This chapter adopts a broad, catholic and perhaps even escapist approach, defining Russia's geographical environment as the entire territory. The natural environment touches human development at many points, indeed is part of that development. To talk of peasant environments is to consider the natural environments which confronted most Russians on a day-to-day basis and from which they were obliged to wrest their subsistence. Across the vast East European plain on which most Russians lived there is considerable environmental variation, and the means which peasants employed to ensure their subsistence also varied. The chapter considers peasant ecotypes against the broad background of the major zonal differences which existed in the Russian environment. It talks about Russian territory, which can be divided into four major zones, roughly in the order in which they were encountered by the Russian peasants of the period: mixed forest, boreal forest, tundra, forest-steppe and steppe.