Siberia

• 1. Introduction

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  Siberia covers over 13.1 million square kilometres, roughly three-quarters of Russia's total land area, and yet only about a quarter of Russia's population lives there. That imbalance tells you something essential about the place. It is one of the most expansive territories on Earth, and one of the emptiest. The questions the rest of this documentary will answer are not simple ones. How did such a vast land come to be Russian at all? What happened to the people who were already there? What does it mean to call a place this large a single thing, when scientists, historians, and the people who live there cannot even agree on where its borders lie? And what forces, ancient and modern, are now reshaping a landscape that was once thought to be simply frozen in time.

• 2. Deep Time

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  In Paleozoic times, the landmass that would become Siberia existed as a separate continent called Angaraland. It fused with Euramerica during the Late Carboniferous as part of the formation of Pangea. The Siberian Traps, a vast region of layered volcanic rock, formed during one of the largest volcanic events of the last 251 million years. That eruption continued for roughly a million years, and some scientists consider it a possible cause of the extinction event known as the Great Dying about 250 million years ago, which is estimated to have killed 90 percent of species then living on Earth.

  The ice and permafrost of later ages preserved what the deep past left behind. Bodies of prehistoric animals from the Pleistocene Epoch have been recovered in Siberia, including cave lion cubs found at a site recorded under the name Goldfuss, a woolly mammoth named Yuka, another woolly mammoth from Oymyakon, a woolly rhinoceros from the Kolyma, and bison and horses from Yukagir. Remote Wrangel Island and the Taymyr Peninsula are believed to have been the last places on Earth where woolly mammoths survived as isolated populations, until their extinction around 2000 BC.

  At least three species of humans shared southern Siberia around 40,000 years ago: Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, and the Denisovans, a group identified as a separate species from DNA evidence in 2010. The oldest known fossil to carry the gene variant responsible for blond hair in modern Europeans was a 17,000-year-old Ancient North Eurasian specimen from Siberia. Ancient North Eurasian populations genetically similar to the Mal'ta-Buret' culture and Afontova Gora are now understood to have been a significant genetic contributor to Native Americans, Europeans, Ancient Central Asians, South Asians, and certain East Asian groups. Current evidence suggests the first people in the Americas diverged from Ancient East Asians about 36,000 years ago and expanded northward into Siberia, where they encountered Ancient North Eurasians, giving rise to populations that later crossed into the Americas.

• 3. Conquest and Colonization

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  The first mention of Siberia in Russian chronicles appears in records from 1032. The city-state of Novgorod established two trade routes to the Ob River and claimed the lands the Russians called Yugra, drawn above all by furs. Military campaigns in 1187 and 1193, both recorded in chronicles, were defeated by local resistance. After Moscow absorbed Novgorod, Ivan III sent expeditionary forces into Siberia in 1483 and again in 1499-1500. The Russians received tribute from local tribes but lost contact with them once they withdrew.

  Formal conquest accelerated when the Khanate of Sibir collapsed. The fall of the Khanate in 1582 opened the way for a sustained Russian push eastward, and the annexation of Chukotka in 1778 completed the process. By the mid-17th century Russia had established areas of control reaching to the Pacific Ocean. Towns rose along the way: Mangazeya, Tara, Yeniseysk, and Tobolsk, which became the de facto capital of Siberia from 1590. Gerardus Mercator's map published in 1595 marks the name Sibier as both a settlement and a surrounding territory along a tributary of the Ob. By 1709 some 230,000 Russians had settled in the region.

  The Trans-Siberian Railway, constructed during 1891-1916, transformed the pace and scale of migration. It bound Siberia to the rapidly industrialising Russia of Nicholas II. Around seven million Russians moved to Siberia from Europe between 1801 and 1914, and between 1859 and 1917 more than half a million people migrated to the Russian Far East alone. Exile, meanwhile, had been a pillar of Russian punitive practice throughout this period, with more than 800,000 people sent to Siberia during the 19th century.

• 4. The Gulag and Its Shadow

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  In the early decades of the Soviet Union, especially during the 1930s and 1940s, the government ran its Gulag system as a state agency administering penal labour camps across a vast network. From 1929 to 1953, more than 14 million people passed through these camps and prisons, many of them in Siberia, according to semi-official Soviet estimates that remained secret until after the Soviet government fell in 1991. Another seven to eight million people were internally deported to remote areas during the same era, in some cases entire nationalities.

  Half a million prisoners, specifically 516,841, died in camps between 1941 and 1943 during World War II. Many Gulag camps operated in the most remote corners of northeastern Siberia. The cluster known as Sevvostlag ran along the Kolyma River. Near Norilsk, the camp called Norillag held 69,000 prisoners in 1952. The major industrial cities of Norilsk and Magadan grew directly from camps built and run by prisoners and later by former prisoners.

  After the Soviet collapse in 1991, Siberia faced a severe economic contraction. Hyperinflation, industrial decline, and resource privatization reshaped the region. Discussions of a Siberian Republic and a proposal for more regional autonomy under a body called the Siberian Agreement circulated through the 1990s but produced no change in federal structure. The populations of remote northern settlements, which had been maintained artificially during the Soviet period, declined sharply as industrial investment retreated.

• 5. A Land of Extremes

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  Oymyakon recorded a temperature of minus 67.7 degrees Celsius on the 6th of February 1933. Verkhoyansk, which lies further north and further inland, matched that record across three consecutive nights: the 5th, 6th, and the 7th of February 1933. Both towns are in competition for the title of the coldest inhabited point in the Northern Hemisphere. Each also regularly reaches 30 degrees Celsius in summer, which means they, and much of Russian Siberia, experience temperature swings often exceeding 94 to 100 degrees between the coldest winters and the warmest summers.

  The highest point in Siberia is the active volcano Klyuchevskaya Sopka on the Kamchatka Peninsula, whose peak reaches 4,750 metres. The Verkhoyansk Range was heavily glaciated during the Pleistocene but the climate was too dry for ice to descend to lower elevations. In the extreme northeast, permafrost in the basin of the Yana River reaches a depth of 1,493 metres. The active layer of soil above the permafrost tends to be less than one metre deep, except near rivers. Only the deciduous Siberian Larch, known scientifically as Larix sibirica, can thrive across much of the Central Siberian Plateau because of its exceptionally shallow roots.

  At 7:15 in the morning on the 30th of June 1908, the event now known as Tunguska felled millions of trees near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia. Most scientists attribute it to the air burst of a meteor or comet. No crater has ever been found. The landscape of that sparsely inhabited area still carries visible scars today.

• 6. Resources and the Warming Land

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  Russia contains about 40 percent of the world's known nickel reserves, concentrated at the Norilsk deposit in Siberia. Norilsk Nickel is the world's largest nickel and palladium producer. Around 70 percent of Russia's developed oil fields lie in the Khanty-Mansiysk region. The Markovo Oil Field was discovered in 1962, producing from an early Cambrian sandstone layer at a depth of 2,156 metres. The Sredne-Botuobin Gas Field followed in 1970, and the Yaraktin Oil Field was found in 1971 at depths of up to 1,750 metres. Siberia also holds some of the world's largest forests, and produces over 10 percent of the world's annual fish catch from the Sea of Okhotsk, one of the two or three richest fisheries on Earth.

  Researchers Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University and Judith Marquand at Oxford University have warned that Western Siberia has begun to thaw as a result of global warming. The frozen peat bogs in this region may hold billions of tons of methane gas. Methane is a greenhouse gas 22 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. In 2008 a research expedition for the American Geophysical Union detected methane levels up to 100 times above normal in the atmosphere over the Siberian Arctic, likely from methane clathrates being released through holes in a frozen layer of seabed permafrost around the outfall of the Lena River and the area between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea. Vasily Kryuchkov has estimated that approximately 31,000 square kilometres of the Russian Arctic has already been subjected to severe environmental disturbance.

  Since 1988, work at a nature reserve called Pleistocene Park has proposed to restore prehistoric grassland conditions by studying the effects of large herbivores on permafrost. The hypothesis is that a transition from tundra to grassland would shift the land's energy balance, changing the ratio of emission to absorption.

• 7. People and Belonging

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  According to the Russian Census of 2010, the Siberian and Far Eastern Federal Districts together hold a population of about 25.6 million. With the Tyumen and Kurgan Oblasts included, the total reaches approximately 30 million across the broadest definition of the region, spread over a population density of about three people per square kilometre. Slavic-origin Russians make up over 85 percent of the population. Slavic-origin Russians outnumber all indigenous peoples combined, except in the Republics of Tuva and Sakha.

  The Mongol-speaking Buryats, numbering approximately 500,000, are the most numerous indigenous group in Siberia, concentrated in the Buryat Republic. According to the 2010 census, 478,085 indigenous Turkic-speaking Yakuts also live in the region. The 2002 census counted 500,000 Tatars in Siberia, of whom 300,000 were Volga Tatars who arrived during the colonial period, and 200,000 were indigenous Siberian Tatars. Other indigenous peoples include the Kets, Evenks, Chukchis, Koryaks, Yupiks, and Yukaghirs.

  Siberia is regarded as the ancestral home of shamanism. The vast territory holds many distinct local traditions, each with their own figures and sacred places, among them Olkhon, an island in Lake Baikal. The question of who counts as Siberian remains open. A number of factors in recent years, including discussions of Siberian separatism, have made the definition of Siberia's territory a contested subject. In the eastern reaches, some territories resist easy classification as either Siberia or the Russian Far East. On the 2nd of December 2019, the Power of Siberia gas pipeline began operating, supplying natural gas from the region to China under a project that had been launched in 2014.