Siberia Trivia
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93 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 93 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which mountain range marks the western edge of Siberia?
The Ural Mountains
The Ural Mountains are the conventional divide between European Russia and Siberia, running about 2,500 km from the Arctic coast south toward the Ural River.
Q 02Roughly what fraction of Russia's land area does Siberia occupy?
About three-quarters
Siberia covers about three-quarters of Russia's territory yet holds only about a quarter of its people, most of them strung along the southern rail corridor.
Q 03What is the most populous city in Siberia?
Novosibirsk
Novosibirsk, founded in 1893 where the Trans-Siberian Railway bridged the Ob, is Russia's third-largest city with about 1.6 million people.
Q 04The Trans-Siberian Railway runs from Moscow to which Pacific port city?
Vladivostok
The line ends at Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan; the full Moscow-Vladivostok run takes about seven days and is the longest railway line in the world.
Q 05The Siberian tiger is also commonly named after which river?
The Amur
The Amur tiger is named for the Amur River, which forms the Russia-China border in the Far East where most of the wild population lives.
Q 06What 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 leading explanation is an asteroid exploding in the air several kilometres up; the airburst flattened about 80 million trees and was heard hundreds of kilometres away.
Q 07What is ground that stays below 0 °C for at least two consecutive years called?
Permafrost
Permafrost is ground that stays at or below 0 °C for two or more years; it underlies about two-thirds of Russia, and thawing it releases carbon dioxide and methane.
Q 08What is the name of the coniferous 'snow forest' biome that covers most of Siberia?
Taiga
The taiga, or boreal forest, is the largest land biome on Earth; the eastern Siberian taiga is essentially one vast larch forest.
Q 09What was the Soviet system of forced-labour camps, many of them in Siberia, called?
Gulag
Gulag is an acronym for the Main Directorate of Camps; about 18 million people passed through its camps and colonies between 1930 and 1953.
Q 10Frozen carcasses of which Ice Age animal are regularly dug out of Siberia's frozen ground?
Woolly mammoth
Woolly mammoth carcasses preserved in permafrost, such as the Berezovka mammoth found in 1901, retain hair, stomach contents and dung, making the species unusually well understood.
Q 11The Russian conquest of Siberia began during the reign of which tsar?
Ivan the Terrible
Ivan the Terrible reigned until 1584; his capture of Kazan in 1552 opened the road east, and Cossacks crossed the Urals in 1582 during his reign.
Q 12On the Siberian tundra, food production is largely limited to herding which animal?
Reindeer
Reindeer herding, practised by peoples such as the Nenets and Evenks, is the main food economy on the tundra, where the growing season is too short for crops.
Q 13The 'Power of Siberia' pipeline, opened in 2019, carries Siberian natural gas to which country?
China
Power of Siberia carries gas from eastern Siberian fields to China; the 30-year Gazprom-CNPC deal was signed in May 2014 and first gas flowed in December 2019.
Q 21Construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway began in which year?
1891
Work began in 1891 with a ceremony at Vladivostok in May; the last link, the Amur bridge at Khabarovsk, was completed in 1916, 25 years later.
Q 22Who ceremonially inaugurated Trans-Siberian construction at its Pacific end?
The future Nicholas II
The future Nicholas II, then tsarevich on his grand eastern tour, turned the first sod at Vladivostok on 31 May 1891 (19 May Old Style).
Q 23Before the line around Lake Baikal was finished in 1904, how did Trans-Siberian trains cross it?
On an icebreaking train ferry
Q 14Which village on the Indigirka River is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth?
Oymyakon
Oymyakon, on the Indigirka, has a monument to an unofficial -71.2 °C reading from 1924; its school closes only when the temperature drops below about -55 °C.
Q 15Which regional capital of about 350,000 people is the coldest major city in the world?
Yakutsk
Yakutsk, in eastern Siberia, averages about -38 °C in January, colder than any other city of comparable size, and has grown fast on diamond and gold mining.
Q 16Which Cossack ataman led the 1582 campaign that began the Russian conquest of Siberia?
Yermak Timofeyevich
Yermak Timofeyevich crossed the Urals with about 840 Cossacks in 1582 and took the khanate's capital Qashliq that October; no reliable portrait of him survives.
Q 17Which merchant family recruited the Cossacks who invaded Siberia for the tsar in the late 1570s?
The Stroganovs
The Stroganovs, salt and fur magnates of the Kama region, hired Yermak's Cossacks around 1579-1581 to guard their lands and push across the Urals; beef stroganoff later took the family's name.
Q 18Which khan ruled Sibir when Cossacks stormed its capital in 1582?
Kuchum
Kuchum Khan, a Shaybanid descendant of Genghis Khan, lost his capital Qashliq to the Cossacks in 1582 but fought on until his final defeat in 1598.
Q 19How long is the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to the Pacific?
About 9,300 km
The Moscow-Vladivostok main line measures about 9,300 km (9,289 km), the longest railway line in the world, though the Moscow-Pyongyang through service runs even farther.
Q 20How many time zones does the Trans-Siberian Railway cross end to end?
Eight
The line spans eight time zones, from Moscow (UTC+3) to Vladivostok (UTC+10); confusingly, Russian timetables listed every station in Moscow time until August 2018.
The icebreaking train ferry Baikal, with a smaller consort, carried carriages across the lake in about four hours until the Circum-Baikal line opened in 1904.
Q 24The main Trans-Siberian route begins at which Moscow station?
Yaroslavsky
Yaroslavsky station on Komsomolskaya Square is kilometre zero of the Trans-Siberian; the Rossiya train leaves from it for Vladivostok, though some services use neighbouring Kazansky.
Q 25Which railway, built parallel to the Trans-Siberian, did Brezhnev call 'the construction project of the century'?
The Baikal–Amur Mainline
The Baikal-Amur Mainline, built mainly 1974-1984 across permafrost north of Lake Baikal, cost about $14 billion and needed 21 tunnels and over 4,200 bridges.
Q 26Roughly what share of the world's fresh surface water is held in the world's deepest lake?
About a fifth
Baikal holds about a fifth (roughly 23,600 km³) of the world's unfrozen fresh surface water, more than all five North American Great Lakes combined.
Q 27What is the maximum depth, in metres, of the world's deepest lake?
1,642
Baikal's deepest point is 1,642 metres; with the surface 456 metres above sea level, the floor lies about 1,190 metres below it, atop some 7 km of sediment.
Q 28Roughly how old is Lake Baikal, the world's oldest lake?
25–30 million years
Baikal is about 25-30 million years old; most lakes silt up within tens of thousands of years, but it sits in a rift still widening by about 4 mm a year.
Q 29What is the local name of the freshwater seal found only in Siberia's great lake?
Nerpa
The nerpa, or Baikal seal, is one of the smallest true seals and the only pinniped living entirely in fresh water; roughly 100,000 survive in the lake.
Q 30The world's deepest lake drains through which single outflowing river?
The Angara
The Angara is Baikal's only outlet; more than 300 rivers flow in, but only the Angara flows out, on a 1,779 km course toward the Arctic basin.