Siberia

SIBERIA

Often called the "Wild East," beautiful but austere, Siberia is one of the least populated places on earth. Western Siberia is the world's largest and flattest plain, across which tributaries of the Ob and Irtysh rivers wend their way north to the Arctic Ocean. This orientation means that in spring the mouths of the rivers are yet frozen while their upper reaches thaw, creating the world's largest peat bog in the middle of the plain; thus, the lowland is arable only in the extreme south. Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East tend to be rugged and mountainous, with thin soils at best. Beneath this chiefly soil-less veneer lies some of the world's oldest rock. Higher mountains and active volcanoes rise along the easternmost edge, where the Pacific Ocean plate subducts beneath Asia. Here also the majority of the rivers drain northward, perpendicular to the main east-west axis of settlement. Only along the Pacific seaboard do the rivers flow east, the longest of which is the Amur, which, together with its tributaries, forms the boundary between China and Russia. On the border between Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, the region boasts the world's oldest and deepest lake, Baikal. Including some of the purest water on earth, Lake Baikal holds more than twenty percent of the globe's freshwater resources.

Human settlement resembles a mostly urban, beaded archipelago strung along the Trans-Siberian Railroad from the Urals cities of Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg to Vladivostok, 4,000 miles away in the east. In between, rest the large cities of Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Khabarovsk. Novosibirsk, which means "New Siberia," is largest of all with 1.5 million people.

The densest settlement pattern conforms to Siberia's least severe climates, which align themselves in parallel belts from harsh to harshest at right angles to a southwest-northeast trend line. Deep within the interior of Asia and surrounded by mostly frozen seas, Siberia experiences the most continental climates on the planet. One-time maxima of more than ninety degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) are possible in the relatively short Siberian summers except along the coasts, whereas one-time minima of minus-ninety degrees Fahrenheit (–68 degrees Celsius) have been recorded in the long winters of Sakha (Yakutia). This broad range of temperatures is not recorded anywhere else. Fortunately, the winter frost is typically dry and windless, affording some relief to the isolated towns and hamlets located in the sparsely populated northeast.

Although western geographers accept the entire northeastern quadrant of Eurasia as the region known as Siberia, Russian geographers officially accept only Western and Eastern Siberia as such, excluding the Russian Far East, or Russia's Pacific Rim. Including the Russian Far East, Siberia spans 5,207,900 square miles (13,488,400 square kilometers) and makes up more than three-fourths of the Russian land mass. By this definition, Siberia is a fourth bigger than Canada, the world's second largest country. It extends from the Ural Mountains on the west to the Pacific Ocean on the east. North to south it spans an empty realm from the Arctic Ocean to the borders of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China. It is empty because, although it occupies 23 percent of Eurasia, it environs less than 1 percent of the continent's population. Siberia is so massive that citizens of the U.S. state of Maine are closer to Moscow than are residents of Siberia's Pacific Coast.

The Russian word Sibir has at least six controversial origins, ranging from Hunnic to Mongolic to Russian. The Mongol definition is "marshy forest," which certainly typifies much of the Siberian landscape.

To many Westerners, the name evokes a popular misconception that people who live in Siberia are exiles or forced laborers. Although it is accurate

to suggest that the region became a place of exile as early as the 1600s and remained that way long after, most Siberians freely migrated there. The Great Siberian Migration, which occurred between 1885 and 1914, witnessed the voluntary movement of 4 million Slavic peasants into the southern tier of the area, facilitated by the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (1891–1916). In fact, the tributary area of that railway became, and remains, the primary area of Siberian settlement. The rest of Siberia represents a vast underdeveloped backwater, containing fewer than one person per square mile.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin successfully endeavored to force the development of the "backwater" by creating a vast system of labor camps, further tarnishing Siberia's image. At least 1.5 million forced laborers and convicts occupied the region's north and east between 1936 and 1953. Some of the camps remained in use until the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991). Between 1953 and 1991, extraordinary financial and material incentives lured the vast majority of migrants to the harshest regions. After 1991, when the incentives were terminated, hundreds of thousands of residents departed for more hospitable and economically stable destinations.

Although Siberia's future is unpredictable, the region remains rich in resources. Most lie in austere, largely unexplored areas far from potential consumers. Thus, like their relatives of the past, modern Russians continue to refer to Siberia as the future or cupboard of the nation. Unfortunately, although teeming with natural wealth, the cupboard remains locked.

See also: china, relations with; far eastern region; northern peoples; pacific fleet; trans-siberian railway

bibliography

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Bychkova-Jordan, Bella, and Jordan-Bychkov, Terry. (2001). Siberian Village: Land and Life in the Sakha Republic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hudgins, Sharon W. (2003). The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.

Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1994). The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. New York: Random House.

Marx, Steven G. (1991). Road to Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Mote, Victor L. (1998). Siberia Worlds Apart. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

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Treadgold, Donald W. (1957). The Great Siberian Migration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Victor L. Mote