Siberia
▪ region, Asia
Russian Sibir
vast region of Russia and northern Kazakhstan, constituting all of northern Asia. Siberia extends from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east and southward from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-central Kazakhstan and the borders of Mongolia and China.
All but the extreme southwestern area of Siberia lies in Russia. In Russian usage the administrative areas on the eastern flank of the Urals, along the Pacific seaboard, and within Kazakhstan are excluded from Siberia. The total area of Siberia in the wider sense is about 5,207,900 square miles (13,488,500 square km); in the narrower Russian definition the area is 2,529,000 square miles (6,550,000 square km), consisting of two economic planning regions, Eastern and Western Siberia. Siberia also contains the (Russian) republics of Sakha (Yakutia), Buryatia, and Tuva (Tyva).
Siberia falls into four major geographic regions, all of great extent. In the west, abutting the Ural Mountains, is the huge West Siberian Plain, drained by the Ob and Yenisey rivers (Yenisey River), varying little in relief, and containing wide tracts of swampland. East of the Yenisey River is central Siberia, a vast area that consists mainly of plains and the Central Siberian Plateau. Farther east the basin of the Lena River separates central Siberia from the complex series of mountain ranges, upland massifs, and intervening basins that make up northeastern Siberia (i.e., the Russian Far East). The smallest of the four regions is the Baikal area, which is centred on Lake Baikal in the south-central part of Siberia.
Siberia, its name derived from the Tatar term for “sleeping land,” is notorious for the length and severity of its almost snowless winters: in Sakha, minimum temperatures of −90 °F (−68 °C) have been recorded. The climate becomes increasingly harsh eastward, while precipitation also diminishes. Major vegetation zones extend east-west across the whole area—tundra in the north; swampy forest, or taiga, over most of Siberia; and forest-steppe and steppe in southwestern Siberia and in the intermontane basins of the south.
The mineral resources of Siberia are enormous; particularly notable are its deposits of coal, petroleum, natural gas, diamonds, iron ore, and gold. Both mining and manufacturing underwent rapid development in Siberia in the second half of the 20th century, and steel, aluminum, and machinery are now among the chief products. Agriculture is confined to the more southerly portions of Siberia and produces wheat, rye, oats, and sunflowers.
It is still uncertain whether humans first came to Siberia from Europe or from central and eastern Asia. Evidence of Paleolithic settlement is abundant in southern Siberia, which, after participating in the Bronze Age, came under Chinese (from 1000 BC) and then under Turkic-Mongol (3rd century BC) influence. Southern Siberia was part of the Mongols' khanate of the Golden Horde from the 10th to the mid-15th century.
Before Russian colonization began in the late 16th century, Siberia was inhabited by a large number of small ethnic groups whose members subsisted either as hunter-gatherers or as pastoral nomads relying on domestic reindeer. The largest of these groups, however, the Sakha (Yakut), raised cattle and horses. The various groups belonged to different linguistic stocks: Turkic (Turkic peoples) (Sakha, Siberian Tatars), Manchu-Tungus ( Evenk [Evenki], Even), Finno-Ugric (Khanty, Mansi), and Mongolic ( Buryat), among others.
The Russian occupation began in 1581 with a Cossack expedition that overthrew the small khanate of Sibir (from which is derived the name of the entire area). During the late 16th and 17th centuries, Russian trappers and fur traders and Cossack explorers penetrated throughout Siberia to the Bering Sea. They built fortified towns in strategic locations, among them Tyumen (1585), Tomsk (1604), Krasnoyarsk (1628), and Irkutsk (1652). Most of Siberia thus gradually came under the rule of Russia between the early 17th century and the mid-18th century, although the Treaty of Nerchinsk (Nerchinsk, Treaty of) (1689) with China halted the Russian advance into the Amur River basin until the 1860s. The impact of Russian expansion upon the indigenous peoples was twofold; the smaller and more primitive tribes succumbed to exploitation and imported diseases, while larger groups such as the Sakha and Buryat adjusted better and began to profit from the material benefits of colonization. The Russians generally did not interfere with their internal institutions and way of life, and most of the native inhabitants eventually became nominal Christians.
At first the area's Russian rulers collected tribute, which was paid by the native inhabitants in furs as it had been paid to the Mongols. Later Russian agricultural colonists arrived to feed the local Russian administrative personnel. With the decline of the fur trade, the mining of silver and other metals became the main economic activity in Siberia in the 18th century.
Although Siberia was used as a place of exile for criminals and political prisoners, Russian settlement (by state peasants and runaway serfs) remained insignificant until the building of the Trans-Siberian Railroad (1891–1905), after which large-scale in-migration occurred. Modern farming methods were introduced into southern Siberia to grow cereal grains and produce dairy products, and coal mining was also started in several locations. During the Russian Civil War (1917–20) an anti-Bolshevik government headed by Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak (Kolchak, Aleksandr Vasilyevich) held much of Siberia until 1920; virtually all of Siberia was reincorporated into the new Soviet state by 1922, however.
From the first Soviet Five-Year Plan (1928–32), industrial growth was considerable, with coal-mining and iron-and-steel complexes begun in the Kuznetsk Coal Basin and along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, partly through the use of forced labour. Forced-labour camps spread throughout Siberia during the 1930s, the most important being the camp complexes in the extreme northeast and along the lower Yenisey River, whose inmates were used mostly in mining operations. During World War II, owing to the evacuation of many factories from the western portions of the Soviet Union, Siberia (together with the Urals) became the industrial backbone of the Soviet war effort for a few years. Agriculture, by contrast, suffered greatly from collectivization in 1930–33 and was neglected until the Virgin Lands Campaign of 1954–56, when southwestern Siberia (including northern Kazakhstan) was the principal area to be opened to cultivation.
The late 1950s and '60s saw major industrial development take place, notably the opening up of large oil and natural gas fields in western Siberia and the construction of giant hydroelectric stations at locations along the Angara, Yenisey, and Ob rivers. A network of oil and gas pipelines was built between the new fields and the Urals, and new industries were also established, such as aluminum refining and cellulose pulp making. The construction of the BAM (Baikal-Amur Magistral) railroad between Ust-Kut, on the Lena River, and Komsomolsk-na-Amure, on the Amur, a distance of 2,000 miles (3,200 km), was completed in 1980.