Siberia

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This article refers to Siberia as a whole; for specific information about the federal district, see Siberian Federal District. For other uses, see Siberia (disambiguation).
Siberian Federal District (darker red) and the broadest definition of Siberia (lighter red).
Siberian Federal District (darker red) and the broadest definition of Siberia (lighter red).
The arctic northeast of Siberia.
The arctic northeast of Siberia.
Udachnaya pipe
Udachnaya pipe

Siberia (Russian: Сиби́рь, Sibir; Tatar: Seber) is a vast region of Russia constituting almost all of Northern Asia and comprising a large part of the Euro-Asian Steppe. It extends eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, and southward from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-central Kazakhstan and the borders of both Mongolia and China. All but the extreme south-western area of Siberia lies in Russia, and it makes up about 56% of that country's territory.

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[edit] Origin of the name

Some sources say that it originates from the Turkic for "sleeping land."[1]. Another version is that this name was the tribal name of Sibirs, Eurasian nomads, later assimilated to Siberian Tatars. Dr. Pamela Kyle Crossley, a professor of history at Dartmouth College, asserts that the Russians named Siberia after the Sibe/Xibe. The modern meaning of the name appeared in Russian language after the conquest of Siberia Khanate.

[edit] Administrative divisions

Map of the largest Siberian cities and towns with clickable names (SVG)
Map of the largest Siberian cities and towns with clickable names (SVG)

Geographically, Siberia includes the federal subjects of the Urals Federal District, Siberian Federal District and Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, which is a part of the Far Eastern Federal District (see a list of subjects below). From the historical point of view, the whole Russian Far East is considered a segment of Siberia.

Comparison of the nine biggest Siberian cities growth in the 20th century
Comparison of the nine biggest Siberian cities growth in the 20th century

Major cities include:

See also a map of the thirty largest Siberian cities with links to Wikipedia.

[edit] History

Main article: History of Siberia
WWI Refugees on Siberian railroad, 1918
WWI Refugees on Siberian railroad, 1918

Siberia was occupied by differing groups of nomads such as the Yenets, the Nenets, the Huns, and the 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 area was conquered by the Mongols in the 13th century and eventually became the autonomous Siberian Khanate.

The growing power of Russia to the west began to undermine the 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 latter being declared the capital of Siberia. By the mid-17th century, the Russian-controlled areas had been extended to the Pacific.

Siberia remained a mostly unexplored and uninhabited area. During the following few centuries, only a few exploratory missions and traders inhabited Siberia. The other group that was sent to Siberia consisted of prisoners exiled from western Russia or Russian-held territories like Poland (see katorga).

The first great change to Siberia was the Trans-Siberian railway, constructed in 1891–1903. It linked Siberia more closely to the rapidly-industrializing Russia of Nicholas II. Siberia is filled with natural resources and during the 20th century these were developed, and industrial towns cropped up throughout the region.

[edit] Katorga and Gulag

Russia, later the Soviet Union, operated a series of labor camps, known as the Gulag. This became so frequent that "Siberia" came to be used as metaphor for exile and punishment: "a bureaucratic Siberia" [2]

By analogy, one working-class district of downtown Stockholm, Sweden, in the late 19th century began being called Sibirien (Siberia) referring to its low-cost tenement houses being built in what was then an outskirts area. The name stuck, and has become part of Stockholm urban lore, though the district is in fact thoroughly inner-city and has been gentrified in the last twenty years (it is now expensive to own an apartment there). (Swedish)

[edit] Geography and geology

N60-90, E60-90 N60-90, E90-120 N60-90, E120-150
N30-60, E60-90 N30-60, E90-120 N30-60, E120-150

With an area of 10,007,400 km², Siberia makes up roughly 58% of the total area of Russia. Major geographical zones include the West Siberian Plain and the Central Siberian Plateau.

The West Siberian Plain consists mostly of Cenozoic alluvial deposits and is extraordinarily low-lying, so much so that a rise of fifty metres in sea level would cause all land between the Arctic Ocean and Novosibirsk to be inundated. 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).

Russia shares a border with China and Mongolia in southern Siberia.
Russia shares a border with China and Mongolia in southern Siberia.
Mount Belukha in Altai Mountains
Mount Belukha in Altai Mountains
Siberia
Siberia

The Central Siberian Plateau is an extremely ancient craton (sometimes called 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 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. Soils here are mainly Turbels, giving way to Spodosols where the active layer becomes thicker and the ice content lower.

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 devoid of vegetation to an extraordinary degree. 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 a meter deep except near rivers.

[edit] Climate

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

Almost all the population lives in the south, along the Trans-Siberian railroad. The climate here is continental subarctic, with the annual average temperature about 0°C (32 F) and roughly −15°C (-5 F) average in January and +20°C (68 F) in July.[3] 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 southwesterly winds of Southern Siberia 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). With a lowest record temperature of -71.2°C (-96.1 F), Oymyakon (Sakha Republic) has the distinction of being the coldest town on Earth. But summer temperature in separate region reaches +36...+38°C. 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 (4,900 feet). Nevertheless, as far as Imperial Russia plans of settlement are concerned, the 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 500mm (20 inches) only in Kamchatka where moist winds flow from the Sea of Okhotsk onto high mountains - producing the region's only major glaciers - and in most of Primorye in the extreme south where monsoonal influences can produce quite heavy summer rainfall. Despite the region's notorious cold, snowfall is generally extremely light, especially in the east of the region.

[edit] Lakes and rivers

[edit] Impact craters

Popigai crater
Popigai crater

[edit] Mountain ranges

[edit] Grasslands

The Siberian plain seen from the Trans-Siberian railway outside Tatarskaya.
The Siberian plain seen from the Trans-Siberian railway outside Tatarskaya.

[edit] Economy

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, molybdenum, diamonds, silver and zinc, as well as extensive unexploited resources of oil and natural gas. Most of these are in the cold and remote eastern part of the region, with the result that extraction has proven difficult and began on a large scale only after Stalin came to power and developed slave-labour camps to deal with the difficulty of attracting labour to such unpleasant climates.

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 ten thousand years. Siberia has the world's largest forests, so that timber is an important source of revenue - depsite the fact that 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 extremely large tidal ranges, and thus Siberia produces over 10 percent of the world's annual fish catch, though fishing has declined somewhat since the collapse of the USSR.

Industry, developed only as a result of World War II making industries in European Russia risky due to the threat posed by Nazi armies, has declined greatly since the collapse of the USSR. At one point there were huge factories in Western Siberia and many even around Lake Baikal but these have largely ceased operation since the USSR collapsed.

[edit] Demographics

Main article: Demographics of Siberia

Siberia has population density of about three people per square kilometer. Most Siberians are Russians. Ethnic Russians are descended from Slavs who lived in Eastern Europe four hundred years ago. Such Mongol and Turkic groups as Buryats, Tuvinians, and Yakuts lived in Siberia originally, and descendants of these peoples still live there. Other ethnic groups include Kets, Evenks, Chukchis, Koryaks, and Yukaghirs. See the Northern indigenous peoples of Russia article for more.

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, Irkutsk and Omsk are the older, historical centers.

[edit] Religion

Main article: Religion in Siberia

Like throughout all of Russia, religion has an important role in Siberian life. There is a variety of beliefs throughout Siberia including Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and denominations of Christianity.[5] The predominant group is the Russian Orthodox Church. However, native religion dates 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.

See also Shamanistic cultures in Siberia.

[edit] Trans-Siberian Railway

The best way to tour Siberia is through the Trans-Siberian Railway. The train has 2nd class 4-berth compartments, 1st class 2-berth compartments, and a restaurant car.

[edit] Peoples

[edit] References

  1. ^ Healing oils from pristine Siberian wilderness
  2. ^ What Became of the CIA?, by Gabriel Schoenfeld. Also see this
  3. ^ Historical Weather for Novosibirsk, Russia. weatherbase.com Last accesed November 6, 2006.
  4. ^ Altai: Saving the Pearl of Siberia. Retrieved on 2006-11-30.
  5. ^ Russian Embassy website - Religion in Russia

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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