Origins
Russia is the English name for the largest country on earth by area, spanning eastern Europe, northern and central Asia, and a thin shelf of the Caucasus. The name enters English through Medieval Latin Russia, itself from Byzantine Greek Rhōsía (Ῥωσία), the Greek chanceries' rendering of the east-Slavic polity known in Old East Slavic as Rusĭ (Роусь, Rus') — the Kievan Rus state that coalesced in the ninth and tenth centuries around the rivers running from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The origin of the base name Rus itself is one of the classic disputes of medieval historiography. The Normanist view, dominant in modern Scandinavian and Western scholarship, derives it from Old Norse Rōþs- (as in Roslagen, the coastal region of Uppland whence many Varangian seafarers came) or from a Finnish rendering Ruotsi (still the Finnish name for Sweden, Estonian Rootsi), ultimately from a Proto-Germanic root *rōþs- meaning "rowers" or "crew of oarsmen." The Anti-Normanist view, developed in nineteenth-century Russian scholarship and revived in various forms since, proposes a native Slavic derivation from a river name or tribal designation. The weight of linguistic and archaeological evidence now favours the Scandinavian origin, though with important qualifications: the name was applied early and broadly to the eastern-Slavic lands whose rulers were assimilated Varangians, so that by the tenth century Rus was already a polity rather than an ethnic label.
The Primary Chronicle (Povest' vremennykh let, compiled in Kiev c. 1113 by the monk Nestor and others) opens the historical record with the famous invitation of 862 CE: "Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come and rule us and reign over us" — addressed, the chronicle claims, to three Varangian brothers of the Rus, Rurik, Sineus, and Truvor. Whether or not the invitation is legendary, the emergence of the Rurikid dynasty and the Kievan state is securely ninth-century. Byzantine sources already know the people as Rhōs by the mid-ninth century: the Patriarch Photius's homilies on the 860 CE Rus attack on Constantinople use the form, and Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus's De administrando imperio (c. 950) distinguishes Rhōsia (the Slavic lands) from its Scandinavian rulers. The Cyrillic form Роусь is fixed by the tenth century in the Russkaya Pravda and in treaty documents with Byzantium.
The Latin form Russia (with a double s) stabilises only from the tenth and eleventh centuries, in the chronicles of Thietmar of Merseburg and Adam of Bremen; earlier Latin sources often use Ruthenia, Russci, Rugi, or Ruzzi. Ruthenia remained a common Latin name for the east-Slavic lands throughout the Middle Ages — the adjective Ruthenian is still used for certain of the west-Ukrainian and Carpathian peoples, and for the Ruthenian rite of the Catholic Church. Ivan III of Muscovy, after his marriage to Sophia Palaiologina in 1472 and his assertion of imperial status, promoted the title Gosudar' vseya Rusi (Sovereign of all Rus); Ivan IV was crowned Tsar of All Rus in 1547; and from the reign of Peter the Great the Latinate form Rossiya (Россия) gradually displaced the older Rus as the formal state name. English Russia is attested from the late fifteenth century in diplomatic correspondence and in Richard Eden's translations of 1555; Richard Chancellor's 1553 voyage to Arkhangelsk established the word firmly in English commercial and geographical vocabulary.
Proto-Indo-European Roots
Cognates and parallel forms in neighbouring languages show the same Greek or Latin root variously naturalised. Polish has Rosja, Czech and Slovak Rusko, German Russland, Dutch Rusland, Swedish Ryssland, Finnish Venäjä (from Proto-Baltic/Slavic *Venedi, a different and older word for the Slavs), Estonian Venemaa, Lithuanian Rusija, Hungarian Oroszország (from Uruš, a Turkic rendering via the Khazars), Arabic Rūsiyā (روسيا), Turkish Rusya, Chinese Éluósī (俄罗斯, itself via Mongolian Oros). The Finno-Ugric outliers (Finnish Venäjä, Estonian Venemaa) are unusual in that they preserve a genuinely pre-Varangian name, one that reaches back to the Wends and to a Roman-era western-Slavic ethnonym. In Russian itself the historic form Rus' survives in literary and ecclesiastical usage — Holy Rus (Svyataya Rus), the lands of Rus — while the modern state name is Rossiya, with the adjective rossiyskiy (of the Russian state) pointedly distinguished from russkiy (ethnically Russian).
In modern English Russia denotes the Russian Federation (Rossiyskaya Federatsiya) as constituted since 1991, though the name has at various periods referred to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, the Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721), the Russian Empire (1721–1917), the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1917–1991) within the USSR, and the wider cultural and linguistic Russian world (russkiy mir). The adjective Russian shows the same ambiguity: russkiy (ethnic-linguistic Russian) and rossiyskiy (civic-territorial Russian) are often rendered by the same English word, a source of persistent translation problems. The deep etymology — if the Scandinavian theory is correct — leaves the provocative image of a vast continental empire named, at its root, for a small crew of northern rowers pulling their oars down the rivers of the ninth-century east. The origin is, as noted, disputed; but the image has the advantage of capturing how thinly the name was once spread before the state it named grew to its present size.