Such an immense topic demands a more thorough investigation, so the following is a collection of several key facts about Siberia:
1. Siberia is a significant portion of Asian Russia.
Though for the scope of this writeup I will include the Russian Far East (and therefore essentially all of Russia east of the Ural Mountains), in the strictest sense Siberia comprises the western sections of Asian Russia. The political divisions are as follows:
2. Siberia is big.
As anyone looking at a map (or the list above) can tell, the Siberian region is indeed vast, comprising 7,511,000 square km (almost 3,000,000 square miles). The area has mostly remained untouched by human hands, though despite the climate and the extreme isolation, there is a human presence sprinkled across the region's immense bulwark. A significant portion of the land, about 40%, is covered in taiga forest. Other types of terrain include mountains and steppes, with tundra and wetlands in the far north.
Siberia is bound to the west by European Russia, with the Ural Mountains serving as a barrier; and to the north by the various seas of inlets of the Arctic Ocean, namely, the Barents Sea, the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea, the East Siberian Sea, and the Chukchi Sea. The extreme northeast of the region, Chukotka, is severed from Alaska and the rest of the North American continent by the Bering Straits. In the Ice Age this area served as the avenue through which proto-Native Americans entered the New World. To the east, the coast tapers away to the southwest, bound in by the Bering Sea, with the Sea of Okhotsk isolating the Kamchatka peninsula. The Okhotsk bends inwardly from the western shore of the Kamchatka to the island of Sakhalin, immediately south of which lies the Japanese isle of Hokkaido. On the western shore of Sakhalin, and binding the east shore of the mainland lies the Sea of Japan. At this point Siberia begins its southern boundary, sharing a multiude of international borders, including a tiny sliver of North Korea, then China, Mongolia, China again very breifly, then Kazakhstan, where the region ends in the southern foothills of the Urals.
The Urals Federal District mainly lies along the vast Western Siberian Lowlands. The region contains the mighty Ob' and its tributaries the Tobol, the Irtysh, the Tura, and the Vakh, amongst others, which empty out into the Kara Sea via the Obskaya Guba. Other important rivers in the region include the Pur and the Taz, which also empty northward. This region mainly consists of forests and plains, as well as considerable peatlands in the north.
Moving eastward towards the vast Krasnoyarsk kray, the land begins to rise, evening out at the Central Siberian Plateau, bound to the west by the low-lying Yenisey and cut through the middle by the Tanguska and Degali, as well as the Yengida. Vast taiga forests stretch out across this relatively uninhabited terrain.
South of the plateau, the land flattens a little until rising again in the Altay Mountains (or Altai Mountains), which stretch down into Mongolia. A large majority of the population lies northwest of this area, in the extreme southeastern Western Siberian Plateau.
The terrain remains mountainous along the southern rim, through Tuva and arcing northeastward. North northeastward of Mongolia lies Lake Baikal. As with the rest of Siberia, this lake is huge: in addition to occupying a sizeable surface area, the lake is extremely deep, probably 9 km if the sediment were removed-the deepest land rift on the planet. It remains, by far, the largest freshwater lake in the world, containing 20% of Earth's fresh water.
East of Baikal, the land remains mountainous along the border with China and North Korea. Northwards, in western Sakha (also known as Yakutia), the land levels out east of the Central Siberian Plateau, as the Lena and its tributaries, including the Vilyny, the Indigirka, and the Tas-Yuryakh, flow northward.
The extreme far east is mountainous, including the maritime region around Vladivostok, as well as the Kamchatka peninsula and Sakhalin. The Kolyma is an important river flowing through Chukotka. The Amur flows along the region's southern rim.
3. Siberia has, believe it or not, people in it.
Siberia had a population of roughly 32,452,000 in 1992. Of these, a majority are ethnic Russians or Ukranians, though there are significant indigenous populations, most of which inhabit the region's republics. These groups include the Turkic-speaking Hakass, Tuvans, and the inhabitants of the Altay republic, as wells as the Buryat Mongols, the Finno-Ugric-speaking Ostyaks (or Khant) and Voguls (Mansi), the Nenets (Semoyedes), and the Evenki.
Most of the population lives in southwestern Siberia, with Novosibirsk serving as the economic center of the region. At 1,500,000, it remains the largest city in Siberia, and the third largest in all of Russia behind Moscow and St. Petersburg. Other cities in the southwest include Omsk, Tomsk, Tobolsk, Barnaul, and Novokuznetsk. This region is heavily industrialized; additionally, portions of western Siberia have beem given over to agriculture, focusing on the production of wheat, rye, oats, potatoes, and dairy. Various mineral deposits have been exploited, particularly in the Kuznetsk Basin, which is a primary coal deposit. Oil is also commonly found, with significant deposits across western Siberia. The world's largest natural gas deposit is found in Yamalo-Nenetskaia, with cities like Nadym expanding rapidly under Soviet dominion upon the deposit's discovery.
In eastern Siberia the population thins out, mainly due to the harsh weather, with Irkutsk, Yakutsk, Chita, Ulan Ude, and Krasnoyarsk serving as the major population centers. The primary industry and raison d'etre for the eastern population is raw materials, with large mineral and petroleum products sprinkled throughout the area. Cities such as Noril'sk housing enormous metallurgy and ore processing facilities. Fur trapping and reindeer hunting are, aside from mining and excavation, the main pursuits in the far north. Of these activities, the former is mainly the province of northern indigenous groups.
In the maritime area around Vladivostok shipping is an important industry, the city being a port of entry for many imported goods, particularly Japanese products. Japanese cars are often either shipped on the Trans-Siberian Railroad (more on that later) or actually driven across sections of the forbidding terrain (more on that later).
4. Siberia has a varying climate.
Most people think of Siberia as a brutally frigid subarctic wasteland, completely unsuitable for human habitation. This is a broad generalization, and not truly reflective of the region's moderately diverse climate. The region is so large that the climate varies, but generally in southern and western sections are much more temperate than northern and eastern sections. It's still Russia, of course, but nowhere near as intensely cold (or intensely hot) as the northern and eastern regions. Verkhoyansk, which has the dubious distinction of being the coldest permanently-settled location on the planet, has an avreage winter temperature of -49oC and an average summer temperature of 32oC. While this is not representative of the entire region's climate, it illustrates the vast differences between winter and summer temperatures. Winters are long, beginning in mid-October and lasting until April-May; summers flare as hot spots in between.
5. People have been living in Siberia for quite some time.
Humanity has been mucking through Siberia since prehistoric times. Beginning with 300,000 years ago to the beginning of recorded history, the area housed many migrant and nomadic tribes of people. During the Ice Age the frozen Bering Strait joined the Eurasian landmass and North America, functioning as the bridge over which the first Native Americans entered the New World. Southern Siberia spawned many nomadic tribes that later graduated into marauding hordes, terrifying Europeans from the Romans on. These tribes included the Huns, the Mongols, and the Manchus. Of these, the Mongols, under Genghis Khan's Golden Horde, carved out the first political elements in Siberia, as the mid-15th century dissolution of the Mongol empire led to the Tatar khanate of Sibir.
Russians had long been interested in the immense territory looming on the far side of the Urals, first trading with native peoples for furs in the 13th century. More serious interaction began in 1552, when Ivan the Terrible, fresh from his conquest of the Kazan khanate, turned his eyes further eastward. Under Yermak Timofeyevich, a small force of Russian Cossacks captured the region's eponymous stronghold, Sibir, in 1581. Further victories and the addition of the Tatar khanate to the Russian Empire in 1598 consolidated Russian power in the region. By the end of the 17th century, Russia had claimed almost all of western Siberia. The Cossacks pressed further eastward, setting up a chain of forts and exacting taxes for the czar from the indigenous tribes in the form of furs. They cut through to the Sea of Okhtosk in 1640, clashing with a Chinese force in the region. Russia and China signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, which ceded the (Russian) Far East to China. Eventually over the course of the 19th century, Russia regained most of this land.
The zemleprokhodtsy ("crossers of land") were the first permanent wave of Russian settlers in Siberia, cutting across the Urals in the 18th century. During this time the fates of indigenous tribes varied: larger groups like the Kazakhs and the Yakuts were enriched by the fur trade, which constituted a large part of Russia's exports to the West. Smaller tribes became Russified. Around this time Siberia began to be used as a penal colony, especially for political prisoners. This idea later reached its climax under Stalin as the gulag system.
The 18th and 19th centuries saw a new influx of ethnic Russians eastward. As the fur trade declined, mining and processing of raw materials became the driving force for the local economy. Following the 1861 emancipation of Russian serfs, large numbers of freedmen and -women rode eastward to seek their fortunes. Most were unsuccessful.
The completion of the massive Trans-Siberian Railroad from 1892-1905 truly welded Siberia to the rest of Russia. Under Stolypin, one of Nicholas II's most effective ministers, Russian farmers were encouraged to move to Siberia. In this area, with government help, agriculture was permenantly established, primarily in the south and west of the region, and along the railroad. The railroad vastly increased Siberia's economic output, ferrying gold, iron, coal, and other items to European Russia.
Following the Russian Revolution, Siberia became a place of refuge for many |
