First of all you need to be close to Europe; S. America or Asia won't do. The second part is to try to ally with your closest neighbour. For this example I'll be Russia and assume that I've managed to ally with Asia. For Russia you just go for an all-out attack, ie. place all your silos in a line down the western border, place all your subs up north as far west as you can get with a couple of battleship/carrier groups supporting. Place the last two carrier/battleship groups (whatever mix you prefer) in the Pacific. Place 3 airfields on the western border and one on the eastern tip, you have enough radars to spread them out evenly over all your territory.
Now that postioning is done you can move onto tactics. Firstly move both sub groups due west so that they are sitting a little bit to the NE of Iceland. then move the other navy groups you have there straight down the coast of Europe so that you end up above Spain. They will almost certainly have to engage in combat but that's OK as it's the subs that are important and they are out of the way. From your airbases you should launch all fighters so that you can try and scout out as much as possible of the western Europe; Eastern Europe should have been revealed by your radar.
Finally we get down to Defcon 1!
Because you launched all your fighters, you should now be able to see almost all of the eastern silos and radars. Launch as soon as possible! Don't wait for other people, what we want is an all-out blitzkrieg! First of all launch all your bombers from your airfields at silos/radars, these take the longest to arrive so get them in early. Next pick your furthest silo from the border and launch all the nukes at various silos/radars. Bear in mind that silos are far more important than radar, Europe is so small that radar has to be very close to the silos, this means that they generally do not have enough time to react to your nukes. If you have any spare fighters left over, send them in as cannon fodder to soak up anti-air fire. Lastly, once the chaos has started and the European has seen just how much trouble he is in and is trying to react to, launch one enitre sub-group of nukes (they should be near iceland by now). These will come in from a completly unexpected trajectory and hopefully do a lot of damage! These you can launch at all targets, there should be no remaining silos, airfields are always a possibility but cities are probably what you should be aiming for so you can start scoring.
Now we are getting on to the final stages. You should by now hopefully have wiped out all eastern defenses. Now you can start bringing on you silos one at a time to nuke all European cities. By this point the European guy will be really overwhelmed (and possibly a tad annoyed!), so he will start launching from his remaining silos as he is desperate to actually launch something! Little does he know that we probably had no idea where these were
This is where your carrier group and final sub-group can come into play. Bring them all online with bombers and nukes and a fighter screen. this should cause the final blow to the Europeans and allow you to target the major cities (London, Paris and Rome) with your nukes. In my experience you should still have 2 or 3 siloes still full of nukes and hopefully your airfields will still have all their bombers too. These you can send on attacks of opportunity (use your own judgement) and possibly start striking Africa.
Lastly I'll talk about the pacific. For starters you do not need to worry about the pacific. It takes far too long for the Americans to get to your coast, if you have followed the blitzkrieg strategy the game should be almost over by the time they get there. You should have a battleship and a carrier fleet out here, you can send these to the Western coast and try taking out some cities with your bombers. Since the pacific is so large, the chances are that you can completely miss the opposition fleest entirely! You might also have an airfield out on your own east coast which could send a load of bombers out too, after launching these will then land on your carriers to reload
Bear in mind that both North and South America will have been fighting major wars with Asia, Africa and Europe, by the time you are launching nukes at them they will already be a bit worn down. Asia especially will take care of most of the pacific fleets even if you aren't allied with them. This is really just about getting a few bonus points, usually I don't even start getting to this phase before the victory countdown starts.
One final point that I'd like to make is that this strategy is not dependant on Russia. The main points are to ally with your closest neighbour and attack your next closest. Unfortunately that tends to be Europe
Just make sure that you go all-out with silos, bombers and subs on the one target. Kill them before they kill you and stagger your silo launches, this will give you time to launch and then switch to defense before they can even react. I've managed to use this strategy succesfully with N. America and Africa as well. you can probably use the same general strategy for the other two, you just wouldn't necessarily attack Europe 
I hope this debunks a few myths about Europe and will help other people with their strategies. I can usually get around 160-170 points with this on a standard game. I wrote a heck of a lot more than I was expecting but it was quite good to try and get a proper strategy down on paper. Let us know if you have had any similar ideas or improvements to the strat.
Just be patient, synchronise your attacks, and let the enemy make a mistake of not being patient, that strategy always works 