100 Fun Facts About Siberia

Which mountain range marks the western edge of Siberia?

The Ural River is usually taken as the southern end of that boundary, and Siberia runs from there all the way to the Pacific.

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

Yet it holds only about a quarter of Russia's people, most of them strung along the southern rail corridor.

What is the most populous city in Siberia?

It is Russia's third-largest city, with about 1.6 million people, and the busiest airport in Siberia.

Which Siberian lake is the deepest in the world?

It is also the oldest lake on Earth and holds more water than all the North American Great Lakes combined.

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

The full journey takes over a week and, at more than 9,000 km, is the longest railway line in the world.

The Siberian tiger is also commonly named after which river?

It has also been called the Manchurian, Korean and Ussurian tiger depending on where it was seen.

Which sled-dog breed was originally developed by the Chukchi people of far eastern Siberia?

Alaskan gold miners nicknamed them 'Siberian Rats' because they were so much smaller than the local Malamutes.

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

The blast was heard like artillery fire, and for nights afterwards the skies over Europe glowed brightly enough to read by.

What name is given to ground that stays frozen for two years or more, which underlies most of Siberia?

The oldest of it has been continuously frozen for around 700,000 years, and thawing it releases carbon dioxide and methane.

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

It is the largest land biome on Earth, and the eastern Siberian version is essentially one vast larch forest.

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

The name is an acronym for the Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps, and about 18 million people passed through the camps and colonies between 1930 and 1953.

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

The finds include stomach contents and dung, which is why this is one of the best-understood prehistoric animals of all.

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

His capture of Kazan in 1552 opened the gateway east, and the fur trade did the rest.

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

In the fertile black-earth southwest, by contrast, farmers grow wheat, barley, rye and potatoes.

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

The project was launched in 2014, the year Western sanctions began pushing Russian energy exports eastward.

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

Schools there close only when it drops below −55 °C, and a monument marks an unofficial reading of −71.2 °C from 1924.

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

January there averages about −37 °C, yet the mining boom has made it one of Russia's fastest-growing cities.

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

He set out with just 840 men, and no reliable portrait or description of him survives.

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

The family name is far better known today for the beef dish supposedly created in one of their kitchens.

The fall of which Tatar khanate in 1582 opened Siberia to Russian conquest?

It was the northernmost Muslim state in recorded history, and its khans descended from Genghis Khan through his son Jochi.

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

That makes it 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?

Confusingly, all trains on it ran on Moscow time until 2018.

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

It took 25 years to finish, under ministers hand-picked by Alexander III and then Nicholas II.

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

He was still tsarevich at the time, and was touring the Far East when he did it.

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

Two purpose-built ships made the four-hour crossing and were kept in reserve until 1916 in case of rockfalls on the new line.

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

Some trains use a neighbouring terminal instead, which shaves about 20 km off the trip.

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

It cost some $14 billion, has 21 tunnels and over 4,200 bridges, and would sink into bog if the frozen ground beneath it ever thawed.

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

That is more than all five North American Great Lakes put together.

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

Its floor lies more than a kilometre below sea level, and some 7 km of sediment sits beneath that.

The world's deepest lake is also its oldest. Roughly how old is it?

Most lakes silt up within tens of thousands of years; this one survives because it sits in a rift that is still pulling apart by about 4 mm a year.

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

It is one of the smallest true seals and one of the very few that lives entirely in fresh water; around 80,000 to 100,000 survive.

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

More than 300 rivers flow in, but only this one flows out, on its way north to the Arctic.

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

Its delta covers 30,000 square kilometres, and mammoth tusks are dug from its sands.

Which Siberian river is the largest in the world to drain into the Arctic Ocean?

It rises in Mongolia and divides the West Siberian Plain from the Central Siberian Plateau.

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

It forms where the Biya and Katun rivers meet in the Altai and is the river the Trans-Siberian crosses at Siberia's largest city.

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

It was founded in 1893 at the spot where the Trans-Siberian bridge would cross Siberia's great western river.

Founded in 1957 about 30 km south of Siberia's largest city, what is Akademgorodok?

It hosts more than 35 institutes and the headquarters of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

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?

Nearby stood the Tatar fortress of Qashliq, whose name eventually spread to the whole region.

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'?

Before the revolution it was also called 'Siberian Petersburg' and 'Siberian Athens'; its wooden houses are on UNESCO's tentative list.

The Decembrist revolt of 1825, whose leaders were hanged or exiled to Siberia, took place in which city?

About 3,000 troops assembled in Senate Square before loyalist artillery scattered them.

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

It is the world's northernmost city of more than 175,000 people and began as a prison-labour camp complex in the 1930s.

What spilled from a power-plant tank at Russia's most polluted city in June 2020, causing an Arctic disaster?

Some 20,000 tons escaped, polluting hundreds of square kilometres of rivers and tundra.

Russia's giant Arctic mining company is the world's largest producer of nickel and which precious metal?

Russia holds about 40 per cent of the world's known nickel resources at that one deposit.

The Siberian Traps flood basalts are blamed for which mass extinction, the worst in Earth's history?

The eruptions ran for about two million years and the 'Great Dying' wiped out roughly 90 per cent of species.

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

It describes the step-like hills the layered lavas leave behind; some 7 million square kilometres of basalt remain.

What is Siberia's highest point?

At 4,750 m it is the largest active volcano in the Northern Hemisphere and part of the Ring of Fire.

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

It lies within the Kronotsky Biosphere Reserve, a region also famous for the size of its brown bears.

Precipitation exceeds 500 mm a year in only one part of Siberia. Which?

Moist winds off the Sea of Okhotsk hit its mountains, feeding the region's only major glaciers.

The Great Vasyugan Mire in western Siberia holds which distinction?

It covers 53,000 square kilometres, and three-quarters of it became waterlogged only in the last 500 years.

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

About 23 tonnes of iron fragments reached the ground, and a Soviet artist who saw the fireball from his window painted it for a stamp.

Siberia's Batagaika 'gateway to the underworld' is the world's largest example of what?

The kilometre-long gash began sinking in the 1960s after the surrounding forest was cleared, and it is still growing.

Which Russian mineralogist led the first scientific expedition to the Tunguska blast site, in 1927?

He 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?

That is why, despite the largest impact event in recorded history, no crater has ever been found.

In which year did the Tunguska explosion occur?

Air waves from the blast were detected as far away as Washington, D.C., and Batavia.

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

All three groups lived in southern Siberia around 40,000 years ago.

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

Heated buildings placed directly on the ground would thaw it and sink; the city is the largest anywhere built on such terrain.

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

A Russian fur trader named William Goosak imported them to work the mining fields.

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

Its entire population is smaller than that of greater Tokyo, spread over a territory bigger than all of Europe.

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

About 70 per cent of them live in cities, mostly in apartment blocks.

Which Mongolic-speaking people, about 500,000 strong, are the most numerous indigenous group in Siberia?

They are concentrated in their own republic east of the great lake, where many follow Tibetan Buddhism.

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

It also digs through deep snow for grazing and descends from horses brought north by the Yakuts in the 13th century.

Thanks largely to the Sea of Okhotsk, roughly what share of the world's fish catch comes from Siberia?

Cold currents and huge tidal ranges make that sea one of the two or three richest fisheries on Earth.

Which ice sport, Russia's third most popular, has strongholds in Kemerovo and Khabarovsk?

Khabarovsk's Arena Yerofey is the world's largest indoor arena built specifically for it.

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

Exile was the main punishment of the tsarist state long before the Soviet camps.

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

Novgorod sent expeditions there for furs from the 11th century, and Ivan III followed in 1483.

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

That is 13.1 million square kilometres, larger than Canada or the United States.

Which critically endangered big cat, numbering around 130 adults, survives in Primorye in the Russian Far East?

In 2007 as few as 19 to 26 were thought to remain, so today's numbers are a fragile recovery.

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

Linguists note the phrase does not actually exist in Siberian Tatar; rival theories point to a Mongolic word for dense forest.

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

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?

That means dwarf mammoths were still alive there while the pyramids of Giza were being built.

Which Arctic Circle town recorded 38 °C in June 2020, the highest ever measured that far north?

The same town shares the record for the coldest reading in Asia, −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?

That included some 200 cubs, up from a low of a few hundred animals in 2005.

In which Siberian city is Russia's largest oil refinery located?

Omsk also served as a provisional capital for the anti-Bolshevik forces during the Russian Civil War.

Which Siberian city is a centre of Russian rugby, home to the big clubs STM Enisei and Krasny Yar?

The city's bandy team Yenisey won three straight Super League titles in the mid-2010s, and its basketball side plays in the VTB United League.

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

Siberia's highest point, by contrast, is the 4,750-metre active volcano Klyuchevskaya Sopka on Kamchatka.

In which year does the first mention of Siberia appear in the chronicles?

The city-state of Novgorod opened two trade routes to the Ob and claimed the lands it called Yugra, drawn above all by furs.

Roughly what is the average January temperature across Siberia?

Most of the region has a continental subarctic climate, though July averages about +17 °C and summer highs can hit 38 °C.

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

He left the village on pilgrimage in 1897 and spent years as a wandering strannik before reaching the imperial capital's high society.

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

Only one other member of his Petrashevsky Circle went with him; he later drew on the camp for The House of the Dead.

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

He went by train, horse carriage and river steamer, and the letters from the two-and-a-half-month trip are rated among his best writing.

Which admiral ruled the White 'Russian State' from Siberia before being shot in 1920?

He styled himself Supreme Ruler of Russia in 1918, and the other White leaders formally recognised his authority.

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

He had first represented the impoverished region in the State Duma in 1999 and set up a charity called Pole of Hope for its children.

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

Its seams reach 1,800 m deep and the deposits are estimated at 725 billion tonnes, feeding the region's steel and chemical industries.

The Mir mine at Mirny, a pit more than 525 metres deep, produced what?

It was the Soviet Union's first developed diamond mine; Russia's two largest stones, of 342 and 468 carats, both came out of it.

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

The style is prized for overtone singing, in which one voice produces two or more pitches at once.

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

Bely Island lies beyond the peninsula's northern tip across the Malygina Strait.

The word 'shaman' comes from a Tungusic language, most likely that of which Siberian people?

The root may be sa-, 'to know'; Dutch statesman Nicolaes Witsen carried the word to Western Europe in a 1692 book on his Siberian travels.

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

The proposed Dene-Yeniseian family would be the first accepted language link between the Old World and the New.

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?

Scurvy had left him too ill to command; his ship sought refuge in the Commander Islands after sighting Mount Saint Elias that July.

Under the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, the southern half of which island passed to Japan?

Japan ran the land below the 50th parallel as Karafuto Prefecture, with its capital at Toyohara, until 1945.

Which city's university, opened in 1888, was the first in the Asian part of Russia?

Alexander II signed the decree in 1878, but it took a decade before a handful of professors taught the first 72 students, all in medicine.

Russia's Big Diomede, in the Bering Strait, is nicknamed what?

The International Date Line runs between it and America's Little Diomede, just 3.8 km away, putting the two 21 hours apart.

Cape Chelyuskin, the northernmost point of mainland Eurasia, is the tip of which peninsula?

It hosts the northernmost airfield in Afro-Eurasia, operating at various sites there since 1950.

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

Ice that formed inside her burial chamber preserved clothing, wooden furnishings and sacrificed horses from Iron Age steppe nomads.

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?

The plant was carrying a 475 MW load at 08:13 local time when the turbine tore loose, flooding the machine hall.