Siberia
Siberia, also known as Asian Russia, is an extensive geographical region comprising all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has formed a part of the sovereign territory of Russia and its predecessor states since the lengthy conquest of Siberia, which began with the fall of the Khanate of Sibir in 1582 and concluded with the annexation of Chukotka in 1778. Siberia is vast and sparsely populated, covering an area of over – about three-quarters of Russia's total area, but home to roughly a quarter of Russia's population. Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Omsk are the largest cities in the area.
Because Siberia is a geographic and historic concept and not a political entity, there is no single precise definition of its territorial borders. It is further defined as stretching from the territories within the Arctic Circle in the north to the northern borders of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China in the south, although the hills of north-central Kazakhstan are also commonly included. The Russian government divides the region into three federal districts, of which only the central one is officially referred to as "Siberian"; the other two are the Ural and Far Eastern federal districts, named for the Ural and Russian Far East regions that correspond respectively to the western and eastern thirds of Siberia in the broader sense.
Siberia is known for its long, harsh winters, with a January average of −25 °C. Although it is geographically located in Asia, Russian sovereignty and colonization since the 16th century has led to perceptions of the region as culturally and ethnically European. Over 85% of its population are of European descent, chiefly Russian, and Eastern Slavic cultural influences predominate throughout the region. Nevertheless, there exist sizable ethnic minorities of Asian lineage, including various Turkic communities—many of which, such as the Yakuts, Tuvans, Altai, and Khakas, are Indigenous—along with the Mongolic Buryats, ethnic Koreans, and smaller groups of Samoyedic and Tungusic peoples, among many others.
Etymology
The origin of the name is uncertain. In the Russian language, it was adopted as a toponym through contact with the Khanate of Sibir since the 15th century. The Russian name Yugra was applied to the northern lands east of the Ural Mountains, which had been known of since the 11th century or earlier, while the name Siberia is first mentioned in Russian chronicles at the start of the 15th century in connection with the death of the khan Tokhtamysh in "the Siberian land".Some sources say that "Siberia" originates from the Siberian Tatar word for 'sleeping land', but this discourse does not correspond to the actual Siberian Tatar language. Mongolist György Kara posits that the toponym Siberia is derived from a Mongolic word sibir, cognate with modern Buryat sheber 'dense forest'. A different hypothesis claims that the region was named after the Sibe people. Another account sees the name as the ancient tribal ethnonym of the Sihirtia or Sirtya ), a hypothetical Paleo-Asiatic ethnic group assimilated by the Nenets.
Polish historian Jan Chyliczkowski has proposed that the name derives from the Proto-Slavic word for 'north', as in Severia. Anatole Baikaloff has dismissed this explanation. He says that the neighboring Chinese, Turks, and Mongolians, who have similar names for the region, would not have known Russian. He suggests that the name might be a combination of two words with Turkic origin, su 'water' and bir 'wild land'.
History
Prehistory
Siberia in Paleozoic times formed the continent of Siberia/Angaraland, which fused to Euramerica during the Late Carboniferous, as part of the formation of Pangea. The Siberian Traps were formed by one of the largest-known volcanic events of the last 251 million years of Earth's geological history. Their activity continued for a million years, and some scientists consider it a possible cause of the "Great Dying" about 250 million years ago, estimated to have killed 90% of species existing at the time.The region has paleontological significance, as it contains bodies of prehistoric animals from the Pleistocene Epoch, preserved in ice or permafrost. Specimens of Goldfuss cave lion cubs, Yuka the mammoth and another woolly mammoth from Oymyakon, a woolly rhinoceros from the Kolyma, and bison and horses from Yukagir have been found. Remote Wrangel Island and the Taymyr Peninsula are believed to have been the last places on Earth to support woolly mammoths as isolated populations until their extinction around 2000 BC.
At least three species of humans lived in southern Siberia around 40,000 years ago: H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, and the Denisovans. In 2010, DNA evidence identified the last as a separate species. Late Paleolithic southern Siberians appear to be related to Paleolithic Europeans and the Paleolithic Jōmon people of Japan. DNA analysis has revealed that the oldest fossil known to carry the derived KITLG allele, which is responsible for blond hair in modern Europeans, is a 17,000 year old Ancient North Eurasian specimen from Siberia. Ancient North Eurasian populations genetically similar to Mal'ta–Buret' culture and Afontova Gora were an important genetic contributor to Native Americans, Europeans, Ancient Central Asians, South Asians, and some East Asian groups. Evidence from full genomic studies suggests that the first people in the Americas diverged from Ancient East Asians about 36,000 years ago and expanded northwards into Siberia, where they encountered and interacted with Ancient North Eurasians, giving rise to both Paleosiberian peoples and Ancient Native Americans, which later migrated towards the Beringian region, became isolated from other populations, and subsequently populated the Americas.
Early history
During past millennia, different groups of nomads – such as the Enets, the Nenets, the Huns, the Xiongnu, the Scythians, and the Yugur – inhabited various parts of Siberia. The Afanasievo and Tashtyk cultures of the Yenisey valley and Altay Mountains are associated with the Indo-European migrations across Eurasia. The proto-Mongol Khitan people, whose territory spanned a vast area, were also attested in the Ob region of western Siberia in the sixteenth century.In the 13th century, during the period of the Mongol Empire, the Mongols conquered a large part of this area. With the breakup of the Golden Horde, the autonomous Khanate of Sibir was formed in the late-15th century. Turkic-speaking Yakut migrated north from the Lake Baikal region under pressure from the Mongol tribes from the 13th to 15th centuries. Siberia remained a sparsely populated area. Historian John F. Richards writes: "it is doubtful that the total early modern Siberian population exceeded 300,000 persons".
Early Russian exploration
The first mention of Siberia in chronicles is recorded in 1032. The city-state of Novgorod established two trade routes to the Ob River, and laid claim to the lands the Russians called Yugra. The Russians were attracted by its furs in particular. Novgorod launched military campaigns to extract tribute from the local population but often met resistance, such as two campaigns in 1187 and 1193 mentioned in chronicles that were defeated. After Novgorod was annexed by Moscow, the newly emerging centralized Russian state also laid claim to the region, with Ivan III of Russia sending expeditionary forces to Siberia in 1483 and 1499–1500. The Russians received tribute, but contact with the tribes ceased after they left.The growing power of the Tsardom of Russia began to undermine the Siberian Khanate in the 16th century. First, groups of traders and Cossacks began to enter the area. The Russian army was directed to establish forts farther and farther east to protect new Russian settlers who migrated from Europe. Towns such as Mangazeya, Tara, Yeniseysk, and Tobolsk developed, the last becoming the de facto capital of Siberia from 1590. At this time, Sibir was the name of a fortress at Qashliq, near Tobolsk. Gerardus Mercator, in a map published in 1595, marks Sibier both as the name of a settlement and of the surrounding territory along a left tributary of the Ob. Other sources contend that the Sibe, an indigenous Tungusic people, offered fierce resistance to Russian expansion beyond the Urals. Some suggest that the term "Siberia" is a Russified version of their ethnonym.
Russian Empire
By the mid-17th century, Russia had established areas of control that extended to the Pacific Ocean. Some 230,000 Russians had settled in Siberia by 1709. Siberia became one of the destinations for sending internal exiles. Exile was the main Russian punitive practice with more than 800,000 people exiled during the 19th century.The first great modern change in Siberia was the Trans-Siberian Railway, constructed during 1891–1916. It linked Siberia more closely to the rapidly industrialising Russia of Nicholas II. Around seven million Russians moved to Siberia from Europe between 1801 and 1914. Between 1859 and 1917, more than half a million people migrated to the Russian Far East. Siberia has extensive natural resources: during the 20th century, large-scale exploitation of these took place, and industrial towns cropped up throughout the region.
At 7:15 a.m. on 30 June 1908, the Tunguska event felled millions of trees near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia. Most scientists believe this resulted from the air burst of a meteor or comet. Even though no crater has ever been found, the landscape in the area still bears the scars of this event.
Soviet Union
In the early decades of the Soviet Union, the government used the Gulag state agency to administer a system of penal labour camps, replacing the previous katorga system. According to semi-official Soviet estimates, which did not become public until after the fall of the Soviet government in 1991, from 1929 to 1953 more than 14 million people passed through these camps and prisons, many of them in Siberia. Another seven to eight million people were internally deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union.Half a million prisoners died in camps from 1941 to 1943 during World War II. At other periods, mortality was comparatively lower. The size, scope, and scale of the Gulag slave-labour camps remain subjects of much research and debate. Many Gulag camps operated in extremely remote areas of northeastern Siberia. The best-known clusters included Sevvostlag along the Kolyma and Norillag near Norilsk, where 69,000 prisoners lived in 1952. Major industrial cities of northern Siberia, such as Norilsk and Magadan, developed from camps built by prisoners and run by former prisoners.