MOSCOW, November 15 (RIA Novosti) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev can look around the summit table on Saturday knowing his government has less debt than any other G20 country, according to the Guardian newspaper. The British paper put Russia's debt at $76 billion - less than 1% of the United States' $8.4 trillion. As a percentage of gross domestic product, Moscow's situation is not quite as rosy, but President George Bush would probably take a national debt running at 6% rather than 60% of GDP. http://en.rian.ru/business/20081115/118335408.html
I checked: they defaulted in 1998.
Interestingly, the late 1990s was a great time to default - in that time period the average lag to renewed access to foreign credit (which is one of the major costs of sovereign default) was 3.5 months (!). Credit was everywhere.
If Russia had (somehow) defaulted during the 1980s the lag would have been about 4.5 years, which would have been a body blow for a country.
Their currency ran like a cheap stocking at the time - which I guess worked out ok as they’re an energy extraction economy.
In today’s saturated debt environment formal sovereign default would be very serious indeed: access to foreign credit is very precious right about now. They couldn’t default now - not that that’s on the cards.