The taiga gradually passed into a mixed forest zone of poplars, aspens, elms, maples, and limes, which in turn thinned out toward the southern steppes, rich in arable and pastureland. In places the Western Siberian steppe was as fertile as the black earth of the Ukraine. On its margins, however, it turned to sand, and for 2,000 miles Southern Siberia skirted a “land of summer snow” where thick deposits of salt broiled beneath a desert sun.
Siberia’s temperature variations, indeed, touched both extremes, not only north and south, but within the same locale. Even in the upper latitudes, brief summers could be almost as hot as the winters were severe, and at Oimyakon, “the world’s pole of cold,” on the Upper Indigirka River, temperatures could drop to -90 degrees, yet climb toward 100 in July.
Interrupting the broad horizontal zones of tundra, taiga, and steppe were several great mountain ranges – the Altai, Sayan, Yablonovy, Stanovoy, and Verkhoyansk, and the volcanic system of Kamchatka. The Altai swept from the West Siberian Plain to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, and the Sayan from the Altai to Lake Baikal. The Yablonovy, commencing in Mongolia, crossed the frontier and divided Transbaikalia (between Lake Baikal and the upper Amur) into two great terraces of almost equal size. The Verkhoyansk formed a huge arc east of and parallel to the Lena River that reached to the Laptev Sea. In the Far East, the Stanovoy arose on the Chinese frontier, closely followed the Okhotsk Sea coast northward, and with its white peaks marked the southern boundary of Kamchatka at the head of the Penzhina Gulf. Kamchatka in turn was divided by a spine of rugged volcanic summits that formed an almost continuous ridge, culminating in “the monarch of Siberian mountains,” the Klyuchevskaya Volcano, towering to 16,000 feet. Along the whole Far Eastern coast, in fact, various ranges broke off into the sea in great shattered headlands and cliffs, where violent earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other cataclysms and deluges of the past had severed them from summits to which they had once been joined on the Northwest Pacific Coast. In between were left chains of volcanic islands whose bare, precipitous coasts appeared similarly sundered and torn.
From the mountains of Southern Siberia, the glaciers of the Altai, and the borderlands of Mongolia arose Siberia’s three great river systems – the Ob, the Yenisey, and the Lena – each among the mightiest and most majestic rivers in the world. Giving off numerous lateral tributaries to the east and west, they wound northward for thousands of miles toward the Arctic to ultimately release their torrents into ice-laden seas. Siberia’s fourth great river was the Amur, which formed on the Mongolian Plateau south of Lake Baikal, and flowed east-by-northeast in a series of great bends to its outlet on the coast of the Pacific between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. Opposite the Amur’s mouth lay the island of Sakhalin, and to Sakhalin’s south and east the Kurile Island chain.
Still other rivers of importance lay along the Arctic coast – the Indigirka, Yana, and Kolyma – and (toward the Bering Sea) the Anadyr. Extending offshore, or scattered through the Arctic seas, were also fantastic islands and huge appendages of land, like Novaya Zemlya; the Yamal Peninsula (“ultimate land,” in the language of the Samoyeds); the Taimyr Peninsula (the size of California and the northernmost extension of Eurasia); and island clusters like the Lyakhov and New Siberian where the soil was nothing but “a mixture of sand and ice and ivory and the petrified remains of giant prehistoric trees.”9
All this was Siberia.†
In 1928, a peasant digging a cellar for his house in Siberia’s northeast discovered an underground Paleolithic home in which mammoth tusks and sundry animal bones, “pressed down at the base with limestone plates,”10 furnished the foundation. Reindeer antlers meshed together provided scaffolding for the roof, and in the middle of the dwelling was a hearth with an oval grave, where a child had been elaborately interred. Among the many ornaments found with the remains were a headband resembling “the well-known diadems worn by ancient kings,”11 and a carved pendant depicting a bird in flight. Examination of the skull revealed a double row of teeth, a defect that may account for the child’s sepulchral splendor, since deformity was once associated with supernatural powers.
Nearly prehistoric settlements have also been discovered from the Ob to the Transbaikal, and the remnants of Neolithic abodes exist all over Siberia. Inscriptions and pictographs on the cliffs and stratified palisades of the Yenisey River are of great antiquity, as are rock drawings along the Lena River that include a giant horse, wild bison, and two elk. Such finds offer a partial (if indeterminate) glimpse into the story of Siberia’s remote past.
During the Pleistocene Epoch (when mountain glaciers covered much of the territory and the whole of its northwestern plain was locked in a glacial sheet), “huge, stooping mammoths, with yellowish upturned tusks,”12 wandered up from northern India into South-Central Siberia, where they browsed upon the greenery and flowers that had begun to come forth in patches across the steeply rolling terrain. In that prehistoric animal kingdom were also the wooly rhinoceros, wild bison, saber-toothed tiger, and steppe land antelope or saiga, the last of which survives in Central Asia to this day.
As the glaciers receded, vast inland seas formed and trees flourished in the Arctic, for the stomachs of some of the recovered mammoths contain vegetation (like buttercups) now growing far to the south of where they died. Over many thousands of years, Siberia’s landscape changed. The seas disappeared, there was a reelevation of the land, and major rivers formed. People began to settle along their banks and make for themselves some kind of home. The wolf was domesticated into the dog, timber used for dwellings, and the Siberian hunter improved his stone tools, fashioning bows and arrows out of wood, harpoons out of reindeer antlers, and fishhooks out of bone. He also began to experiment with different kinds of arrowheads and spears, and along the rivers learned how to make light and highly maneuverable birchbark canoes. By the end of the Neolithic period, the whole of northern Asia was inhabited, most densely around Lake Baikal in the heart of the taiga. From the forests the hunter ventured northward into the tundra, reached the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and set up collapsible, tall conical skin tents – a prototype of the familiar tepee that later spread to America’s shores.
The first metal tools appeared around 2000 b.c. – knives, needles, and fishhooks cold-forged out of native copper found by hunters in the mountains. Much later, the natives developed molds made of clay and used them to cast knives and swords. By the beginning of the second millennium b.c., tribes of cattle breeders roamed the steppes of Western Siberia and began to cultivate the soil, using a stone hoe and grinding the grain by hand. Horse cultures also developed, and, during the Bronze Age, the people living in the Minusinsk Basin (an oasis in the upper part of the Yenisey River Valley between the Sayan and Altai mountains) acquired such skill in metalwork that the collection of bronze implements from their burial mounds is said to give “a more complete representation of the progress of art in the bronze age, and of the transition from the use of bronze to the use of iron, than is to be found anywhere else in the world.”13
In the sixth century a.d., a people of Turkic stock founded a powerful empire centered in Mongolia, dominated by the Uighurs, who headed a tribal confederation known in Chinese annals as the Nine Clans. They carried on trade with China and spread through the Yenisey Valley, where they built great tumuli, adorned with monoliths, over their dead. Although originally pastoral nomads, the Uighurs became fine agriculturists, irrigating wide tracts of land by means of canals that more modern settlers have rediscovered and utilized. In the ninth century, however, another Turkic people, the Kirghiz, coming from the upper reaches of the Yenisey, put an end to their power. Of Europoid ethnic stock, the Yenisey Kirghiz were able farmers, skilled in handicrafts, including metalware, and carried on a brisk trade with the Tibetans and Chinese. They also had a runic system of writing, which survives in fragmentary inscriptions on clay vessels, tombstones, and stone idols decorated with symbols of the sun.