93 Fun Facts About Siberia

The Mir mine at Mirny, a Siberian pit more than 500 m deep, was dug to reach what?

Diamonds: geologists found the deposit in 1955, the town of Mirny was founded beside it the same year, and the pit became the Soviet Union's largest diamond mine before work moved underground.

If Siberia were a country it would be the world's largest; which country would rank second by total area?

Canada, at about 10 million square km, would trail Siberia's 13.1 million, while the Russia left west of the Urals, some 4 million, would fall to seventh, behind Australia.

What is the most populous city in Siberia?

Novosibirsk was founded in 1893 where the Trans-Siberian Railway was to bridge the Ob, and it grew so fast that it passed a million people in under 70 years; it is now Russia's third-largest city.

Which tennis star was born in the Siberian town of Nyagan in 1987?

Maria Sharapova moved to Florida as a small child after Martina Navratilova spotted her talent and pointed her family to an academy there; at 17 she beat Serena Williams to win Wimbledon.

The Siberian tiger is also commonly named after which river?

The Amur flows through the Russian Far East, the cat's last stronghold; despite its famous name, the Siberian tiger does not live in most of Siberia at all.

What is thought to have flattened 2,000 square km of forest near the Tunguska River in June 1908?

An asteroid exploding in the air, some 5 to 10 km up, is the leading explanation: the blast flattened millions of trees but, because nothing solid reached the ground, it left no crater.

The craters that began appearing on Siberia's Yamal Peninsula in the 2010s are thought to be blowouts of which gas?

Methane is the prime suspect: gas builds up under the warming tundra until it bursts through the surface, hurling blocks of soil and ice out of the hole.

Which biome covers most of Siberia?

Taiga, also called boreal or 'snow forest', is the world's largest land biome; in eastern Siberia it is mostly larch, a conifer that, unlike most, sheds all its needles every autumn.

What was the Soviet system of forced-labour camps, many of them in Siberia, called?

Gulag began as the acronym of the Soviet camp administration; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years inside, made it a word known worldwide with The Gulag Archipelago in 1973.

Frozen carcasses of which Ice Age animal are regularly dug out of the Siberian tundra?

Woolly mammoth carcasses emerge with hair, skin and stomach contents intact, which let scientists sequence the animal's genome by 2015 and start talking of bringing it back.

The Russian conquest of Siberia began during the reign of which tsar?

Ivan the Terrible opened the road east by taking Kazan in 1552, and Cossacks crossed the Urals to attack the khanate of Sibir in the last years of his reign, which ended in 1584.

On the Siberian tundra, food production is largely limited to herding which animal?

Reindeer herding is almost the only farming the tundra allows, because the growing season is too short for crops; peoples such as the Nenets still move with their herds through the year.

The 'Power of Siberia' pipeline, opened in 2019, carries Siberian natural gas to which country?

China signed a 30-year, $400 billion gas deal with Russia's Gazprom in May 2014, which is what made the pipeline worth building; deliveries across the border began in December 2019.

Which village on the Indigirka River is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth?

Oymyakon sits in a valley ringed by mountains, so bitter winter air sinks and pools there; in February 1933 its weather station logged a temperature below -67 °C.

Which Siberian regional capital has the coldest winters of any city its size or larger on Earth?

Yakutsk averages about -37 °C in January; as of 2025 no bridge crosses its great river, so traffic takes a ferry in summer and drives over the ice in winter.

Which Cossack ataman led the campaign of the 1580s that began the Russian conquest of Siberia?

Yermak Timofeyevich and his Cossacks took the khan's capital in 1582; he later drowned fleeing a night ambush, dragged under, the story goes, by armour the tsar had sent him.

Which merchant family recruited the Cossacks who invaded Siberia for the tsar?

The Stroganovs, salt magnates of the Kama region, hired Cossacks to guard their lands and then strike across the Urals; beef stroganoff was later named after one of the family.

The Khanate of Sibir, overrun by Cossacks in the 1580s, was a fragment of which Mongol state?

The Golden Horde broke up in the 1400s, leaving khanates such as Kazan and Sibir; Sibir's last khan, Kuchum, lost his capital to the Cossacks in 1582 but fought on until 1598.

Roughly how long is the Trans-Siberian Railway's main line, end to end?

About 9,000 km: the longest railway line in the world, it had carried millions of settlers into Siberia by 1914, before its last link was finished.

Until 2018, timetables along the whole Trans-Siberian Railway showed departures in which city's time?

Moscow time ruled every timetable on a line that spans eight time zones, so trains in the Far East were listed seven hours off the local clock until Russian Railways switched to local time in August 2018.

The Trans-Siberian's link around Lake Baikal was rushed to completion to supply the tsar's army in which war?

The Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1904 with the lakeside line unfinished, so the work was speeded up; even then the single track caused bottlenecks in moving troops and supplies east.

Which future tsar, ending a tour of East Asia, inaugurated work on the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1891?

Nicholas II, then heir to the throne, launched the work at Vladivostok in May 1891 on his way home from a much-publicised tour of East Asia; his father, Alexander III, had ordered the line built.

Before the line around Lake Baikal was finished, how was the Trans-Siberian carried across the lake?

On an icebreaking train ferry, the Baikal, carriages crossed the lake; the ship was built in Newcastle, England, taken apart, shipped to Siberia in pieces and put back together on the lakeshore.

The main Trans-Siberian route begins at which Moscow station?

Yaroslavsky station, which holds the line's 'zero kilometre' post, is named for Yaroslavl, the first large city its trains reach; the Rossiya leaves here on a journey of about seven days.

Which railway, built parallel to the Trans-Siberian, did Brezhnev call 'the construction project of the century'?

The Baikal–Amur Mainline runs hundreds of kilometres north of the Trans-Siberian; the Soviet Union built it as a strategic back-up because the older line passed so close to the Chinese border.

Lake Baikal holds roughly what share of the world's unfrozen fresh surface water?

About a fifth: Baikal holds more water than all five North American Great Lakes combined, although its surface is far smaller than Lake Superior's, because it is so deep.

Roughly how deep is Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth, at its deepest point?

About 1,600 m: the deepest point is a mile down, so although Baikal's surface lies some 450 m above sea level, its floor is more than a kilometre below it.

Lake Baikal has lasted more than 20 million years, far longer than other lakes, because it fills what?

A continental rift valley: the Earth's crust is slowly pulling apart here, so the basin keeps deepening instead of silting up, and the lake is the oldest and deepest in the world.

Lake Baikal's nerpa, which lives its whole life in fresh water far from any ocean, is what kind of animal?

A seal: the nerpa, a close relative of the Arctic's ringed seal, is one of the smallest true seals; when Baikal freezes over in winter, it keeps breathing holes open in the ice.

Lake Baikal drains through which single outflowing river?

The Angara is Baikal's only outlet, though more than 330 rivers and streams flow in; its steady, powerful flow now drives a chain of big hydroelectric dams, among them Bratsk.

Which of Siberia's three great Arctic-flowing rivers is the longest river entirely within Russia?

The Lena rises in the mountains along Lake Baikal's western shore, yet none of its water reaches the lake: it runs north for more than 4,000 km to the Arctic without ever leaving Russia.

Which Siberian river carries the most water of any river draining into the Arctic Ocean?

The Yenisei, whose headwaters reach into Mongolia, is the largest river draining into the Arctic Ocean; below one of its great dams the released water keeps it ice-free for many kilometres, even in midwinter.

Which Siberian river, with its tributary the Irtysh, forms the world's seventh-longest river system?

The Ob owes its rank to the Irtysh, the longest tributary river in the world and longer than the Ob itself; measured from the head of the Irtysh, the system runs 5,410 km.

Siberian-born Aleksandr Karelin, nicknamed 'the Russian Bear', won three Olympic gold medals in which sport?

Wrestling: the Greco-Roman heavyweight lost only twice in nearly 900 senior bouts, and nobody scored a point against him for six years before American Rulon Gardner beat him by one in the 2000 Olympic final.

Which science town was built in the late 1950s about 30 km south of Novosibirsk?

Akademgorodok, 'Academic Town', was built in the forest for the Academy of Sciences; in its early years researchers there enjoyed rare freedom, and fields that officials elsewhere dismissed as pseudoscience, such as genetics, flourished.

Which Siberian city was capital of the anti-Bolshevik 'Russian State' and held the imperial gold reserves?

Omsk was Admiral Kolchak's capital from his coup in November 1918; when the Red Army took it a year later he retreated east along the railway, was handed over to his enemies and shot in February 1920.

Which city, home to Siberia's only stone kremlin, was the region's historic capital?

Tobolsk, founded in 1587, governed Siberia for the tsars from its hilltop kremlin, but it faded after the Trans-Siberian Railway bypassed it in the 1890s.

Which Siberian city, a major aluminium producer, hosted the 2019 Winter Universiade?

Krasnoyarsk smelts aluminium with power from the giant dam just upstream, which appears on Russia's 10-ruble note and keeps the river from freezing as it passes through the city.

Which city near Lake Baikal, an exile-post for the Decembrists, was nicknamed 'The Paris of Siberia'?

Irkutsk owed its polish to its prisoners: nobles and officers banished after the 1825 Decembrist revolt made it the centre of Siberia's intellectual and social life, and their wooden houses still stand.

Which animal's fur, prized as 'soft gold', drew Russian trappers across Siberia?

Sable was the most prized of the Siberian furs known as 'soft gold'; chasing it, trappers and Cossacks crossed the whole continent, and at the trade's peak furs brought in over a tenth of Russia's revenue.

Which permit-only Arctic industrial city sits atop some of Earth's largest nickel deposits?

Norilsk, founded in 1935 north of the Arctic Circle, is one of the world's great nickel-mining centres; its smelters have also made it the most polluted city in Russia, with acid rain and smog.

What poured from a collapsed power-plant tank into Arctic rivers near a Siberian mining city in May 2020?

Diesel fuel, many thousands of tonnes of it, escaped when the storage tank's supports gave way; the owner blamed thawing ground beneath them, and Russia declared a state of emergency.

The Siberian Traps flood basalts are blamed for which mass extinction, the worst in Earth's history?

The Permian–Triassic extinction, the 'Great Dying' of about 252 million years ago, wiped out most species in the sea; the eruptions ran for some two million years, and their magma baked carbon-rich rock, releasing greenhouse gases.

The geological term 'trap', as in the Siberian Traps, comes from a Swedish word meaning what?

Stairs: 'trap' comes from the Swedish trappa, because the stacked lava flows of flood basalts weather into hillsides that rise like giant steps.

Klyuchevskaya Sopka, the highest active volcano in Eurasia, rises on which Russian peninsula?

Kamchatka lies on the Pacific Ring of Fire, which is why it bristles with active volcanoes; Klyuchevskaya, about 4,750 m high, has erupted more than 50 times since 1700.

The Valley of Geysers, in Russia's Far East, was partly destroyed by what in June 2007?

A massive mudslide buried about two-thirds of the valley on 3 June 2007; the geyser field is so remote that science knew nothing of it until a geologist came upon it in 1941.

The 'cedar nuts' gathered and sold across Siberia are really the seeds of which kind of tree?

A pine: Russians call the Siberian pine a 'cedar', so its seeds are marketed as cedar nuts, though they are simply pine nuts from a tree hardy to about -60 °C.

A 1947 meteorite fall in Russia's Far East, on a scale never witnessed before, scattered 23 tonnes of what?

Iron: the Sikhote-Alin meteorite broke up in the air and peppered the forest with metal fragments; an artist who watched the fireball painted it, and the Soviet Union put his picture on a stamp.

Siberia's Batagaika 'gateway to the underworld' is the world's largest example of what?

Batagaika is a thawing-permafrost crater, or megaslump, in north-eastern Siberia; it began sinking in the 1960s after nearby forest was cleared and had grown to about a kilometre long by the 2010s.

Which Japanese director spent eight months filming Dersu Uzala in the wilds of Russia's Far East?

Akira Kurosawa made it for the Soviet studio Mosfilm from an explorer's memoir of the native hunter who guided him through the forest; it won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.

In 2016 a heatwave thawed a long-frozen carcass on the Yamal Peninsula and set off an outbreak of which disease?

Anthrax spores can lie dormant for decades in a frozen carcass; the 2016 outbreak, blamed on one about 75 years old, killed a boy and put dozens of people in hospital for checks.

Into which Arctic sea does the Lena River empty?

The Laptev Sea, which takes in the Lena through a vast delta, is named for Dmitry and Khariton Laptev, Russian naval officers who mapped its shores in the 1730s and 1740s.

Which archaic human group from southern Siberia did 2010 DNA evidence show was distinct from Neanderthals?

Denisovans were first known from a single finger bone in Siberia's Denisova Cave, yet they left a mark far away: roughly 5% of the DNA of Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians comes from them.

The extinct giant nicknamed the 'Siberian unicorn' was a species of which animal?

A rhinoceros: Elasmotherium was thought to have died out more than 100,000 years ago, until fossil dating in 2018 showed it survived to about 39,000 years ago, when modern humans were already around.

Siberian sled dogs were first brought to which Alaskan gold-rush town in the early 1900s?

Nome got its first Siberian sled dogs in 1908, brought over by a fur trader during the gold rush; in 1925 dog teams relayed diphtheria serum to the town through blizzards, which made the breed famous.

Which French novelist sent Michael Strogoff, a courier of the tsar, racing across Siberia in an 1876 adventure?

Jules Verne wrote Michael Strogoff with no science fiction in it at all, just a courier crossing Siberia during a Tartar revolt, and its stage version helped make his fortune.

Roughly how many people live in Siberia in the broadest sense, from the Urals to the Pacific?

About 30 million: counts run from roughly 30 to 37 million depending on where Siberia is taken to begin, and Russian settlement stayed thin until the Trans-Siberian Railway brought in millions of migrants.

Which Mongolic people of the Lake Baikal region, about 460,000 strong in Russia, are traditionally Tibetan Buddhists?

The Buryats' most famous lama, Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov, died in 1927; when monks exhumed his body for the last time, in 2002, it was so well preserved that it is now venerated at a monastery in Buryatia.

Which animal do Sakha herders in north-eastern Siberia keep outdoors all year, even at -70 °C?

Horses of the shaggy local breed live unstabled all year, pawing through deep snow to graze; they reached the region only about 800 years ago, so they adapted to the cold remarkably fast.

Which sea lies between Kamchatka and the Siberian mainland?

The Sea of Okhotsk starts to ice over in late October and its last floes linger into June; fresh water pouring in from a great river thins the salt at the surface, so it freezes more readily.

Which ice sport, known to Russians as 'Russian hockey', held its 2015 world championship in Khabarovsk?

Bandy is played eleven-a-side with a ball on ice the size of a football pitch; it had long been popular in Russia when the Soviet Union first took up ice hockey.

Which revolutionary was exiled in 1897 to the Siberian village of Shushenskoye, where he spent three years?

Vladimir Lenin, then still known as Ulyanov, was banished for sedition and married fellow activist Nadezhda Krupskaya in the village; he took the name Lenin in 1901, soon after his exile ended.

Which English word for a hooded winter coat is traced, by way of Russian, to the Nenets of Arctic Siberia?

Parka reached English by way of Russian, in which it meant a pelt or a coat made from pelts, and dictionaries trace it back to the Nenets; anorak, by contrast, comes from the Inuit of Greenland.

Which Russian scientist was born in western Siberia in 1834, the last of more than a dozen children?

Dmitri Mendeleev was a Siberian schoolmaster's youngest child; after the family's glass factory burned down, his mother took him across Russia to find a university place, and he went on to devise the periodic table.

Male Siberian musk deer never grow antlers; what do they grow instead?

Long fangs: the male's upper canine teeth grow into tusks that jut below the jaw, and he uses them to fight rivals in the breeding season.

A popular but doubtful folk etymology claims 'Siberia' comes from a Siberian Tatar phrase meaning what?

'Sleeping land' is the popular reading of Sib-ir, but it does not match real Siberian Tatar; the name is usually traced instead to Sibir, the Tatar fortress and khanate that the Russians conquered.

The Soviet labour camps of Sevvostlag, set up to mine gold in the far north-east, lay along which river?

The Kolyma goldfields were worked by prisoners from 1932; the highway they built is still called the Road of Bones, because those who died building it are said to lie beneath it.

Siberia's Sakha Republic, the largest region of any country on Earth, is almost as big as which nation?

India is just slightly larger than Sakha, which covers more than 3 million square km yet is home to only about a million people.

Which remote Arctic island was a last refuge of mammoths until about 2000 BC?

Wrangel Island, off Chukotka, kept an isolated mammoth population until about 2000 BC, several centuries after the Giza pyramids were built.

Which Arctic Circle town recorded 38 °C in June 2020, the highest ever measured that far north?

Verkhoyansk, on the Yana, hit 38 °C on 20 June 2020, the highest verified Arctic temperature; it also shares Asia's cold record of -67.8 °C, giving it the largest temperature range on Earth.

Which ballet star was born aboard a Trans-Siberian train near Lake Baikal in 1938?

Rudolf Nureyev arrived while his mother was travelling east to join his father, a Red Army officer; in 1961 he defected to the West, despite the KGB's efforts to stop him.

Which was the first Russian town founded in Siberia, in 1586?

Tyumen began in 1586 as a fort on the Tura River, Russia's first foothold beyond the Urals; today it is home to many of the companies that run the country's oil and gas industry.

Which Soviet leader's Virgin Lands campaign sent young volunteers to plough the steppes of southern Siberia and Kazakhstan?

Nikita Khrushchev launched the plan in 1953 to end food shortages; it began well, but ploughing the dry steppe later brought severe soil erosion and shrinking harvests.

Which Cossack is thought to have sailed through the strait between Asia and America in 1648, before Bering?

Semyon Dezhnev rounded Asia's eastern tip 80 years ahead of Bering, but his report was forgotten for almost a century, so the strait took the later man's name; the cape there is now named for Dezhnev.

Who was born a peasant in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoye in 1869?

Grigori Rasputin left the village as a wandering holy man; in St Petersburg his apparent power to ease the bleeding of the tsar's haemophiliac son gave him sway at court until he was murdered in 1916.

Which novelist served four years of hard labour in a Siberian prison camp from 1850?

Fyodor Dostoevsky had first been sentenced to death and led out before a firing squad, only for the sentence to be commuted at the last moment; his four years of hard labour became The House of the Dead.

Which playwright crossed Siberia in 1890 to survey a penal colony on an island north of Japan?

Anton Chekhov spent three months on the island interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers for a census of his own, then published what he found as a study of the penal colony.

Which force of former prisoners of war seized the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1918?

The Czechoslovak Legion was leaving Russia the long way round, by rail to Vladivostok and then by sea to fight in France, when clashes with the Bolsheviks in May 1918 turned its trains into an army astride the line.

Which billionaire governed Chukotka, Russia's far north-eastern corner, from 2000 to 2008?

Roman Abramovich, who owned Chelsea football club at the time, put a fortune of his own money into schools, hospitals and housing in the impoverished region, which he had first represented in parliament.

The Kuznetsk Basin, or Kuzbass, around Kemerovo is one of Russia's largest sources of what?

Coal made Kuzbass one of the Soviet Union's industrial heartlands, and its miners shook the state: a walkout at Mezhdurechensk in July 1989 set off the largest strike in Soviet history.

Which Siberian republic bordering Mongolia is famous for khoomei throat singing?

Tuva was a separate country, Tannu Tuva, from 1921 until the Soviet Union annexed it in 1944; its khoomei singers sound a low note and a whistling overtone at the same time.

Yamal, the name of the gas-rich Arctic peninsula, means what in the Nenets language?

'End of the Land' suits a peninsula that pushes some 700 km into the Arctic; its gas is now liquefied on the spot and shipped out through the ice in specially built tankers.

The word 'shaman' most likely entered Russian from the language of which Siberian people?

The Evenki word passed into Russian and then west with the Dutch statesman Nicolaes Witsen, whose book on Siberia carried the earliest known picture of a shaman, drawn with clawed feet as a 'priest of the Devil'.

Siberia's Ket language has been linked by some linguists to a family that includes which language of the American Southwest?

Navajo is the largest of the Na-Dene languages, which the linguist Edward Vajda tied to Ket and its extinct Siberian relatives in 2008; the link is rated plausible rather than proven.

The Pacific port of Petropavlovsk, founded by Bering's men in 1740, is named after what?

Two ships of the expedition, the Saint Peter and the Saint Paul, gave the harbour its name; a century later its small garrison beat off an Anglo-French landing during the Crimean War.

Where did the Danish-born explorer Vitus Bering die in December 1741?

On an island later named for him, where his ship was wrecked on the way back from Alaska, Bering died that winter; his death was long put down to scurvy, though that has since been questioned.

Under the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, the southern half of which island passed to Japan?

Southern Sakhalin below the 50th parallel became Japan's Karafuto Prefecture, with its capital at Toyohara (now Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk), until the Soviet Union retook it in 1945.

Which city's university, opened in 1888, was the first in the Asian part of Russia?

Tomsk already had Siberia's first university when the Trans-Siberian Railway bypassed it in the 1890s; a new town on the main line overtook it as the region's hub, but Tomsk remains a university city.

Russia's Big Diomede, in the Bering Strait, is nicknamed what?

Big Diomede is 'Tomorrow Island' because the International Date Line runs between it and America's Little Diomede ('Yesterday Island'), 3.8 km away but 21 hours behind.

Cape Chelyuskin, the northernmost point of mainland Eurasia, is the tip of which peninsula?

The Taymyr Peninsula reaches farther north than any other mainland on Earth; musk oxen, which died out here thousands of years ago, were reintroduced in the 1970s.

The 'Siberian Ice Maiden', a 2,400-year-old mummy unearthed in the Altai in 1993, still bore what when she was found?

Tattoos of fantastic horned animals survive on her arm and shoulder because water seeped into her burial chamber and froze, preserving her skin, her clothing and the animals sacrificed with her.

Pleistocene Park, near Chersky in north-eastern Siberia, is trying to re-create what?

Ice-age steppe grassland is what Sergey and Nikita Zimov hope herds of large grazers will bring back; by trampling the snow, the animals let winter cold reach the soil and keep it frozen.

What tore loose inside Russia's largest hydroelectric plant, Sayano-Shushenskaya, in August 2009, killing 75 people?

A turbine with a long record of vibration trouble broke free, and water burst into the machine hall, drowning workers and knocking out the plant.