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Siberia

 
American Heritage Dictionary:

Si·be·ri·a1

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(sī-bîr'ē-ə) pronunciation

A region of central and eastern Russia stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Inhabited by a variety of peoples including the Ostyak, Chukchi, Evenki, and Yakut, the extensive area was annexed by Russia in stages during the 16th and 17th centuries. Used as a place of exile for political prisoners since the early 17th century, it was settled by Russians after the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad (completed in 1905) and developed for its mineral resources after World War II.

Siberian Si·be'ri·an adj. & n.
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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

Siberia

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Region, north-central Asia, largely in Russia. It extends from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean and from the Arctic Ocean to central Kazakhstan and the boundaries of China and Mongolia; it covers more than 5,000,000 sq mi (13,000,000 sq km). It is notorious for the length and severity of its almost snowless winters. Temperatures of -90 °F (-68 °C) have been recorded. The first settlers probably arrived in southern Siberia in the Paleolithic Period. The area was under Chinese influence from c. 1000 BC, followed by the Turkic-Mongols in the 3rd century BC. Russian trappers and Cossack explorers (see Cossacks) colonized it in the late 16th century, and by the mid-18th century most of Siberia was under Russian rule. It was connected to other parts of Russia by the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Eastern Siberia was the scene of the anti-Bolshevik government of Aleksandr Kolchak (1918 – 20). It was made part of the Russian S.F.S.R. in 1922. Russia exiled criminals and political prisoners there, and in the 1930s Joseph Stalin set up forced-labour camps that fueled industrial growth. When Russian factories were relocated there during World War II, it played an important role in the war effort. It has deposits of coal, petroleum, natural gas, diamonds, iron ore, and gold; its chief industrial products include steel, aluminum, and machinery. Southern Siberia produces wheat, rye, oats, and sunflowers. Its main cities include Novosibirsk, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Irkutsk.

For more information on Siberia, visit Britannica.com.

Gale Encyclopedia of Russian History:

Siberia

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Often called the "Wild East," beautiful but austere, Siberia is one of the least populated places on earth. Western Siberia is the world's largest and flattest plain, across which tributaries of the Ob and Irtysh rivers wend their way north to the Arctic Ocean. This orientation means that in spring the mouths of the rivers are yet frozen while their upper reaches thaw, creating the world's largest peat bog in the middle of the plain; thus, the lowland is arable only in the extreme south. Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East tend to be rugged and mountainous, with thin soils at best. Beneath this chiefly soil-less veneer lies some of the world's oldest rock. Higher mountains and active volcanoes rise along the easternmost edge, where the Pacific Ocean plate subducts beneath Asia. Here also the majority of the rivers drain northward, perpendicular to the main east-west axis of settlement. Only along the Pacific seaboard do the rivers flow east, the longest of which is the Amur, which, together with its tributaries, forms the boundary between China and Russia. On the border between Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, the region boasts the world's oldest and deepest lake, Baikal. Including some of the purest water on earth, Lake Baikal holds more than twenty percent of the globe's freshwater resources.

Human settlement resembles a mostly urban, beaded archipelago strung along the Trans-Siberian Railroad from the Urals cities of Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg to Vladivostok, 4,000 miles away in the east. In between, rest the large cities of Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Khabarovsk. Novosibirsk, which means "New Siberia," is largest of all with 1.5 million people.

The densest settlement pattern conforms to Siberia's least severe climates, which align themselves in parallel belts from harsh to harshest at right angles to a southwest-northeast trend line. Deep within the interior of Asia and surrounded by mostly frozen seas, Siberia experiences the most continental climates on the planet. One-time maxima of more than ninety degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) are possible in the relatively short Siberian summers except along the coasts, whereas one-time minima of minus-ninety degrees Fahrenheit ( - 68 degrees Celsius) have been recorded in the long winters of Sakha (Yakutia). This broad range of temperatures is not recorded anywhere else. Fortunately, the winter frost is typically dry and windless, affording some relief to the isolated towns and hamlets located in the sparsely populated northeast.

Although western geographers accept the entire northeastern quadrant of Eurasia as the region known as Siberia, Russian geographers officially accept only Western and Eastern Siberia as such, excluding the Russian Far East, or Russia's Pacific Rim. Including the Russian Far East, Siberia spans 5,207,900 square miles (13,488,400 square kilometers) and makes up more than three-fourths of the Russian land mass. By this definition, Siberia is a fourth bigger than Canada, the world's second largest country. It extends from the Ural Mountains on the west to the Pacific Ocean on the east. North to south it spans an empty realm from the Arctic Ocean to the borders of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China. It is empty because, although it occupies 23 percent of Eurasia, it environs less than 1 percent of the continent's population. Siberia is so massive that citizens of the U.S. state of Maine are closer to Moscow than are residents of Siberia's Pacific Coast.

The Russian word Sibir has at least six controversial origins, ranging from Hunnic to Mongolic to Russian. The Mongol definition is "marshy forest," which certainly typifies much of the Siberian landscape.

To many Westerners, the name evokes a popular misconception that people who live in Siberia are exiles or forced laborers. Although it is accurate to suggest that the region became a place of exile as early as the 1600s and remained that way long after, most Siberians freely migrated there. The Great Siberian Migration, which occurred between 1885 and 1914, witnessed the voluntary movement of 4 million Slavic peasants into the southern tier of the area, facilitated by the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (1891 - 1916). In fact, the tributary area of that railway became, and remains, the primary area of Siberian settlement. The rest of Siberia represents a vast underdeveloped backwater, containing fewer than one person per square mile.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin successfully endeavored to force the development of the "backwater" by creating a vast system of labor camps, further tarnishing Siberia's image. At least 1.5 million forced laborers and convicts occupied the region's north and east between 1936 and 1953. Some of the camps remained in use until the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991). Between 1953 and 1991, extraordinary financial and material incentives lured the vast majority of migrants to the harshest regions. After 1991, when the incentives were terminated, hundreds of thousands of residents departed for more hospitable and economically stable destinations.

Although Siberia's future is unpredictable, the region remains rich in resources. Most lie in austere, largely unexplored areas far from potential consumers. Thus, like their relatives of the past, modern Russians continue to refer to Siberia as the future or cupboard of the nation. Unfortunately, although teeming with natural wealth, the cupboard remains locked.

Bibliography

Bobrick, Benson. (1992). East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia. New York: Poseidon.

Bychkova-Jordan, Bella, and Jordan-Bychkov, Terry. (2001). Siberian Village: Land and Life in the Sakha Republic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hudgins, Sharon W. (2003). The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.

Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1994). The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. New York: Random House.

Marx, Steven G. (1991). Road to Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Mote, Victor L. (1998). Siberia Worlds Apart. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Thubron, Colin. (1999). In Siberia. New York: Harper Collins.

Treadgold, Donald W. (1957). The Great Siberian Migration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Tupper, Harmon. (1965). To the Great Ocean. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

—VICTOR L. MOTE

Columbia Encyclopedia:

Siberia

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Siberia (sībēr'ēə), Rus. Sibir, vast geographical region of Russia, covering c.2,900,000 sq mi (7,511,000 sq km) and having an estimated population (1992) of 32,459,000. Historically it has had no official standing as a political or territorial division, but it was generally understood to comprise the northern third of Asia, stretching from the Urals in the west to the mountain ranges of the Pacific Ocean watershed in the east and from the Laptev, Kara, and East Siberian seas (arms of the Arctic Ocean) in the north to the Kazakh steppes, the Altai and Sayan mountain systems, and the border of Mongolia in the south. In 2000, however, Siberia was established as one of seven Russian federal districts, with the district administrative center at Novosibirsk. The Russian Far East, which is commonly considered to be part of Siberia, is treated separately in regional schemes.

Geography

Siberia's administrative units are the Altai, Buryat, Khakass, and Tuva republics, the Altai, Krasnoyarsk, and Transbaykal territories, and the Omsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Kemerovo, and Irkutsk regions. Lying off Siberia in the Arctic Ocean are the New Siberian Islands, the Severnaya Zemlya Archipelago, and other islands.

Siberia may be divided, from north to south, into the zones of vegetation that run across Russia-the tundra (extending c.200 mi/320 km inland along the entire Arctic coast), the taiga, the mixed forest belt, and the steppe zone. Forests occupy about 40% of Siberia's land. Siberia is drained, from south to north, by the Ob, Yenisei, and Lena rivers (and their tributaries), which also provide the only means of longitudinal transportation. These rivers empty northward into the Arctic Ocean. East-west transportation depends largely on the Trans-Siberian RR (which follows the steppe belt), on the Baykal-Amur Mainline (BAM), and to an increasing extent on the Arctic sea route.

Siberia is conventionally subdivided into the following four geomorphological areas: the West Siberian lowland; the Central Siberian plateaus, or uplands; the mountains of the south; and the northeast Siberian mountain systems. The lowland occupies the western third of Siberia; it stretches from the Urals to the Yenisei and is mainly a low-lying, often marshy, plain. It is drained by the Ob and Irtysh rivers, which are ice-free and navigable for about half the year. Situated far from vulnerable frontiers, SW Siberia contains about 60% of Siberia's population, major industrial complexes, and such important cities as Novosibirsk (the leading industrial and scientific research center of Siberia), Omsk, Tomsk, Tobolsk, Barnaul, and Novokuznetsk.

The wooded steppe and fertile black earth of W Siberia favor agriculture and, especially in the Baraba Steppe, dairying. Wheat is the principal crop; rye, oats, potatoes, sunflowers, flax, and sugar beets are also important. Butter is the major dairy product. The Kuznetsk Basin, in W Siberia, is one of the world's richest coal regions and also has modest iron deposits. It forms the basis for the region's iron, steel, and heavy metallurgical industries. Rich oil and natural-gas fields have been exploited in the West Siberian lowlands, from which a network of pipelines now serves European Russia and the E European republics.

E Siberia, which is drained by the Lena, extends from the Yenisei to a huge mountain chain, an offshoot of the mountains of Central Asia, comprising (from southwest to northeast) the Yablonovy, Stanovoy, Verkhoyansk, Kolyma, and Cherskogo ranges. In the center of E Siberia rise the Central Siberian uplands, which are separated from the northeastern mountains by the plateaus along the Vitim and Aldan rivers. South of the uplands lies Lake Baykal, the world's deepest lake, surrounded by mountains. E Siberia's important cities include Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Cheremkhovo, Yakutsk, and Chita; but most of the region is sparsely populated because of the extreme rigors of the climate and the difficulties of communication. Verkhoyansk, the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on earth (-56°F/-49°C on average in winter) has summer hot spells where the temperature rises above 90°F (32°C).

E Siberia is Russia's leading producer of gold, diamonds, mica, and aluminum, and there are large reserves of iron ore, coal, oil, gas, graphite, and nonferrous precious metals. Exploitation of the region's rich waterpower resources began in the mid-1950s, and there are four giant hydroelectric power stations on the Angara River between Irkutsk and Lake Baykal. Forestry, like mining, is a major economic activity in E Siberia. Agriculture (wheat and oats) is practiced in the south, and animal husbandry is prevalent among the indigenous Siberian peoples. Reindeer breeding, fishing, sealing, hunting, and fur processing are important occupations in the Arctic north.

People

The great majority of Siberia's population is made up of Russians and Ukrainians. Non-Russian groups include Turkic-speaking nationalities in the Altai Republic, the Khakass Republic, the Tuva Republic, and the Kemerovo Region; Buryat-Mongols in the Buryat Republic, the Irkutsk region, and Transbaykal Territory; Finno-Ugric Ostyaks (Khant) and Voguls (Mansi) in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area; Nenets (Samoyedes) in the Taymyr Peninsula of Krasnoyarsk Territory and the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area; and Tungus Evenki in Krasnoyarsk Territory. The largely nomadic Mongol and Turkic herders of S Siberia mostly settled down to agriculture under the Soviet government. The indigenous peoples of central and N Siberia remain mostly hunters and fishermen. The chief non-Christian religions are Islam and Tibetan Buddhism in the south, and forms of shamanism elsewhere.

History

Findings made in the late 1990s indicate that Siberia was inhabited as early as 300,000 years ago, rather than 40,000 years ago, as previously thought. In the historic period, S Siberia frequently served as the point of departure for several nomadic groups, such as Huns, Mongols, and Manchus, who conquered and lost immense empires. Among the political entities emerging after the breakup of the Mongol state of the Golden Horde in the mid-15th cent. was the Tatar khanate of Sibir.

Russian Conquest

Although Russian traders from Novgorod crossed the Urals as early as the 13th cent. to trade in furs with native tribes, the Russian conquest began much later. Czar Ivan IV's capture of the Kazan khanate in 1552 opened the way for Russian expansion into Siberia. In 1581 a band of Cossacks under Yermak crossed the middle Urals and took the city of Sibir (near modern Tobolsk), capital of the Sibir khanate, which gave its name to the entire region. Russia's conquest of the Tatar khanate was completed in 1598 (see Tatars), and during the 17th cent. Russia annexed all of W Siberia.

The Cossacks rapidly penetrated eastward by land and on riverboats, building a string of small fortresses and levying tribute for Moscow from the sparse population in the form of precious furs. By 1640 they had reached the Sea of Okhotsk, an arm of the Pacific Ocean, and soon afterward they collided with Chinese troops. By the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689), Russia abandoned to China the region later known as the Far Eastern Territory (Russian Far East), which was ceded to Russia only from 1858 to 1860. The Chinese still have claims over parts of the border, including islands in the Ussuri River.

Russian Settlement and Administration

Russian settlement of Siberia was spurred by groups of zemleprokhodtsy (literally, "crossers of land"), who came mostly from N European Russia and traversed the easy portages linking the east-west Siberian river systems to pioneer new forts and trading communities. A colony of the Russian Empire, Siberia was administered by a colonial office based first in Moscow and later (after its founding in 1703) in the new Russian capital of St. Petersburg.

Although military governors collected tribute, they interfered little with native Siberian customs and religions; while the smaller, weaker ethnic groups succumbed to Russian influence, larger tribes such as the Kazakhs and Yakuts thrived and reaped material benefits under Russian administration. Siberian furs constituted an important source of wealth for Russia and figured prominently in Russian trade with Western Europe. These furs, along with customs duties levied on all Siberian raw materials acquired by Russian entrepreneurs, more than reimbursed the state for the costs of its Siberian conquest and administration.

With the decline of the fur trade in the early 18th cent., mining became the chief economic activity in Siberia. The state was the chief entrepreneur, but wealthy private families were also involved. Silver, lead, and copper mining began around 1700; gold mining did not develop until the 1830s. Forced labor in the mines, often using convicts, proved generally unproductive; the gold miners were usually free laborers. Siberian agriculture was stimulated in the late 16th and 17th cent. by the needs of the Russian military and administrative personnel stationed there.

From the early 17th cent. Siberia was used as a penal colony and a place of exile for political prisoners; among the latter there emerged (especially after the exile of leaders of the Decembrist Conspiracy of 1825) a small but vocal Siberian intelligentsia, who agitated for an end of Siberia's colonial status. Meanwhile, Russian colonizers continued to push southward, establishing forts along the steppe to thwart nomadic raids. Newly emancipated (1861) Russian serfs were allowed to take free possession of Siberian land, but they received little state assistance and suffered intolerable hardships.

Russian settlement of Siberia on a large scale began only with the construction (1892-1905) of the Trans-Siberian RR, after which the eastward migratory movement reached major proportions. P. A. Stolypin, the interior minister under Nicholas II, made a special effort to reduce rural overpopulation in European Russia by encouraging Siberian colonization. The railroad also enabled European Russia to obtain cheap grain from W Siberia and butter from the Baraba Steppe. The railroad's needs spurred the development of coal mining and the opening of repair shops. Before the Russian Revolution, however, Siberia contributed only a minute fraction of Russia's industrial output, mainly in the form of gold.

During the Revolution

Siberia played a key role in the Russian civil war of 1918-20 (see Russian Revolution). An autonomous Siberian government formed in early 1918 was soon superseded by the regime of the counterrevolutionary Admiral A. V. Kolchak, who made his capital at Omsk. The White forces were aided by contingents of czarist political exiles and by the Czech Legion, a group of Austrian army deserters who had hoped to fight alongside the czarist army. In Aug., 1918, a U.S., British, French, and Japanese expeditionary force joined the anti-Bolshevik units in Siberia. The main purpose of this allied expedition was probably to prevent German use of Siberian resources in World War I. Most of Siberia was in White hands by late 1918, but Czar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks at Yekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk) that year. Early in 1920, Admiral Kolchak's government collapsed, and he was executed.

Under the Soviets

Under the Soviet government, Siberia, especially the Ural-Kuznetsk complex, underwent dramatic economic development. Under the First Five-Year Plan (1928-33), forced labor was instrumental in mining coal and building the iron and steel complex of the Kuznetsk Basin. In addition, part of the agricultural colonization of Siberia was carried out by the forced resettlement of large segments of the Russian rural population, notably the expropriated kulaks (wealthier peasants). As a result, Siberia's population doubled between 1914 and 1946. Forced labor was also employed extensively in the E Siberian gold mines. Parts of the vast Siberian concentration and forced-labor camp network established by Stalin may still exist, but many of the political prisoners were released by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Siberia's economic development increased dramatically during World War II with the transfer of many industries from European USSR to the other side of the Urals, where they would be less vulnerable to German seizure. Siberian grain was essential in enabling the Soviet Union to resist the German wartime onslaught despite the loss of valuable agricultural areas in W USSR.

Postwar industrialization of Siberia continued at a rapid pace, with special concentration on SW Siberia and the Lake Baykal region. Siberian agriculture, which suffered during the Stalinist collectivization campaign, was revived in the mid-1950s by Premier Khrushchev's "virgin lands" program, focusing on cultivation in the steppes of SW Siberia and N Kazakhstan. The Seven-Year Plan (1958-65) emphasized construction of large thermal and hydroelectric power plants in Siberia and elsewhere.

The resulting destruction of natural areas and the gross waste of resources led to strong environmental opposition. Centered on the issue of the polluting of Lake Baykal, Siberian environmental groups became some of the first organizations to challenge the Communist party's decisions openly. Indigenous peoples also protested the destruction of their autonomous regions. With the fall of the USSR, Siberia became more open to foreign travel and trade, while local Siberians sought to distance themselves from the Russian government in Moscow. The region also suffered population losses that were more substantial than those suffered by Russia as a whole.

Bibliography

See H. Tupper, To the Great Ocean: Siberia and the Trans-Siberian Railway (1965); F. Mowat, The Siberians (1970); G. V. Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century (1943, repr. 1972); L. I. Shinkarev, The Land beyond the Mountains: Siberia and Its People Today (1973); H. DeWindt, The New Siberia (1976); J. M. Kaul, Siberia and the Soviet Economy (1984); A. Wood, Siberia: Problems and Prospects for Regional Development (1987); W. B. Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent (1994).

Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: Geography:

Siberia

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Region of Russia stretching from north-central to northeastern Asia.

  • Known for its vast space, long and severely cold winters, and few inhabitants widely scattered in small settlements, Siberia has been for many centuries a place of political and criminal exile for Russians who anger the government's authorities.
  • As a consequence of Siberia's harsh conditions and its historical function as a place of punishment, to be “sent to Siberia” has become a metaphor for demotion, disgrace, or other forms of status diminution.

Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Siberia

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"Siberian" redirects here. For other uses, see Siberian (disambiguation).
This article is about Siberia as a whole. For the federal district, see Siberian Federal District. For other uses, see Siberia (disambiguation).

Coordinates: 60°0′N 105°0′E / 60°N 105°E / 60; 105

       Siberian Federal District        Geographic Russian Siberia        Historical Siberia (and present Siberia in some usages)

Siberia (pronounced /saɪˈbɪəriə/; Russian: Сибирь, tr. Sibir' [sʲɪˈbirʲ] ( listen)) is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union (USSR) from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th to 19th centuries.

Encompassing much of the Eurasian Steppe, the territory of Siberia extends eastward from the Ural Mountains to the watershed between the Pacific and Arctic drainage basins, and southward from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-central Kazakhstan and the national borders of Mongolia and China.[1] Siberia makes up about 77% of Russia's territory (13.1 million square kilometres), but has only 28% (40 million people) of Russia's population.

Contents

Etymology

The Siberian is a native cat of Siberia; it is also the national cat of Russia

Some sources say that the word Siberia originates from the Turkic for "sleeping land". Another version is that this name was the ancient tribal name of the Sabirs, Turkic nomads later assimilated to Siberian Tatars. The modern usage of the name appeared in the Russian language after the conquest of the Siberian Khanate.[2]

History

Main articles: History of Siberia and Explorers of Siberia

The Siberian Traps were formed by one of the largest known volcanic events of the last 500 million years of Earth's geological history. The event continued for a million years and is considered the likely cause of the "Great Dying" about 250 million years ago,[3] which is estimated to have killed 90% of species existing at the time.[4]

The tower of ostrog, a 17th-century Russian fort, in Yakutsk.

At least three species of humans lived in southern Siberia around 40,000 years ago: H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, and an unknown type of hominin, nicknamed "Woman X" for the time being.[5]

Siberia was occupied by differing groups of nomads such as the Yenets, the Nenets, the Huns, the Iranian Scythians, and the Turkic Uyghurs. The Khan of Sibir in the vicinity of modern Tobolsk was known as a prominent figure who endorsed Kubrat as Khagan in Avaria in 630. The Mongols conquered a large part of this area early in the 13th century. With the breakup of the Golden Horde, the autonomous Siberia Khanate was established in late 14th century. The Yakuts migrated north from their original area of settlement in the vicinity of Lake Baikal under the pressure of the Mongol expansion during the 13th to 15th century.[6]

The growing power of Russia to the west began to undermine the Siberian Khanate in the 16th century. First, groups of traders and Cossacks began to enter the area, and then the Russian army began to set up forts further and further east. Towns like Mangazeya, Tara, Yeniseysk, and Tobolsk sprang up, the last being declared the capital of Siberia. At this time, Sibir was the name of a fortress at Qashlik, near Tobolsk. Gerardus Mercator in a map published in 1595 marks Sibier both as the name of a settlement and of the surrounding territory along a left tributary of the Ob.[7]

By the mid-17th century, the Russian-controlled areas had been extended to the Pacific. The total Russian population of Siberia in 1709 was 230,000.[8]

Siberia remained a mostly undocumented and sparsely populated area. During the following few centuries, only a few exploratory missions and traders entered Siberia. The other group that was sent to Siberia consisted of prisoners exiled from western Russia or Russian-held territories like Poland (see katorga). In the 19th century, around 1.2 million prisoners had been sent to Siberia.[9]

Siberian Cossack family in Novosibirsk.

The first great modern change to Siberia was the Trans-Siberian railway, constructed in 1891–1916. It linked Siberia more closely to the rapidly-industrializing Russia of Nicholas II. From 1801 to 1914, an estimated 7 million settlers moved from European Russia to Siberia, 85% during the quarter-century before World War I.[10] From 1859 to 1917, over half a million people moved to the Russian Far East.[11] Siberia is filled with natural resources and during the 20th century large scale exploitation of these was developed, and industrial towns cropped up throughout the region.[12]

In the times of the Soviet Union, the earlier katorga system of penal labor camps was replaced by the new one, administered by the GULAG state agency.[13] According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, with a further 7 to 8 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union (including entire nationalities in several cases).[14] 516,841 prisoners died in camps from 1941 to 1943[15] due to food shortages caused by World War II. At other periods, mortality was comparatively lower.[16] The size, scope, and scale of the GULAG slave labor camp system remains a subject of much research and debate; for example, Australian professor Stephen Wheatcroft argues that these penal camps were neither as large nor as deadly as is often claimed.[17] Many Gulag camps were positioned in extremely remote areas of north-eastern Siberia. The best known clusters are Sevvostlag (The North-East Camps) along Kolyma river and Norillag near Norilsk, where 69,000 prisoners were kept in 1952.[18] Major industrial cities of the Northern Siberia, such as Norilsk and Magadan, were originally camps built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners.[19]

Geography

Altai, Lake Kutsherla in the Altai Mountains.
The peninsula of Svyatoy Nos, Lake Baikal
Koryaksky volcano towering over Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on Kamchatka Peninsula.
Further information: Geography of Russia

With an area of 13.1 million km² (5.1 million square miles), Siberia makes up roughly 77% of the total area of Russia. Major geographical zones include the West Siberian Plain and the Central Siberian Plateau. Siberia covers almost 10% of Earth's land surface (14,894,000 km²).

Eastern and central Sakha comprise numerous north-south mountain ranges of various ages. These mountains extend up to almost three thousand metres in elevation, but above a few hundred metres they are almost completely devoid of vegetation. The Verkhoyansk Range was extensively glaciated in the Pleistocene, but the climate was too dry for glaciation to extend to low elevations. At these low elevations are numerous valleys, many of them deep, and covered with larch forest except in the extreme north, where tundra dominates. Soils are mainly Turbels and the active layer tends to be less than one metre deep except near rivers.

The highest point in Siberia is the active volcano Klyuchevskaya Sopka, on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Its peak is at 4,649 metres (15,253 ft).

Mountain ranges

Lakes and rivers

Grasslands

Geology

The West Siberian Plain consists mostly of Cenozoic alluvial deposits and is somewhat low-lying. Many of the deposits on this plain result from ice dams; having reversed the flow of the Ob and Yenisei Rivers, so redirecting them into the Caspian Sea (perhaps the Aral as well). It is very swampy and soils are mostly peaty Histosols and, in the treeless northern part, Histels. In the south of the plain, where permafrost is largely absent, rich grasslands that are an extension of the Kazakh Steppe formed the original vegetation (almost all cleared now).

The Central Siberian Plateau is an extremely ancient craton (sometimes named Angaraland) that formed an independent continent before the Permian (see Siberia (continent)). It is exceptionally rich in minerals, containing large deposits of gold, diamonds, and ores of manganese, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt and molybdenum. Much of the area includes the Siberian Traps which is a large igneous province. The massive eruptive period was approximately coincident with the Permian–Triassic extinction event. The volcanic event is said to be the largest known volcanic eruption in Earth's history. Only the extreme northwest was glaciated during the Quaternary, but almost all is under exceptionally deep permafrost and the only tree that can thrive, despite the warm summers, is the deciduous Siberian Larch (Larix sibirica) with its very shallow roots. Outside the extreme northwest, the taiga is dominant; in fact, taiga covers a significant fraction of the entirety of Siberia.[21] Soils here are mainly Turbels, giving way to Spodosols where the active layer becomes thicker and the ice content lower.

Climate

Russia vegetation.png

     polar desert      tundra      alpine tundra      taiga      montane forest
     temperate broadleaf forest      temperate steppe      dry steppe
Vegetation in Siberia is mostly taiga, with a tundra belt on the northern fringe, and a temperate forest zone in the south.

The climate of Siberia varies dramatically. On the north coast, north of the Arctic Circle, there is a very short (about one-month-long) summer.

Taiga near Lake Baikal

Almost all the population lives in the south, along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The climate in this southernmost part is Humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with cold winters but fairly warm summers lasting at least 4 months. Annual average is about 0.5 °C (32.9 °F), January averages about −15 °C (5 °F) and July about 19 °C (66 °F), while daytime temperatures in summer typically are above 20 °C.[22][23] With a reliable growing season, an abundance of sunshine and exceedingly fertile chernozem soils, Southern Siberia is good enough for profitable agriculture, as was proven in the early twentieth century.

The by far most common climate in Siberia is continental subarctic (Koppen Dfc or Dwc), with the annual average temperature about −5 °C (23 °F) and roughly −25 °C (−13 °F) average in January and 17 °C (63 °F) in July,[24] although this varies considerably, with July average about 10 °C at the taiga–tundra ecotone.

Southwesterly winds bring warm air from Central Asia and the Middle East. The climate in West Siberia (Omsk, Novosibirsk) is several degrees warmer than in the East (Irkutsk, Chita), where in the north an extreme winter subarctic climate (Köppen Dfd or Dwd) prevails. With a lowest record temperature of −71.2 °C (−96.2 °F), Oymyakon (Sakha Republic) has the distinction of being the coldest town on Earth. But summer temperatures in other regions reach 38 °C (100 °F). In general, Sakha is the coldest Siberian region, and the basin of the Yana River has the lowest temperatures of all, with permafrost reaching 1,493 metres (4,898 ft). Nevertheless, as far as Imperial Russian plans of settlement were concerned, cold was never viewed as an issue. In the winter, southern Siberia sits near the center of the semi-permanent Siberian High, so winds are usually light in the winter.

Precipitation in Siberia is generally low, exceeding 500 millimetres (20 in) only in Kamchatka where moist winds flow from the Sea of Okhotsk onto high mountains – producing the region's only major glaciers, though the volcanic eruptions, and low summer temperatures allow limited forests to grow. Precipitation is high also in most of Primorye in the extreme south where monsoonal influences can produce quite heavy summer rainfall. Despite the region's notorious cold winters, snowfall is generally quite light, especially in the eastern interior of the region.

Climate data for Novosibirsk, Siberia's largest city
Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year
Average high °C (°F) −12.2
(10.0)		 −10.3
(13.5)		 −2.6
(27.3)		 8.1
(46.6)		 17.5
(63.5)		 24.0
(75.2)		 25.7
(78.3)		 22.2
(72.0)		 16.6
(61.9)		 6.8
(44.2)		 −2.9
(26.8)		 −8.9
(16.0)		 7.0
(44.6)
Daily mean °C (°F) −16.2
(2.8)		 −14.7
(5.5)		 −7.2
(19.0)		 3.2
(37.8)		 11.6
(52.9)		 18.2
(64.8)		 20.2
(68.4)		 17.0
(62.6)		 11.5
(52.7)		 3.4
(38.1)		 −6
(21.2)		 −12.7
(9.1)		 2.4
(36.3)
Average low °C (°F) −20.1
(−4.2)		 −19.1
(−2.4)		 −11.8
(10.8)		 −1.7
(28.9)		 5.6
(42.1)		 12.3
(54.1)		 14.7
(58.5)		 11.7
(53.1)		 6.4
(43.5)		 0.0
(32.0)		 −9.1
(15.6)		 −16.4
(2.5)		 −2.3
(27.9)
Precipitation mm (inches) 19
(0.75)		 14
(0.55)		 15
(0.59)		 24
(0.94)		 36
(1.42)		 58
(2.28)		 72
(2.83)		 66
(2.6)		 44
(1.73)		 38
(1.5)		 32
(1.26)		 24
(0.94)		 442
(17.4)
Source: [25]

Researchers, including Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University and Judith Marquand at Oxford University, warn that Western Siberia has begun to thaw as a result of global warming. The frozen peat bogs in this region may hold billions of tons of methane gas, which may be released into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas 22 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.[26] In 2008, a research expedition for the American Geophysical Union detected levels of methane up to 100 times above normal in the Siberian Arctic, likely being released by methane clathrates being released by holes in a frozen 'lid' of seabed permafrost, around the outfall of the Lena River and the area between the Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea.[27][28]

Borders and administrative division

Map of the most populated area of Siberia with clickable city names (SVG).
Comparison of the nine biggest Siberian cities' growth in the 20th century.

The term "Siberia" has a long history. Its meaning has gradually changed during ages. Historically, Siberia was defined as the whole part of Russia to the east of Ural Mountains, including the Russian Far East. According to this definition, Siberia extended eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific coast, and southward from the Arctic Ocean to the border of Russian Central Asia and the national borders of both Mongolia and China.[29]

Soviet-era sources (Great Soviet Encyclopedia and others)[30] and modern Russian ones[31] usually define Siberia as a region extending eastward from the Ural Mountains to the watershed between Pacific and Arctic drainage basins, and southward from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-central Kazakhstan and the national borders of both Mongolia and China. By this definition, Siberia includes the federal subjects of the Siberian Federal District, and some of the Urals Federal District, as well as Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, which is a part of the Far Eastern Federal District. Geographically, this definition includes subdivisions of several other subjects of Urals and Far Eastern federal districts, but they are not included administratively. This definition excludes Sverdlovsk Oblast and Chelyabinsk Oblast, both of which are included in some wider definitions of Siberia.

Other sources may use either a somewhat wider definition that states the Pacific coast, not the watershed, is the eastern boundary (thus including the whole Russian Far East)[32] or a somewhat narrower one that limits Siberia to the Siberian Federal District (thus excluding all subjects of other districts).[33] In Russian, the word for Siberia is never used as a substitute for the name of the federal district.

Federal subjects of Siberia (GSE)
subject administrative center
Urals Federal District
Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug Khanty-Mansiysk
Kurgan Oblast Kurgan
Tyumen Oblast Tyumen
Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug Salekhard
Siberian Federal District
Altai Krai Barnaul
Altai Republic Gorno-Altaysk
Buryat Republic Ulan-Ude
Chita Oblast Chita
Irkutsk Oblast Irkutsk
Republic of Khakassia Abakan
Kemerovo Oblast Kemerovo
Krasnoyarsk Krai Krasnoyarsk
Novosibirsk Oblast Novosibirsk
Omsk Oblast Omsk
Tomsk Oblast Tomsk
Tuva Republic Kyzyl
Far Eastern Federal District
Sakha (Yakutia) Republic Yakutsk
Federal subjects of Siberia (in wide sense)
subject administrative center
Far Eastern Federal District
Amur Oblast Blagoveshchensk
Chukotka Autonomous Okrug Anadyr
Jewish Autonomous Oblast Birobidzhan
Kamchatka Krai Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky
Khabarovsk Krai Khabarovsk
Magadan Oblast Magadan
Primorsky Krai Vladivostok
Sakhalin Oblast Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk
Urals Federal District
Chelyabinsk Oblast Chelyabinsk
Sverdlovsk Oblast Yekaterinburg

Major cities

Major cities include:

Economy

Russia is a key oil and gas supplier to much of Europe.

Siberia is extraordinarily rich in minerals, containing ores of almost all economically valuable metals—largely because of the absence of Quaternary glaciation outside highland areas. It has some of the world's largest deposits of nickel, gold, lead, coal, molybdenum, gypsum, diamonds, diopside, silver and zinc, as well as extensive unexploited resources of oil and natural gas. The Khanty-Mansiysk region is home to 70% of Russia's developed oil fields.[34] Russia contains about 40% of the world's known resources of nickel at the Norilsk deposit in Siberia. Norilsk Nickel is the world's biggest nickel and palladium producer.[35]

Agriculture is severely restricted by the short growing season of most of the region. However, in the southwest where soils are exceedingly fertile black earths and the climate is a little more moderate, there is extensive cropping of wheat, barley, rye and potatoes, along with the grazing of large numbers of sheep and cattle. Elsewhere food production, owing to the poor fertility of the podzolic soils and the extremely short growing seasons, is restricted to the herding of reindeer in the tundra — which has been practiced by natives for over 10,000 years. Siberia has the world's largest forests. Timber remains an important source of revenue, even though many forests in the east have been logged much more rapidly than they are able to recover. The Sea of Okhotsk is one of the two or three richest fisheries in the world owing to its cold currents and very large tidal ranges, and thus Siberia produces over 10% of the world's annual fish catch, although fishing has declined somewhat since the collapse of the USSR.[citation needed]

Demographics

Main article: Demographics of Siberia
Distribution of ethnic groups in the Soviet Union in 1974.

Siberia is home to approximately 38 million people.[36] It has a population density of about three people per square kilometer. Most Siberians are Russians and Russified Ukrainians. There are approximately 400,000 Russified ethnic Germans living in Siberia.[37] Such Mongol and Turkic groups as Buryats, Tuvinians, Yakuts, and Siberian Tatars[38] lived in Siberia originally, and descendants of these peoples still live there.[39] The Buryats number 445,175, which makes them the largest ethnic minority group in Siberia.[40] According to the 2002 census there are 443,852 Yakuts.[41] Other ethnic groups include Kets, Evenks, Chukchis, Koryaks, and Yukaghirs. See the Northern indigenous peoples of Russia article for more. Officially, 40,000 Chinese live in the Russian Far East, but the actual figure is believed to be much higher.[42]

About 70% of Siberia's people live in cities. Most city people live in apartments. Many people in rural areas live in simple, but more spacious, log houses. Novosibirsk is the largest city in Siberia, with a population of about 1.5 million. Tobolsk, Tomsk, Tyumen, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk and Omsk are the older, historical centers.

Religion

A view along Turgenev Street toward the Spaso-Preobrazhenskiy Cathedral in Khabarovsk.
See also: Shamanistic cultures in Siberia

There are a variety of beliefs throughout Siberia, including Orthodox Christianity, other denominations of Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism and Islam.[43] An estimated 70,000 Jews live in Siberia.[44] The predominant group is the Russian Orthodox Church.

Siberia is regarded as the locus classicus of shamanism and polytheism is popular.[45] These native religions date back hundreds of years. The vast terrority of Siberia has many different local traditions of gods. These include: Ak Ana, Anapel, Bugady Musun, Kara Khan, Khaltesh-Anki, Kini'je, Ku'urkil, Nga, Nu'tenut, Numi-Torem, Numi-Turum, Pon, Pugu, Todote, Toko'yoto, Tomam, Xaya Iccita, Zonget. Places with sacred areas include Olkhon, an island in Lake Baikal.

Transport

Many cities in Siberia, such as Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, cannot be reached by road, as there is virtually none connecting from other major cities in Russia or Asia. The best way to tour Siberia is through the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Trans-Siberian Railway operates from Moscow in the West to Vladivostok in the East. Cities not nearby the Railway are best reached by air or the separate Baikal-Amur-Railway (BAM).

References

  1. ^ словари. "Great Soviet Encyclopedia (in Russian)". Encycl.yandex.ru. http://encycl.yandex.ru/dict/bse/article/00070/76500.htm?text=%D0%A1%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%80%D1%8C. Retrieved 2010-05-15. 
  2. ^ Vasily Surikov. The Conquest of Siberia by Yermak. http://www.tanais.info/art/en/surikov6more.html
  3. ^ "Yellowstone's Super Sister". Discovery Channel.
  4. ^ Benton M J (2005). When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0500285732. 
  5. ^ "DNA identifies new ancient human dubbed 'X-woman'". BBC News. March 25, 2010.
  6. ^ "Investigating the effects of prehistoric migrations in Siberia: genetic variation and the origins of Yakuts.". Hum Genet. 2006 Oct;120(3):334-53. Epub 2006 Jul 15.
  7. ^ Asia ex magna Orbis terrae descriptione Gerardi Mercatoris desumpta, studio & industria G.M. Iunioris
  8. ^ Sean C. Goodlett. "Russia’s Expansionist Policies I. The Conquest of Siberia". Falcon.fsc.edu. http://falcon.fsc.edu/sgoodlett/courses/hist1100/lect08.html. Retrieved 2010-05-15. 
  9. ^ Carl De Keyzer, Zona at the Impressions Gallery, BBC
  10. ^ The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War
  11. ^ "The Russian Far East: A History". John J. Stephan (1996). Stanford University Press. p.62. ISBN 0804727015
  12. ^ Fiona Hill, Russia — Coming In From the Cold?, The Globalist, 23 February 2004
  13. ^ "The unknown gulag: the lost world of Stalin's special settlements". Lynne Viola (2007). Oxford University Press US. p.3. ISBN 0195187695
  14. ^ Robert Conquest in Victims of Stalinism: A Comment. Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 49, No. 7 (Nov., 1997), pp. 1317-1319 states:"We are all inclined to accept the Zemskov totals (even if not as complete) with their 14 million intake to Gulag 'camps' alone, to which must be added 4-5 million going to Gulag 'colonies', to say nothing of the 3.5 million already in, or sent to, 'labour settlements'. However taken, these are surely 'high' figures."
  15. ^ Zemskov, Gulag, Sociologičeskije issledovanija, 1991, No. 6, pp. 14-15.
  16. ^ Stéphane Courtois, Mark Kramer. Livre noir du Communisme: crimes, terreur, répression. Harvard University Press, 1999. p.206. ISBN 0-674-07608-7
  17. ^ Stephen Wheatcroft. The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930-45. Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 48, No. 8 (Dec., 1996), pp. 1319-1353
  18. ^ Stéphane Courtois, Mark Kramer. Livre noir du Communisme: crimes, terreur, répression. Harvard University Press, 1999. p.239. ISBN 0-674-07608-7
  19. ^ "Gulag: a History of the Soviet Camps". Arlindo-correia.com. http://www.arlindo-correia.com/041003.html. Retrieved 2009-01-06. 
  20. ^ "Altai: Saving the Pearl of Siberia". http://www.pacificenvironment.org/article.php?list=type&type=83. Retrieved 2006-11-30. 
  21. ^ C. Michael Hogan. 2011. Taiga. eds. M.McGinley & C.Cleveland. Encyclopedia of Earth. National Council for Science and the Environment. Washington DC
  22. ^ "Novosibirsk climate". Worldclimate.com. 2007-02-04. http://www.worldclimate.com/cgi-bin/data.pl?ref=N55E082+1102+29634W. Retrieved 2010-05-15. 
  23. ^ "Omsk climate". Worldclimate.com. 2007-02-04. http://www.worldclimate.com/cgi-bin/data.pl?ref=N54E073+1202+0004115G2. Retrieved 2010-05-15. 
  24. ^ "Kazachengoye climate". Worldclimate.com. 2007-02-04. http://www.worldclimate.com/cgi-bin/data.pl?ref=N56E107+1102+30337W. Retrieved 2010-05-15. 
  25. ^ "Гидрометцентр России" (in Russian). Archived from the original on June 27, 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080627063054/http://meteoinfo.ru/NovosibirskClimat. Retrieved January 8, 2009. 
  26. ^ Ian Sample "Warming hits 'tipping point'". The Guardian, August 11, 2005
  27. ^ Connor, Steve (September 23, 2008). "Exclusive: The methane time bomb". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-the-methane-time-bomb-938932.html. Retrieved 2008-10-03. 
  28. ^ N. Shakhova, I. Semiletov, A. Salyuk, D. Kosmach, and N. Bel’cheva (2007), Methane release on the Arctic East Siberian shelf, Geophysical Research Abstracts, 9, 01071
  29. ^ Малый энциклопедический словарь Брокгауза и Ефрона (The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, in Russian)
  30. ^ Сибирь—Большая советская энциклопедия (The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in Russian)
  31. ^ Сибирь- Словарь современных географических названий (in Russian)
  32. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. "Siberia-Britannica online encyclopedia". Britannica.com. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9067598/Siberia. Retrieved 2010-05-15. 
  33. ^ "Siberia", The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition
  34. ^ The City Built on Oil: EU-Russia Summit Visits Siberia's Boomtown, Spiegel
  35. ^ "Norilsk raises 2010 nickel output forecast". Reuters.
  36. ^ "China's Growing Interests in Siberia". Der Spiegel. May 6, 2011
  37. ^ "Siberian Germans". Everyculture.com. http://www.everyculture.com/Russia-Eurasia-China/Siberian-Germans-Orientation.html. Retrieved 2010-05-15. 
  38. ^ According to the 2002 census there are 500,000 Tatars in Siberia, but 300,000 of them are Volga Tatars who settled in Siberia during periods of colonization.[1]
  39. ^ "Ethnographic map of Siberia". Hunmagyar.org. http://www.hunmagyar.org/turan/ssib.html. Retrieved 2010-05-15. 
  40. ^ World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Russian Federation : Buryats.
  41. ^ World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Russian Federation : Yakuts.
  42. ^ The Chinese are coming ... to Russia. Asia Times. May 27, 2006.
  43. ^ Russian Embassy website — Religion in Russia[dead link]
  44. ^ "Planting Jewish roots in Siberia". Fjc.ru. 2004-05-24. http://www.fjc.ru/news/newsArticle.asp?AID=136974. Retrieved 2010-05-15. 
  45. ^ Hoppál 2005:13

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Translations:

Siberia

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - Siberien

Français (French)
n. - Sibérie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Sibirien

Português (Portuguese)
n. - Sibéria

Español (Spanish)
n. - Siberia

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
西伯利亚

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 西伯利亞

한국어 (Korean)
시베리아 (러시아 명은 Siber), 지겨운 근무지

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮סיביר‬

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Sib. (abbreviation)
Rubtsovsk
steppes (Geography)

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