100 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 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which mountain range marks the western edge of Siberia?
The Ural Mountains
The Ural River is usually taken as the southern end of that boundary, and Siberia runs from there all the way to the Pacific.
Q 02Roughly what fraction of Russia's land area does Siberia occupy?
About three-quarters
Yet it holds only about a quarter of Russia's people, most of them strung along the southern rail corridor.
Q 03What is the most populous city in Siberia?
Novosibirsk
It is Russia's third-largest city, with about 1.6 million people, and the busiest airport in Siberia.
Q 04Which Siberian lake is the deepest in the world?
Baikal
It is also the oldest lake on Earth and holds more water than all the North American Great Lakes combined.
Q 05The Trans-Siberian Railway runs from Moscow to which Pacific port city?
Vladivostok
The full journey takes over a week and, at more than 9,000 km, is the longest railway line in the world.
Q 06The Siberian tiger is also commonly named after which river?
The Amur
It has also been called the Manchurian, Korean and Ussurian tiger depending on where it was seen.
Q 07Which sled-dog breed was originally developed by the Chukchi people of far eastern Siberia?
Siberian Husky
Alaskan gold miners nicknamed them 'Siberian Rats' because they were so much smaller than the local Malamutes.
Q 08What is believed to have flattened some 2,000 square km of forest near the Tunguska River one June morning in 1908?
An asteroid exploding in the air
The blast was heard like artillery fire, and for nights afterwards the skies over Europe glowed brightly enough to read by.
Q 09What name is given to ground that stays frozen for two years or more, which underlies most of Siberia?
Permafrost
The oldest of it has been continuously frozen for around 700,000 years, and thawing it releases carbon dioxide and methane.
Q 10What is the name of the coniferous 'snow forest' biome that covers most of Siberia?
Taiga
It is the largest land biome on Earth, and the eastern Siberian version is essentially one vast larch forest.
Q 11What was the Soviet system of forced-labour camps, many of them in Siberia, called?
Gulag
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.
Q 12Frozen carcasses of which Ice Age animal are regularly dug out of Siberia's frozen ground?
Woolly mammoth
The finds include stomach contents and dung, which is why this is one of the best-understood prehistoric animals of all.
Q 13The Russian conquest of Siberia began during the reign of which tsar?
Ivan the Terrible
His capture of Kazan in 1552 opened the gateway east, and the fur trade did the rest.
Q 21How long is the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to the Pacific?
About 9,300 km
That makes it the longest railway line in the world, though the Moscow–Pyongyang through service runs even farther.
Q 22How many time zones does the Trans-Siberian Railway cross end to end?
Eight
Confusingly, all trains on it ran on Moscow time until 2018.
Q 23Construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway began in which year?
1891
It took 25 years to finish, under ministers hand-picked by Alexander III and then Nicholas II.
Q 24Who ceremonially inaugurated Trans-Siberian construction at its Pacific end?
Q 14On the Siberian tundra, food production is largely limited to herding which animal?
Reindeer
In the fertile black-earth southwest, by contrast, farmers grow wheat, barley, rye and potatoes.
Q 15The 'Power of Siberia' pipeline, opened in 2019, carries Siberian natural gas to which country?
China
The project was launched in 2014, the year Western sanctions began pushing Russian energy exports eastward.
Q 16Which village on the Indigirka River is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth?
Oymyakon
Schools there close only when it drops below −55 °C, and a monument marks an unofficial reading of −71.2 °C from 1924.
Q 17Which regional capital of about 350,000 people is the coldest major city in the world?
Yakutsk
January there averages about −37 °C, yet the mining boom has made it one of Russia's fastest-growing cities.
Q 18Which Cossack ataman led the 1582 campaign that began the Russian conquest of Siberia?
Yermak Timofeyevich
He set out with just 840 men, and no reliable portrait or description of him survives.
Q 19Which merchant family recruited the Cossacks who invaded Siberia for the tsar in the late 1570s?
The Stroganovs
The family name is far better known today for the beef dish supposedly created in one of their kitchens.
Q 20The fall of which Tatar khanate in 1582 opened Siberia to Russian conquest?
Sibir
It was the northernmost Muslim state in recorded history, and its khans descended from Genghis Khan through his son Jochi.
The future Nicholas II
He was still tsarevich at the time, and was touring the Far East when he did it.
Q 25Before the line around Lake Baikal was finished in 1904, how did Trans-Siberian trains cross it?
On an icebreaking train ferry
Two purpose-built ships made the four-hour crossing and were kept in reserve until 1916 in case of rockfalls on the new line.
Q 26The main Trans-Siberian route begins at which Moscow station?
Yaroslavsky
Some trains use a neighbouring terminal instead, which shaves about 20 km off the trip.
Q 27Which railway, built parallel to the Trans-Siberian, did Brezhnev call 'the construction project of the century'?
The Baikal–Amur Mainline
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.
Q 28Roughly what share of the world's fresh surface water is held in the world's deepest lake?
About a fifth
That is more than all five North American Great Lakes put together.
Q 29What is the maximum depth, in metres, of the world's deepest lake?
1,642
Its floor lies more than a kilometre below sea level, and some 7 km of sediment sits beneath that.
Q 30The world's deepest lake is also its oldest. Roughly how old is it?
25–30 million years
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.