Siberia Trivia
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93 free Siberia trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Siberia is bigger than Canada, holds a fifth of the planet's fresh surface water in a single lake, and has a village where school is cancelled only when it drops below −55 °C. This quiz covers the whole of it: the Urals to the Pacific, the three great Arctic rivers, the taiga and the frozen ground beneath it, Kamchatka's volcanoes, the swamp that is the world's largest peatland, and the animals that make the region famous, from woolly mammoths in the ice to the last few hundred tigers. It also covers the people and the history: Yermak's Cossacks and the khanate they toppled, exiles and Decembrists, the railway that took 25 years to build, the labour camps, the boom cities of nickel and science, and the morning in 1908 when something exploded over the Tunguska forest. Questions run from easy geography to details only Siberia obsessives will know. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Siberia and its lakes, rivers, cities and history, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 93 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Mir mine at Mirny, a Siberian pit more than 500 m deep, was dug to reach what?
Diamonds
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.
Q 02If Siberia were a country it would be the world's largest; which country would rank second by total area?
Canada
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.
Q 03What is the most populous city in Siberia?
Novosibirsk
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.
Q 04Which tennis star was born in the Siberian town of Nyagan in 1987?
Maria Sharapova
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.
Q 05The Siberian tiger is also commonly named after which river?
The Amur
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.
Q 06What is thought to have flattened 2,000 square km of forest near the Tunguska River in June 1908?
An asteroid exploding in the air
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.
Q 07The craters that began appearing on Siberia's Yamal Peninsula in the 2010s are thought to be blowouts of which gas?
Methane
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.
Q 08Which biome covers most of Siberia?
Taiga
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.
Q 09What was the Soviet system of forced-labour camps, many of them in Siberia, called?
Gulag
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.
Q 10Frozen carcasses of which Ice Age animal are regularly dug out of the Siberian tundra?
Woolly mammoth
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.
Q 11The Russian conquest of Siberia began during the reign of which tsar?
Ivan the Terrible
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.
Q 12On the Siberian tundra, food production is largely limited to herding which animal?
Reindeer
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.
Q 13The 'Power of Siberia' pipeline, opened in 2019, carries Siberian natural gas to which country?
China
Q 21The Trans-Siberian's link around Lake Baikal was rushed to completion to supply the tsar's army in which war?
The Russo-Japanese 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.
Q 22Which future tsar, ending a tour of East Asia, inaugurated work on the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1891?
Nicholas II
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.
Q 23Before the line around Lake Baikal was finished, how was the Trans-Siberian carried across the lake?
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.
Q 14Which village on the Indigirka River is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth?
Oymyakon
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.
Q 15Which Siberian regional capital has the coldest winters of any city its size or larger on Earth?
Yakutsk
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.
Q 16Which Cossack ataman led the campaign of the 1580s that began the Russian conquest of Siberia?
Yermak Timofeyevich
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.
Q 17Which merchant family recruited the Cossacks who invaded Siberia for the tsar?
The Stroganovs
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.
Q 18The Khanate of Sibir, overrun by Cossacks in the 1580s, was a fragment of which Mongol state?
The Golden Horde
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.
Q 19Roughly how long is the Trans-Siberian Railway's main line, end to end?
About 9,000 km
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.
Q 20Until 2018, timetables along the whole Trans-Siberian Railway showed departures in which city's time?
Moscow
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.
On an icebreaking train ferry
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.
Q 24The main Trans-Siberian route begins at which Moscow station?
Yaroslavsky
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.
Q 25Which railway, built parallel to the Trans-Siberian, did Brezhnev call 'the construction project of the century'?
The Baikal–Amur Mainline
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.
Q 26Lake Baikal holds roughly what share of the world's unfrozen fresh surface water?
About a fifth
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.
Q 27Roughly how deep is Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth, at its deepest point?
About 1,600 m
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.
Q 28Lake Baikal has lasted more than 20 million years, far longer than other lakes, because it fills what?
A continental rift valley
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.
Q 29Lake Baikal's nerpa, which lives its whole life in fresh water far from any ocean, is what kind of animal?
A seal
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.
Q 30Lake Baikal drains through which single outflowing river?
The Angara
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.