Russia strategy?

I'm now consistently beating emperor with the science, culture and diplo victory conditions but tend not to do very well with my domination games. I've only won one as China and decided I want to use Russia next.

I was wondering what should my general strategy starting out be. Are Kreposts any good? What social policies should I choose? Does the faster border expansion from Kreposts make Liberty over Tradition more viable? Obviously I should go for Animal Husbandry and Bronze Working to take advantage of my UA, but what then? Is Honor opener for Statue of Zeus viable? When should I start pumping out units?

Krepost is probably one of the worst UB's, to be honest. Its effect is...mediocre, at best, so you can safely ignore it.
I find that Russia's advantage comes mostly from having production monstercities provided they have some horses/iron around. The next resources come late, so let's focus on those two.
As you noted, beeline to them. Improve them ASAP and make sure you get Stables out soon, so you'll have 2 food 4 hammer horses (provided grassland). From that point on, I'd go and work my way towards Machinery, get your crossbows and start rushing enemies down with those. If you're on a water map (Say, Small Continents), move towards Navigation instead and produce a critical load of Frigates (Which, with Russia's iron reserves, should not be an issue) along with a few Privateers. Send them out as wolf packs of 4/5 frigates and a privateer, and harass enemy coasts with them, quickly taking cities as you go.
Early game though, keep the AI as your friend. Your extra resources can easily be sold off for a few GPT. This in turn boosts your early game economy, enabling you to stabilize easily. This also means it's indeed rather viable to pick up Liberty. Go past Construction to get your Colloseums set up and you've covered the biggest bonuses Tradition has to offer.
If you end up going land war, Cossacks aren't anything too great. They're nice to pick off wounded units though, so having a few on hand won't hurt. But yeah, Russia isn't much for an early rush in itself, though they can do warmongering quite decently.

To be honest one of main reasons I chose Russia was for the double Uranium. Does the AI tend to choose and vote for nuclear non-proliferation? If it does I will either need to build all my nuclear weapons before it passes or dominate the late game UN

I've never seen them do such, so you should be perfectly fine there.They prefer to try and embargo each other instead.

Russia is almost entirely generic civ until fairly late with the main exception that you'll start near Tundra.
As such, you mostly have the advantages and disadvantages of the Tundra start (including lower than normal chance of having Horses near you unless you've chosen strategic balance)

If there are early strategic resources, you'll have a prod & gold advantage [sell surplus copies]; but if not, then your UA doesn't come into play at all.

Their UB will provide a small advantage on tile acquisition. It stacks nicely with Tradition opener.

The UU is really nice if you either settle a source of horses or acquire a city state ally with them.

Loucypher said:

If you end up going land war, Cossacks aren't anything too great. They're nice to pick off wounded units though, so having a few on hand won't hurt.

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I think you underestimate them a lot.
1. They basically have a "free" 33% bonus vs any units. It so easy to use arty at this point to hurt any unit before using cossacks.
2. They are on the tech way for artilleries and cav + arty is a very popular domination start at any difficulty. Cavalry itself is quite powerfull at its age and make the 33% even better.
3. They upgrade to tanks (and keep the 33% dmg) which are late game monsters in general. No idea how the "bonus vs wounded" works in combination with this UA.

what the cossacks get IS a free 'bonus vs wounded' promotion. so you can't get another one.

if you want to win using the russian uniques, try a mid-late domination, starting from cossacks or once you upgraded them to landships/tanks.

Russia is tedious to play but powerful. Selling 4x2 horses early game for 2 gold each is pretty powerful.

I really have nothing to commit to how to play Russia, as I've never played them before. However, what I do know is that if you're going for a domination victory, America is a great choice. Two UU's centered around mid and late game war.

Getting double strategic resources from Russia's UU can be useful in sea and water maps where iron is important for the frigates. Once you have a source of iron especially 6 iron, you get double that amount.. 6+6=12 iron for frigates.. Once you have 6-8 frigates out there sailing that should be enough for domination..

Firaxis has modelled the civs to play out the way they did in real life and Russia is no exception - they're a farly aggressive, imperialist state that evolves [degenerates?] into communism (Order). Both of these tendencies in their play come down to their increased trait. As Russia, one of your main goals should be maximizing and spamming out lots of cities (which your excellent production will allow you to support). As such, they play a lot like Rome - differences being that Russia doesn't share the early conquest focus of Rome and are instead stronger militarily later on and that Russia is even more of a city-spammer than Rome is, at least from the industrial era forward (since even newly founded cities will have excellent production due to the strategic resource hammer bonus).

The value of the Krepost doesn't get fully appreciated on these forums because people don't think past the usual vs AI play (where the AI is very easy to beat). The Krepost/Barracks is valuable by itself but the Krepost is especially useful because it allows Russia to mimic the effect of the American Manifest Destiny ability tile purchasing - basically, it allows even cities with weak culture to expand territory fast[er], which is great for a city-spamming civ that due to its militarism has a priority for military buildings anyway.