North Asia

• 1. Introduction

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  North Asia covers 13,100,000 square kilometres, making it the largest subregion of Asia by area. That is 29.4% of Asia's entire landmass. Yet fewer than 37 million people live there, a share so small it amounts to less than one percent of Asia's population. A vast territory, extraordinarily thinly settled. How did this place come to be the way it is? What shaped its land, its peoples, and its fractured history? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Land of Extremes

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  Permafrost underlies roughly 9.6 million square kilometres of North Asia, ranging from 30 to 600 metres in depth. There are no mountain chains to stop Arctic air from pouring down across the plains of Siberia and Turkestan, which gives the region its bitterly cold character. Three major landforms divide the territory: the West Siberian Plain, the Central Siberian Plateau, and the Verkhoyansk-Chukotka collision zone.

  The Angara Shield, lying between the Yenisey River and the Lena River, forms the ancient foundation of North Asia. It developed from fragments of Laurasia, with rocks mainly composed of Precambrian crystalline rocks, gneisses, and schists. The Eurasian Plate accounts for most of the region's geology, though the eastern part sits on the North American, Amurian, and Okhotsk Plates.

  Eastern North Asia sits within the Ring of Fire. Volcanic activity shapes the Koryak Mountains and the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the islands of Severnaya Zemlya and Novaya Zemlya still carry ice caps. Ultra-prominent peaks such as Klyuchevskaya Sopka, Kronotsky, and Koryaksky mark this volatile belt. Island arcs like the Kuril Islands were formed here by tectonic and volcanic forces.

  At the centre of the region lies one of the most dramatic geological features on Earth. The Siberian Traps is a large igneous province created by a massive eruption that occurred roughly 250 million years ago. That eruption coincided with the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the largest mass extinction in the planet's history. The Uralian orogeny in the west raised the Ural Mountains, which serve as the informal boundary between Asia and Europe.

• 3. First Peoples

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  Hominins first reached North Asia approximately 100,000 years ago, in the Late Pleistocene. Modern humans are confirmed to have arrived by 45,000 years ago, and those earliest inhabitants had West Eurasian origins.

  By the Neolithic, the region's culture was marked by distinct stone production techniques and pottery with eastern origins. The Bronze Age came during the 3rd millennium BCE, shaped by Indo-Iranian cultural influences that archaeologists trace through the Andronovo culture.

  During the 1st millennium BCE, polities such as the Scythians and the Xiongnu emerged across North Asia. They frequently clashed with Persian and Chinese neighbours to their south. The Göktürks dominated southern Siberia during the 1st millennium CE. In the early 2nd millennium, the Mongol Empire and its successor states ruled the region.

  The Khanate of Sibir was among the last independent Turkic states in North Asia before the Tsardom of Russia conquered it in the 16th century. Russian expansion then continued steadily until the Convention of Peking was signed in 1860, formally completing the annexation. Russian emigration from Europe into the region began in the 16th century, bringing Slavic and other Indo-European peoples who now make up the vast majority of North Asia's population.

• 4. Soviet Power and War

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  Following the Russian Civil War, the Soviet Union worked to consolidate its hold over Siberia and the Russian Far East. The Far Eastern Republic, which had operated as a buffer state, was dissolved and absorbed into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1922. Full Soviet authority over the region was established by 1923.

  Throughout the 1930s, rising tensions with Japan prompted the Soviet Union to fortify the region militarily. That standoff reached a decisive point at the Battles of Khalkhin Gol in 1939, where Soviet General Georgy Zhukov commanded a decisive victory over Japanese forces. The outcome led directly to the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact in 1941.

  After World War II, North Asia became central to Soviet industrial and military strategy. Major industrial centres grew at Norilsk, Novosibirsk, and Irkutsk, supplied in large part by labour from the Gulag system. The Trans-Siberian Railway, running from Moscow to Vladivostok, became the essential artery for moving timber, coal, and metals to western parts of the USSR.

• 5. Demographic Realities

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  Around 33 million Russian citizens live east of the Ural Mountains. Most are Slavic-origin Russians and Russified Ukrainians. Indigenous Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic peoples have been reduced to a minority through three centuries of Russification. Russian census figures put them at roughly 10% of the region's population.

  The Buryats are the largest indigenous group, numbering 445,175. The Yakuts follow closely at 443,852. According to the 2002 census, around 500,000 Tatars live in Siberia, though 300,000 of them are Volga Tatars who settled during periods of colonization rather than indigenous residents. Ethnic Germans, numbering about 400,000, make up another significant group.

  In 1875, the population of North Asia was reported to be 8 million. Between 1801 and 1914, an estimated 7 million settlers moved from European Russia into Siberia, with 85% of that movement concentrated in the quarter-century before World War I. Indigenous peoples now comprise only about 5% of North Asia's population, while over 85% of residents are of European descent.

  With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the region entered a period of economic turmoil and depopulation. Towns built around single industries saw sharp decline. The demographic challenge has not been reversed, and it remains one of the defining constraints on the region's future.

• 6. Resources and Future

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  During the 2000s and 2010s, North Asia gained renewed strategic importance because of its vast reserves of natural gas, oil, and mineral resources. Russia began building infrastructure to connect those reserves to new markets, with the Power of Siberia gas pipeline to China marking a significant strategic pivot toward Asia.

  The Russian government launched the "Far Eastern Hectare" program and established special economic zones to attract settlement and investment in the Russian Far East. Progress has been uneven, shaped by the region's geographic isolation and persistent demographic decline. The 2010 population of the three federal districts comprising North Asia stood at 37,630,081, spread across 13,132,900 square kilometres. The Sakha Republic alone covers 3,083,500 square kilometres yet held fewer than a million people at that count, a ratio that captures the core tension at the heart of North Asia.