93 Fun Facts About Siberia

Which mountain range marks the western edge of Siberia?

The Ural Mountains are the conventional divide between European Russia and Siberia, running about 2,500 km from the Arctic coast south toward the Ural River.

Roughly what fraction of Russia's land area does Siberia occupy?

Siberia covers about three-quarters of Russia's territory yet holds only about a quarter of its people, most of them strung along the southern rail corridor.

What is the most populous city in Siberia?

Novosibirsk, founded in 1893 where the Trans-Siberian Railway bridged the Ob, is Russia's third-largest city with about 1.6 million people.

The Trans-Siberian Railway runs from Moscow to which Pacific port city?

The line ends at Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan; the full Moscow-Vladivostok run takes about seven days and is the longest railway line in the world.

The Siberian tiger is also commonly named after which river?

The Amur tiger is named for the Amur River, which forms the Russia-China border in the Far East where most of the wild population lives.

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

The leading explanation is an asteroid exploding in the air several kilometres up; the airburst flattened about 80 million trees and was heard hundreds of kilometres away.

What is ground that stays below 0 °C for at least two consecutive years called?

Permafrost is ground that stays at or below 0 °C for two or more years; it underlies about two-thirds of Russia, and thawing it releases carbon dioxide and methane.

What is the name of the coniferous 'snow forest' biome that covers most of Siberia?

The taiga, or boreal forest, is the largest land biome on Earth; the eastern Siberian taiga is essentially one vast larch forest.

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

Gulag is an acronym for the Main Directorate of Camps; about 18 million people passed through its camps and colonies between 1930 and 1953.

Frozen carcasses of which Ice Age animal are regularly dug out of Siberia's frozen ground?

Woolly mammoth carcasses preserved in permafrost, such as the Berezovka mammoth found in 1901, retain hair, stomach contents and dung, making the species unusually well understood.

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

Ivan the Terrible reigned until 1584; his capture of Kazan in 1552 opened the road east, and Cossacks crossed the Urals in 1582 during his reign.

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

Reindeer herding, practised by peoples such as the Nenets and Evenks, is the main food economy on the tundra, where the growing season is too short for crops.

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

Power of Siberia carries gas from eastern Siberian fields to China; the 30-year Gazprom-CNPC deal was signed in May 2014 and first gas flowed in December 2019.

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

Oymyakon, on the Indigirka, has a monument to an unofficial -71.2 °C reading from 1924; its school closes only when the temperature drops below about -55 °C.

Which regional capital of about 350,000 people is the coldest major city in the world?

Yakutsk, in eastern Siberia, averages about -38 °C in January, colder than any other city of comparable size, and has grown fast on diamond and gold mining.

Which Cossack ataman led the 1582 campaign that began the Russian conquest of Siberia?

Yermak Timofeyevich crossed the Urals with about 840 Cossacks in 1582 and took the khanate's capital Qashliq that October; no reliable portrait of him survives.

Which merchant family recruited the Cossacks who invaded Siberia for the tsar in the late 1570s?

The Stroganovs, salt and fur magnates of the Kama region, hired Yermak's Cossacks around 1579-1581 to guard their lands and push across the Urals; beef stroganoff later took the family's name.

Which khan ruled Sibir when Cossacks stormed its capital in 1582?

Kuchum Khan, a Shaybanid descendant of Genghis Khan, lost his capital Qashliq to the Cossacks in 1582 but fought on until his final defeat in 1598.

How long is the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to the Pacific?

The Moscow-Vladivostok main line measures about 9,300 km (9,289 km), the longest railway line in the world, though the Moscow-Pyongyang through service runs even farther.

How many time zones does the Trans-Siberian Railway cross end to end?

The line spans eight time zones, from Moscow (UTC+3) to Vladivostok (UTC+10); confusingly, Russian timetables listed every station in Moscow time until August 2018.

Construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway began in which year?

Work began in 1891 with a ceremony at Vladivostok in May; the last link, the Amur bridge at Khabarovsk, was completed in 1916, 25 years later.

Who ceremonially inaugurated Trans-Siberian construction at its Pacific end?

The future Nicholas II, then tsarevich on his grand eastern tour, turned the first sod at Vladivostok on 31 May 1891 (19 May Old Style).

Before the line around Lake Baikal was finished in 1904, how did Trans-Siberian trains cross it?

The icebreaking train ferry Baikal, with a smaller consort, carried carriages across the lake in about four hours until the Circum-Baikal line opened in 1904.

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

Yaroslavsky station on Komsomolskaya Square is kilometre zero of the Trans-Siberian; the Rossiya train leaves from it for Vladivostok, though some services use neighbouring Kazansky.

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

The Baikal-Amur Mainline, built mainly 1974-1984 across permafrost north of Lake Baikal, cost about $14 billion and needed 21 tunnels and over 4,200 bridges.

Roughly what share of the world's fresh surface water is held in the world's deepest lake?

Baikal holds about a fifth (roughly 23,600 km³) of the world's unfrozen fresh surface water, more than all five North American Great Lakes combined.

What is the maximum depth, in metres, of the world's deepest lake?

Baikal's deepest point is 1,642 metres; with the surface 456 metres above sea level, the floor lies about 1,190 metres below it, atop some 7 km of sediment.

Roughly how old is Lake Baikal, the world's oldest lake?

Baikal is about 25-30 million years old; most lakes silt up within tens of thousands of years, but it sits in a rift still widening by about 4 mm a year.

What is the local name of the freshwater seal found only in Siberia's great lake?

The nerpa, or Baikal seal, is one of the smallest true seals and the only pinniped living entirely in fresh water; roughly 100,000 survive in the lake.

The world's deepest lake drains through which single outflowing river?

The Angara is Baikal's only outlet; more than 300 rivers flow in, but only the Angara flows out, on a 1,779 km course toward the Arctic basin.

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

The Lena runs about 4,400 km from the Baikal Mountains to the Arctic without leaving Russia; its delta covers some 30,000 square kilometres and yields mammoth tusks.

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

The Yenisei discharges about 19,600 cubic metres per second into the Kara Sea, the most of any Arctic-draining river, and divides the West Siberian Plain from the Central Siberian Plateau.

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

The Ob rises where the Biya and Katun meet in the Altai; with the Irtysh it forms a 5,410 km system, and the Trans-Siberian crosses it at Novosibirsk.

Until 1926, Siberia's largest city bore what name, honouring both Saint Nicholas and the reigning tsar?

Novonikolayevsk, founded in 1893 at the Trans-Siberian bridge over the Ob, was renamed Novosibirsk in 1926.

Which science town was founded in 1957 about 30 km south of Novosibirsk?

Akademgorodok, begun in 1957 as the seat of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences, hosts more than 35 research institutes and Novosibirsk State University.

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

Admiral Kolchak's government was chased out by the Red Army and retreated eastward along the railway.

Which city, home to Siberia's only kremlin, was its de facto capital from 1590?

Tobolsk, founded in 1587 near the old Tatar capital Qashliq, was Siberia's administrative seat from 1590 and has the region's only stone kremlin, built from the 1680s.

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

Anton Chekhov judged it the most beautiful city in Siberia, and the Stolby rock pillars lie just south of town.

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

Irkutsk, on the Angara near Baikal, housed exiled Decembrists such as Sergei Volkonsky; its 19th-century merchant mansions earned it the 'Paris of Siberia' nickname.

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

Sable pelts, known as 'soft gold', were Siberia's prime export; by the 1600s fur brought in about a tenth of state revenue and drove Cossacks east to the Pacific.

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

Norilsk, a closed city above the Arctic Circle, sits on the Talnakh nickel and copper deposits and grew out of the Norillag prison camps opened in 1935.

What spilled from a power-plant tank at Norilsk in May 2020, causing an Arctic disaster?

About 21,000 tonnes of diesel fuel leaked from a collapsed storage tank at Norilsk's CHP-3 plant on 29 May 2020, fouling the Ambarnaya River and Lake Pyasino.

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, killed roughly 90 per cent of marine species; the Siberian Traps erupted for around two million years.

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

'Trap' comes from the Swedish trappa, 'stairs', for the step-like hillsides that layered lava flows leave; the Siberian Traps once covered some 7 million square kilometres.

What is the highest point of Russia east of the Urals?

Klyuchevskaya Sopka on Kamchatka, about 4,750 m, is the highest active volcano in Eurasia and the highest point in Russia east of the Urals.

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

A massive mudslide on 3 June 2007 buried about two-thirds of the Valley of Geysers in Kamchatka's Kronotsky Reserve, though many geysers later re-emerged.

Which Siberian mountain range contains Belukha, at 4,506 m its highest peak?

Belukha, at 4,506 m, is the highest summit of the Altai Mountains, which straddle the meeting point of Russia, Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia; it was first climbed in 1914.

The largest witnessed meteorite fall in recorded history came down in 1947 in which Far Eastern range?

The Sikhote-Alin fall of 12 February 1947 dropped about 23 tonnes of iron fragments; artist Pyotr Medvedev, who saw the fireball from his window, painted it for a Soviet 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 Russian mineralogist led the first scientific expedition to the Tunguska blast site, in 1927?

Leonid Kulik reached the blast site in 1927, mistook bog potholes for meteorite craters, and organised an aerial survey of the flattened forest in 1938.

At roughly what altitude is the Tunguska object thought to have exploded?

The object exploded at roughly 5-10 km altitude, which is why the largest impact event in recorded history left no crater.

Into which Arctic sea does the Lena River empty?

The Lena empties into the Laptev Sea through a delta of some 30,000 square kilometres; the sea is named for the cousins Dmitry and Khariton Laptev, who charted its coast in the 1730s.

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

Denisovans are known from a finger bone found in Denisova Cave in the Altai; its 2010 mitochondrial DNA showed a lineage distinct from both Neanderthals and modern humans.

Why are many buildings in the world's coldest major city built on concrete piles?

Yakutsk stands on permanently frozen ground (permafrost); heated buildings set directly on it would thaw it and sink, so they rest on piles driven deep into the frozen layer.

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

Nome, the gold-rush town on the Seward Peninsula, received its first Siberian sled dogs in 1908 from fur trader William Goosak, who raced them in the 1909 All-Alaska Sweepstakes.

What is Siberia's population density, in people per square kilometre?

About 3 people per square kilometre: Siberia's entire population is smaller than greater Tokyo's, spread over a territory larger than all of Europe.

Approximately how many people live in Siberia in the broadest sense of the term?

Roughly 30-36 million people live in Siberia including the Far East, about 70 per cent of them in cities, mostly in apartment blocks.

Which Siberian people, about 460,000 strong in Russia, mostly follow Tibetan Buddhism?

The Buryats, a Mongolic people numbering about 460,000 in Russia, are concentrated in Buryatia east of Lake Baikal, where Buddhism arrived from Tibet and Mongolia in the 1700s.

The Yakutian horse can survive without shelter at temperatures down to roughly what?

Yakutian horses endure about -70 °C in the open thanks to thick coats and fat layers; they dig through deep snow to graze and descend from horses the Yakuts brought north around the 13th century.

Which sea lies between Kamchatka and the Siberian mainland?

The Sea of Okhotsk, enclosed by Kamchatka, the Kuril Islands and the mainland, freezes for months each winter despite lying at the latitude of Britain, and supports one of the world's richest fisheries.

Which ice sport has strongholds in Kemerovo and Khabarovsk?

Bandy, played with a ball on a football-sized ice rink, thrives in Siberia: Khabarovsk's Arena Yerofey, opened in 2013, is the world's largest arena built specifically for it.

Roughly how many people were exiled to Siberia during the 19th century?

More than 800,000 people were sent into Siberian exile during the 19th century, most by administrative order rather than court sentence; exile was the tsarist state's main punishment long before the Soviet camps.

What did medieval Russians call the lands beyond the mountains, before 'Siberia' caught on?

Yugra (Ugra) was the Novgorodian name for the Ob lands east of the Urals; Novgorod sent fur expeditions there from the 11th century, and Ivan III's army reached it in 1483.

Siberia covers roughly what share of Earth's entire land surface?

Almost 9 per cent: Siberia's 13.1 million square kilometres, larger than Canada or the United States, make up nearly a tenth of Earth's 149 million square kilometres of land.

Which critically endangered big cat survives in Primorye in the Russian Far East?

The Amur leopard, confined to Primorye and adjacent China, fell to an estimated 19-26 animals in 2007 before recovering to around 130 by the early 2020s.

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

The folk etymology glosses Sibir as Tatar for 'sleeping land', though linguists find no such phrase in Siberian Tatar; rival theories cite a Mongolic word for dense forest.

The most notorious Soviet labour-camp cluster, Sevvostlag, lay along which north-eastern river?

Sevvostlag ran the Kolyma goldfield camps under Dalstroy from 1932; of some 10,000-12,000 Poles sent there in 1940-41, only 583 survived.

Which republic, containing both northern 'Poles of Cold', is generally the coldest region of Siberia?

Beneath its Yana basin the frozen ground reaches nearly 1.5 km deep.

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.

Roughly how many Siberian tigers were estimated to live in the Russian Far East as of 2022?

The 2022 census put Siberian (Amur) tigers at about 750 including around 200 cubs, up from roughly 500 in 2015 and a 1940s low of a few dozen.

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

Tyumen, founded in 1586 on the Tura River by the voevodas Vasily Sukin and Ivan Myasnoy, was the first Russian town in Siberia; Tobolsk followed a year later.

Which high tableland in Siberia's Altai region is a UNESCO World Heritage Site?

The Ukok Plateau, a high grassland near the Mongolian border, is part of the 'Golden Mountains of Altai' World Heritage Site listed in 1998 and yielded the frozen 'Siberian Ice Maiden' burial in 1993.

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

Semyon Dezhnev sailed from the Kolyma around the Chukchi Peninsula in 1648, passing the strait later named for Bering; Cape Dezhnev, Eurasia's easternmost point, bears his name.

Which mystic, later close to the Romanovs, was born in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoye?

Grigori Rasputin was born in Pokrovskoye, Tobolsk Governorate, in 1869; he left on pilgrimage in 1897 and wandered as a strannik before entering St Petersburg society around 1905.

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

Fyodor Dostoevsky served four years in the Omsk katorga prison from 1850 for his part in the Petrashevsky Circle, an experience he turned into The House of the Dead (1862).

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

Anton Chekhov crossed Siberia in 1890 by train, carriage and river steamer, a journey of about two and a half months that he described in letters and later in a book on the penal island.

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

The Czechoslovak Legion, some 40,000 former prisoners of war, revolted in May 1918 and took control of the Trans-Siberian from the Volga to Vladivostok, where it was evacuated by 1920.

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

Roman Abramovich was Chukotka's governor from December 2000 to July 2008, having first won its State Duma seat in 1999; he funded the Pole of Hope charity for its children.

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

Kuzbass coal seams reach 1,800 m deep, with deposits estimated at 725 billion tonnes; the basin supplies well over half of Russia's coal output.

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

Tuva, whose capital Kyzyl sits near the geographic centre of Asia, is the home of khoomei, in which a singer produces two or more pitches at once.

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

Yamal is Nenets for 'end of the land', fitting a peninsula that juts some 700 km into the Kara Sea; its Bovanenkovo field is among Russia's largest gas deposits.

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

Shaman comes from the Evenki šamān, perhaps from a root sa-, 'to know'; Dutch statesman Nicolaes Witsen carried the word to Western Europe in his 1692 book on Siberia.

Central Siberia's Ket language has been linked to which North American language family?

Ket has been linked to Na-Dene (Athabaskan, Eyak and Tlingit) in the Dene-Yeniseian proposal put forward by Edward Vajda in 2008, the first such trans-Bering family to win broad linguistic support.

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

The Saint Peter and Saint Paul were built at Okhotsk for Bering's second expedition, giving the town its 'Peter and Paul' name.

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

Bering died on 19 December 1741 on the island later named for him, in the Commander Islands, where the St Peter had been wrecked; scurvy had left him too ill to command.

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's Imperial University, decreed by Alexander II in 1878, opened in 1888 with a single medical faculty and 72 students, the first university in Asian Russia.

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?

Cape Chelyuskin, at 77°43'N, caps the Taymyr Peninsula; Semyon Chelyuskin reached it in 1742 during the Great Northern Expedition, and a polar station has operated there since 1932.

The tattooed 'Siberian Ice Maiden' found in the Altai in 1993 had lain in ice for about how long?

The Ice Maiden, a Pazyryk noblewoman buried around 400 BC, had lain about 2,400 years in ice that formed inside her tomb, preserving clothing, furnishings and six sacrificed horses.

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

Sergey and Nikita Zimov are testing whether large grazers can bring back the grassland and slow the thaw beneath.

How many people died when a turbine failed at the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam in August 2009?

75 people died on 17 August 2009 when turbine 2, under a 475 MW load, tore loose at 08:13 and flooded the machine hall of Russia's largest hydroelectric plant.