Another account sees the name as the ancient tribal ethnonym of the Sirtya, a folk, which spoke a language that later evolved into the Ugric languages. This ethnic group was later assimilated to the Siberian Tatar people.
The modern usage of the name was recorded in the Russian language after the Empire's conquest of the Siberian Khanate. A further variant claims that the region was named after the Xibe people.
The term Siberia has a long history. Its meaning has gradually changed during ages. Historically, Siberia was defined as the whole part of Russia to the east of Ural Mountains, including the Russian Far East.
According to this definition, Siberia extended eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific coast, and southward from the Arctic Ocean to the border of Russian Central Asia and the national borders of both Mongolia and China.
Great Soviet Encyclopedia and others and modern Russian ones usually define Siberia as a region extending eastward from the Ural Mountains to the watershed between Pacific and Arctic drainage basins.
Southward from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-central Kazakhstan and the national borders of both Mongolia and China.
By this definition, Siberia includes the federal subjects of the Siberian Federal District, and some of the Ural Federal District, as well as Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, which is a part of the Far Eastern Federal District.
Geographically, this definition includes subdivisions of several other subjects of Urals and Far Eastern federal districts, but they are not included administratively.
This definition excludes Sverdlovsk Oblast and Chelyabinsk Oblast, both of which are included in some wider definitions of Siberia.
In Russian, the word for Siberia is used as a substitute for the name of the federal district by those who live in the district itself and less commonly used to denote the federal district by people residing outside of it.
The region is of 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 (mammoth) and another woolly mammoth from Oymyakon, a woolly rhinoceros from the Kolyma River, and bison and horses from Yukagir have been found here.
The Siberian Traps were formed by one of the largest-known volcanic events of the last 500 million years of Earth's geological history.
They continued for a million years and are considered a possible cause of the Great Dying about 250 million years ago, which is estimated to have killed 90% of species existing at the time.
Siberia was inhabited by different groups of nomads such as the Enets, the Nenets, the Huns, the Scythians and the Uyghurs.
The Khan of Sibir in the vicinity of modern Tobolsk was known as a prominent figure who endorsed Kubrat as Khagan of Old Great Bulgaria in 630. The Mongols conquered a large part of this area early in the 13th century.
With the breakup of the Golden Horde, the autonomous Khanate of Sibir was established in the late 15th century.
Turkic-speaking Yakut migrated north from the Lake Baikal region under pressure from the Mongol tribes during the 13th to 15th century.
The growing power of Russia in the West 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 settlers from European Russia. Towns such as Mangazeya, Tara, Yeniseysk and Tobolsk were developed, the last being declared the capital of Siberia.
At this time, Sibir was the name of a fortress at Qashlik, near Tobolsk. Gerardus Mercator.
By the mid-17th century, Russia had established areas of control that extended to the Pacific. Some 230,000 Russians had settled in Siberia by 1709. Siberia was a destination for sending exiles.
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 people moved to Siberia from European Russia between 1801 and 1914. From 1859 to 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 was developed, and industrial towns cropped up throughout the region.
At 7:15 a.m. on 30 June 1908, millions of trees were felled near the Podkamennaya Tunguska or Stony Tunguska River in central Siberia in the Tunguska Event.
In the early decades of the Soviet Union especially the 1930s and 1940s, the government established the GULAG state agency to administer a system of penal labour camps, replacing the previous katorga system.
According to semi-official Soviet estimates, which were not made public until after the fall of the Soviet government, from 1929 to 1953 more than 14 million people passed through these camps and prisons, many of which were in Siberia.
Another 7 to 8 million people were internally deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union including entire nationalities or ethnicities in several cases.
Half a million (516,841) prisoners died in camps from 1941 to 1943 due to food shortages caused by World War II.
At other periods, mortality was comparatively lower. The size, scope, and scale of the GULAG slave labour camps remains a subject of much research and debate.
Many Gulag camps were positioned in extremely remote areas of northeastern Siberia. The best known clusters are Sevvostlag in The North-East Camps along the Kolyma River and Norillag near Norilsk, where 69,000 prisoners were kept in 1952.
Major industrial cities of Northern Siberia, such as Norilsk and Magadan, developed from camps built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners.
With an area of 13.1 million square kilometres (5,100,000 sq mi), Siberia makes up roughly 77% of Russia's total territory and almost 10% of Earth's land surface (148,940,000 km2, 57,510,000 sq mi).
While Siberia falls entirely within Asia, many authorities such as the UN geoscheme will not subdivide countries and will place all of Russia as part of Europe and/or Eastern Europe.
Major geographical zones include the West Siberian Plain and the Central Siberian Plateau.
Eastern and central Sakha comprises numerous north-south mountain ranges of various ages. These mountains extend up to almost 3,000 metres (9,800 ft), but above a few hundred metres they are almost completely devoid of vegetation.
The Verkhoyansk Range was extensively glaciated in the Pleistocene, but the climate was too dry for glaciation to extend to low elevations.
At these low elevations are numerous valleys, many of them deep and covered with larch forest, except in the extreme north where the tundra dominates. Soils are mainly turbels a type of gelisol. The active layer tends to be less than one metre deep, except near rivers.
The highest point in Siberia is the active volcano Klyuchevskaya Sopka, on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Its peak is at 4,750 metres (15,580 ft).
Mountain ranges in Siberia:
- Altai Mountains
- Anadyr Range
- Baikal Mountains
- Chamar-Daban
- Chersky Range
- Dzhugdzhur Mountains
- Gydan Mountains
- Koryak Mountains
- Sayan Mountains
- Tannu-Ola Mountains
- Ural Mountains
- Verkhoyansk Mountains
- Yablonoi Mountains
Lakes and rivers in Siberia:
- Anabar River
- Angara River
- Indigirka River
- Irtysh River
- Kolyma River
- Lake Baikal
- Lena River
- Lower Tunguska River
- Novosibirsk Reservoir
- Ob River
- Popigay River
- Stony Tunguska River
- Upper Angara River
- Uvs Nuur
- Yana River
- Yenisei River
Grasslands in Siberia:
Ukok Plateau — part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The West Siberian Plain consists mostly of Cenozoic alluvial deposits and is somewhat flat. Many deposits on this plain result from ice dams which produced a large glacial lake.
This mid to late Pleistocene lake blocked the northward flow of the Ob and Yenisei rivers, resulting in a redirection southwest into the Caspian and Aral seas via the Turgai Valley.
The area is very swampy, and soils are mostly peaty histosols and, in the treeless northern part, histels.
In the south of the plain, where permafrost is largely absent, rich grasslands that are an extension of the Kazakh Steppe formed the original vegetation, most of which is not visible anymore.
The Central Siberian Plateau is an ancient craton sometimes called Angaraland that formed an independent continent before the Permian.
It is exceptionally rich in minerals, containing large deposits of gold, diamonds, and ores of manganese, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt and molybdenum. Much of the area includes the Siberian Traps, a large igneous province.
This massive eruptive period was approximately coincident with the Permian–Triassic extinction event. The volcanic event is said to be the largest known volcanic eruption in Earth's history.
Only the extreme northwest was glaciated during the Quaternary, but almost all is under exceptionally deep permafrost, and the only tree that can thrive, despite the warm summers, is the deciduous Siberian Larch (Larix sibirica) with its very shallow roots.
Outside the extreme northwest, the taiga is dominant, covering a significant fraction of the entirety of Siberia.Soils here are mainly turbels, giving way to spodosols where the active layer becomes thicker and the ice content lower.
The Lena-Tunguska petroleum province includes the Central Siberian platform, bounded on the northeast and east by the Late Carboniferous through Jurassic Verkhoyansk foldbelt, on the northwest by the Paleozoic Taymr foldbelt, and on the southeast, south and southwest by the Middle Silurian to Middle Devonian Baykalian foldbelt.
Vegetation in Siberia is mostly taiga, with a tundra belt on the northern fringe, and a temperate forest zone in the south.
The climate of Siberia varies dramatically, but all of it basically has short summers and long and extremely cold winters. On the north coast, north of the Arctic Circle, there is a very short period about one-month-long summer.
Almost all the population lives in the south, along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The climate in this southernmost part is Humid continental climate with cold winters but fairly warm summers lasting at least four months.
The annual average is about 0.5 °C (32.9 °F). January averages about −20 °C (−4 °F) and July about +19 °C (66 °F) while daytime temperatures in summer typically are above 20 °C (68 °F).
With a reliable growing season, an abundance of sunshine and exceedingly fertile chernozem soils, southern Siberia is good enough for profitable agriculture, as was proven in the early 20th century.
By far the most commonly occurring climate in Siberia is continental subarctic, with the annual average temperature about −5 °C (23 °F) and an average for January of −25 °C (−13 °F).
An average for July of +17 °C (63 °F),although this varies considerably, with a July average about 10 °C (50 °F) in the taiga–tundra ecotone.
Southwesterly winds bring warm air from Central Asia and the Middle East. The climate in West Siberia of Omsk, Novosibirsk is several degrees warmer than in the East which is Irkutsk, Chita where in the north an extreme winter subarctic climate prevails.
But summer temperatures in other regions can reach +38 °C (100 °F). In general, Sakha is the coldest Siberian region, and the basin of the Yana River has the lowest temperatures of all, with permafrost reaching 1,493 metres (4,898 ft).
Nevertheless, as far as Imperial Russian plans of settlement were concerned, cold was never viewed as an impediment.
In the winter, southern Siberia sits near the center of the semi-permanent Siberian High, so winds are usually light in the winter.
Precipitation in Siberia is generally low, exceeding 500 millimetres (20 in) only in Kamchatka where moist winds flow from the Sea of Okhotsk onto high mountains – producing the region's only major glaciers.
Although volcanic eruptions and low summer temperatures allow limited forests to grow.
Precipitation is high also in most of Primorye in the extreme south where monsoonal influences can produce quite heavy summer rainfall.
Western Siberia has begun to thaw as a result of global warming. The frozen peat bogs in this region may hold billions of tons of methane gas, which may be released into the atmosphere.
Methane is a greenhouse gas 22 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. In 2008, a research expedition for the American Geophysical Union detected levels of methane up to 100 times above normal in the atmosphere above the Siberian Arctic.
The likely the result of methane clathrates being released through holes in a frozen 'lid' of seabed permafrost, around the outfall of the Lena River and the area between the Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea.
Fauna in Siberia
- Order Artiodactyla
- Manchurian wapiti
- Siberian musk deer
- Order Carnivora
- Family Felidae
- Amur leopard
- Amur tiger
- Family Ursidae
- Asian black bear
- Brown bear
- Polar bear
Flora in Siberia
- Picea obovata
- Pinus pumila
Most important cities in Siberia:
The most populous city of Siberia, as well as the third most populous city of Russia, is the city of Novosibirsk.
Other cities are:
- Barnaul
- Irkutsk
- Kemerovo
- Krasnoyarsk
- Novokuznetsk
- Omsk
- Tomsk
- Tyumen
- Chelyabinsk
- Khabarovsk
- Vladivostok
Yekaterinburg - This city as it lies in the Ural Mountains. Inhabitants have distanced themselves though saying that there is a difference between Siberian and Urals culture.
Siberia is extraordinarily rich in minerals, containing ores of almost all economically valuable metals.
It has some of the world's largest deposits of nickel, gold, lead, coal, molybdenum, gypsum, diamonds, diopside, silver and zinc, as well as extensive unexploited resources of oil and natural gas.
Around 70% of Russia's developed oil fields are in the Khanty-Mansiysk region. Russia contains about 40% of the world's known resources of nickel at the Norilsk deposit in Siberia.
Norilsk Nickel is the world's biggest nickel and palladium producer.
Siberian agriculture is severely restricted by the short growing season of most of the region.
In the southwest where soils are exceedingly fertile black earths and the climate is a little more moderate, there is extensive cropping of wheat, barley, rye and potatoes, along with the grazing of large numbers of sheep and cattle.
Elsewhere food production, owing to the poor fertility of the podzolic soils and the extremely short growing seasons, is restricted to the herding of reindeer in the tundra.
Siberia has the world's largest forests. Timber remains an important source of revenue, even though many forests in the east have been logged much more rapidly than they are able to recover.
The Sea of Okhotsk is one of the two or three richest fisheries in the world owing to its cold currents and very large tidal ranges.
Siberia produces over 10% of the world's annual fish catch, although fishing has declined somewhat since the collapse of the USSR.
Professional football teams include FC Tom Tomsk, FC Sibir Novosibirsk and FK Yenisey Krasnoyarsk.
The Yenisey Krasnoyarsk basketball team has played in the VTB United League since 2011–12.
Russia's third most popular sport, bandy, is important in Siberia. In the 2015–16 Russian Bandy Super League season Yenisey from Krasnoyarsk became champions for the third year in a row by beating Baykal-Energiya from Irkutsk in the final.
Two or three more teams depending on the definition of Siberia play in the Super League, the 2016-17 champions SKA-Neftyanik from Khabarovsk as well as Kuzbass from Kemerovo and Sibselmash from Novosibirsk.
In 2007 Kemerovo got Russia's first indoor arena specifically built for bandy. Now Khabarovsk has the world's biggest indoor arena specifically built for bandy, Arena Yerofey.
It will be the venue for Division A of the 2018 World Championship.
The 2019 Winter Universiade will be hosted by Krasnoyarsk.
According to the Russian Census of 2010, the Siberian and Far Eastern Federal Districts, located entirely east of the Ural Mountains, together have a population of about 25.6 million.
Tyumen and Kurgan Oblasts, which are geographically in Siberia but administratively part of the Urals Federal District, together have a population of about 4.3 million.
Thus, the whole region of Asian Russia or Siberia is home to approximately 30 million people. It has a population density of about three people per square kilometre.
All Siberians are Russian citizens, and of these Russian citizens of Siberia, most are Slavic-origin Russians and russified Ukrainians.
The remaining Russian citizens of Siberia consists of other groups of non-indigenous ethnic origins and those of indigenous Siberian origin.
Among the largest non-Slavic group of Russian citizens of Siberia are the approximately 400,000 ethnic Volga Germans.
The original indigenous groups of Siberia, including Mongol and Turkic groups such as Buryats, Tuvinians, Yakuts, and Siberian Tatars still mostly reside in Siberia, though they are minorities outnumbered by all other non-indigenous Siberians.
Slavic origin Russians by themselves outnumber all of the indigenous peoples combined, both in Siberia as a whole and its cities, except in the Republic of Tuva.
Slavic-origin Russians make up the majority in the Buryat, Sakha, and Altai Republics, outnumbering the indigenous Buryats, Sakha, and Altai.
The Buryat make up only 25% of their own republic, and the Sakha and Altai each are only one-third, and the Chukchi, Evenk, Khanti, Mansi, and Nenets are outnumbered by non-indigenous peoples by 90% of the population.
According to the 2002 census there are 500,000 Tatars in Siberia, but of these, 300,000 are Volga Tatars who also settled in Siberia during periods of colonization and are thus also non-indigenous Siberians.
In contrast to the 200,000 Siberian Tatars which are indigenous to Siberia.
Of the indigenous Siberians, the Buryats, numbering approximately 500,000, are the most numerous group in Siberia, and they are mainly concentrated in their homeland, the Buryat Republic.
According to the 2002 census there were 443,852 indigenous Yakuts. Other ethnic groups indigenous to Siberia include Kets, Evenks, Chukchis, Koryaks, Yupiks, and Yukaghirs.
About seventy percent of Siberia's people live in cities, mainly in apartments. Many people also live in rural areas, in simple, spacious, log houses.
Novosibirsk is the largest city in Siberia, with a population of about 1.5 million. Tobolsk, Tomsk, Tyumen, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Omsk are the older, historical centers.
There are a variety of beliefs throughout Siberia, including Orthodox Christianity, other denominations of Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism and Islam.
An estimated 70,000 Jews live in Siberia, some in the Jewish Autonomous Region. The predominant religious group is the Russian Orthodox Church.
Tradition regards Siberia the archetypal home of shamanism, and polytheism is popular. These native sacred practices are considered by the tribes to be very ancient.
There are records of Siberian tribal healing practices dating back to the 13th century. The vast territory of Siberia has many different local traditions of gods.
These include: Ak Ana, Anapel, Bugady Musun, Kara Khan, Khaltesh-Anki, Kini'je, Ku'urkil, Nga, Nu'tenut, Numi-Torem, Numi-Turum, Pon, Pugu, Todote, Toko'yoto, Tomam, Xaya Iccita, Zonget. Places with sacred areas include Olkhon, an island in Lake Baikal.
Many cities in northern Siberia, such as Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, cannot be reached by road, as there are virtually none connecting from other major cities in Russia or Asia.
The best way to tour Siberia is through the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Trans-Siberian Railway operates from Moscow in the west to Vladivostok in the east.
Cities that are located far from the railway are best reached by air or by the separate Baikal-Amur-Railway (BAM).
Stroganina is a raw fish dish of the indigenous people of northern Arctic Siberia made from raw, thin, long-sliced frozen fish. It is a popular dish with native Siberians.
Regions of Siberia:
- Western Siberia which consists of Altai Krai, Altai Republic, Khakassia, Kemerovo Oblast, Novosibirsk Oblast, Omsk Oblast, Tomsk Oblast.
- Krasnoyarsk Krai
- Eastern Siberia ofBuryatia, Zabaykalsky Krai, Irkutsk Oblast, Tuva.
Lake Baikal. The pearl of Siberia. It is the deepest and one of the purest lakes in the World.
With an area of nearly 11 million sq.km., Siberia is vast. While the popular view of Siberia is of howling arctic wastes dotted with penal colonies, the truth is more complex.
The west of Siberia is covered by a swampy plain, the central plateau is heavily forested, and the east has mountains soaring to above 3,000 meters. Only the extreme north is true tundra, where temperatures can hit -68°C in winter.
While the official language of Russia and the extended region of Siberia is Russian, the numerous tribes that populate the area possess different languages and dialects that do not transfer as well.
Among the largest of these ethnic tribes are the Buryats who can be found mostly south towards Mongolia and as far west to the border of China and, as such, may speak either Russian, Mongolian, or Chinese in addition to their native language of Buryat.
The eastern region is home to indigenous people known as the Koryaks who speak their own native language.
The Buddhist Mongol tribe known as the Kalmyk people also have a strong presence across the region but span further away from the Russian mainland after a massive exodus occurred in the 1700s to avoid slavery.
Although all these races are likely to understand Russian, it is possible that they may only understand their native language which is rarely spoken or understand by the majority of Russians.
One should have an idea of which region they desire to travel to so they can be prepared to deal with whatever natives they may encounter.
The Trans-Siberian Railway, connecting Moscow to Vladivostok, is by far the most famous method of transport in Siberia.
Covering a distance of 9,289 kilometres, making it the longest railway in the world, the full trip takes over 6 days and crosses 8 time zones.
Its branches the Trans-Manchurian and Trans-Mongolian connect to Beijing in China, the first directly, the second via Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia.
Less famed is the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), a northern line running parallel to the Trans-Siberian for 4,234 km. Completed only in 1991 and built mostly for military reasons, further away from the border of China, the BAM is much less touristed.
- Cold ostriches in Siberia
- Mountainous Altai (Gorny Altai) - this region of Siberia is very popular among eco tourists. Mountainering and mountain rivers' rafting are wide spread here. The area is famous for its stunning scenery.
- Ethnic Khanty Nomad Camp, Kazym
- Ethnic Mansi Nomad Camp, Yasunt
Engage your self in Siberia
- Mushroom picking
- Hiking/biking
- Alpine Sports
- Whitewater rafting
- Cross country skiing
- Dog sledding
- Reindeer herding
Eat Borsch Kievsky Syrniki Pryaniki
Do not forget to ask for Russian Vodka
Tourism Observer
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