The Russian Federation contains a complex hierarchical system of administrative structures at several levels, the origins of which can be traced to the Soviet and Tsarist periods. The Central Eurasian interactive Atlas (CEIA) contains maps with data presented at two of the these levels: the oblast and rayon levels.
The rayon administrative level is characterized by a single type of administrative unit: the rayon (also spelled raion), usually translated into English as "district" or "region". The rayon is the lowest (smallest) administrative unit in the administrative hierarchy above settlements (villages, towns, cities), and they number nearly two thousand. The term rayon is also used, however, for administrative units within large cities. The city of St. Petersburg, for instance, contains five rayons. In this usage, rayon can be translated as "burrough". Several CEIA maps on election behavior display data by rayon such as the map on presidential election returns.
The maps have been configured so that rayon boundaries appear only at large viewing scales, 1:10,000,000 or larger. This configuration allows the user to see finer detail when viewing the landscape up close, yet prevents the map from becoming too cluttered with line features at small viewing scales (e.g., at the entire Russian Federation scale).
The oblast administrative level, the next highest level of administration in the Russian Federation, is much more heterogeneous than the rayon administrative level, and, in fact, contains several different types of administrative units. These units correspond to the 89 units represented in the Council of the Federation. They can be divided into two broad classes: ethnically and non-ethnically based units. The ethnically based units include 21 autonomous republics, 10 okrugs (national districts), and one autonomous region, the Jewish Autonomous Region. The non-ethnically based units include 49 oblasts (provinces) as well six krays (territories) and the country's two largest cities--Moscow and St. Petersburg. These units have been granted differing levels of rights under the Russian constitution, and, in fact, some of these units are contained within and are constituent parts of "parent" units. The Khanty-Mansi and Yamal-Nents okrugs, for instance, are constituent parts of the Tyumen Oblast.
Oblast-level administrative units comprise the basic spatial units for most of the CEIA maps since official statistical data are readily available in official handbooks, such as Chislennost naseleniia Rossiiskoi Federatsii po gorodam, poselkam gorodskogo tipa i raionam. In contrast to the availability of oblast-level data, data by rayons do not appear in official handbooks for the entire country, and are available as a complete set only through direct correspondence with the state ministry of statistics (Goskomstat). Also in contrast to rayon-level data, oblast-level units provide a convenient scale for viewing the entire country, although the size of these units differs considerably: small units characterize the highly populated portions of European Russia, and large units characterize the Far North, Siberia, and the Russian Far East.