Russians couldn't adapt, they don't live and those areas remain free and uninhabited. Russians learned how far they could push the environment and themselves within it without dying, and they live very comfortably in that gray area. They depend heavily on family units, and it's very rare for Russians to ever leave the communities they grow up in, even today. The importance of family in Russian society can be traced back to the need for a unit to survive the hard environment.
