Short answers, pulled from the story.
Siberia covers over 13.1 million square kilometres, which is roughly three-quarters of Russia's total land area. It accounts for almost 9 percent of Earth's entire land surface. Despite its size, it is home to only about a quarter of Russia's population.
The conquest of Siberia began with the fall of the Khanate of Sibir in 1582 and concluded with the annexation of Chukotka in 1778. By the mid-17th century Russia had established control reaching to the Pacific Ocean, and by 1709 approximately 230,000 Russians had settled in the region.
From 1929 to 1953, more than 14 million people passed through Gulag camps and prisons, many of them in Siberia, according to semi-official Soviet estimates made public after 1991. An additional seven to eight million people were internally deported to remote Soviet areas during the same period. Between 1941 and 1943 alone, 516,841 prisoners died in the camps.
Oymyakon recorded a temperature of minus 67.7 degrees Celsius on the 6th of February 1933. Verkhoyansk matched that extreme across three consecutive nights on the 5th, 6th, and the 7th of February 1933. Both towns are in competition for the title of coldest inhabited point in the Northern Hemisphere.
At 7:15 in the morning on the 30th of June 1908, an event near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia felled millions of trees. Most scientists believe it resulted from the air burst of a meteor or comet. No crater has ever been found, but the landscape still shows visible damage.
Researchers including Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University and Judith Marquand at Oxford University have warned that Western Siberia's frozen peat bogs may hold billions of tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 22 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. A 2008 expedition for the American Geophysical Union detected methane levels up to 100 times above normal in the atmosphere over the Siberian Arctic, likely from clathrates releasing through holes in seabed permafrost.