History of Siberia

[1][2][3] According to Vasily Radlov, among the Paleo-Siberian inhabitants of Central Siberia were the Yeniseians, who spoke a language different from the later Uralic and Turkic people.

In 1207 his eldest son Jochi subjugated the Siberian forest people, the Uriankhai, the Oirats, Barga, Khakas, Buryats, Tuvans, Khori-Tumed [ru], and Kyrgyz.

While the Barga, Tumed, Buriats, Khori, Keshmiti, and Bashkirs were organized in separate thousands, the Telengit, Tolos, Oirats and Yenisei Kirghiz were numbered as tumens.

In 1270, Kublai Khan sent an ethnic Han official, with a new batch of settlers, to serve as the judge of the Kyrgyz and Tuvan basin areas (益蘭州 and 謙州).

In the beginning of the 16th century Tatar fugitives from Turkestan subdued the loosely associated tribes inhabiting the lowlands to the east of the Ural Mountains.

[15] In the mid-16th century, the Tsardom of Russia conquered the Tatar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, thus annexing the entire Volga Region and making the way to the Ural Mountains open.

After a few victories over the khan's army, Yermak's people defeated the main forces of Kuchum on Irtysh River after a 3-day battle of Chuvash Cape in 1582.

The remains of the khan's army retreated to the steppes, abandoning his domains to Yermak, who, according to tradition, by presenting Siberia to tsar Ivan IV achieved his own restoration to favour.

Yermak's Cossacks had to withdraw from Siberia completely, but every year new bands of hunters and adventurers, supported by Moscow, poured into the country.

According to folk tales related a century after the fact, in the three and a half years from 1620 to 1624 Pyanda allegedly traversed the total of 4,950 miles (7,970 km) of hitherto unknown large Siberian rivers.

[18][19] In 1639 a group led by Ivan Moskvitin became the first Russian to reach the Pacific Ocean and to discover the Sea of Okhotsk, having built a winter camp on its shore at the Ulya River mouth.

[16] In 1640 they apparently sailed south, explored the south-eastern shores of the Okhotsk Sea, maybe even reaching the mouth of the Amur River and discovering the Shantar Islands on their return voyage.

[20] In 1643, Vasily Poyarkov crossed the Stanovoy Range and reached the upper Zeya River in the country of the Daurs, who were paying tribute to Manchu Chinese.

He built winter quarters at Albazin, then sailed down the Amur and found Achansk, which preceded the present-day Khabarovsk, defeating or evading large armies of Daurian Manchu Chinese and Koreans on his way.

[19] So, by the mid-17th century, the Russian people had established the borders of their country close to the modern ones, and explored almost the whole of Siberia, except eastern Kamchatka and some regions north of the Arctic Circle.

At the same time, some of the members of the newly founded Russian Academy of Sciences traveled extensively through Siberia, forming the so-called Academic Squad of the Expedition.

The Manchu resistance, however, obliged the Russian Cossacks to quit Albazin, and by the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) Russia abandoned her advance into the basin of the river, instead concentrating on the colonisation of the vast expanses of Siberia and trading with China via the Siberian trakt.

Peter Simon Pallas, with several Russian students, laid the first foundation of a thorough exploration of the topography, fauna, flora, and inhabitants of the country.

In the beginning of the 18th century, the threat of the nomads' attacks weakened; thus the region became more and more populated; normal civic life was established in the cities.

[27] The same events took place in other cities; public libraries, museums of local lore, colleges, theatres were being built, although the first university in Siberia was opened as late as 1880 in Tomsk.

Trans-Siberian Railroad gave a great boost to Siberian agriculture, allowing for increased exports to Central Russia and European countries.

Another profitable industry is the fur trade, which contributed greatly to the national revenue on top of covering administrative costs in Siberia.

In 1921, the Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik, visiting the Podkamennaya Tunguska River basin as part of a survey for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, deduced from local accounts that the explosion had been caused by a giant meteorite impact.

[45] In the 1930s, the Party started the collectivization, which automatically put the "kulak" label on the well-off families living in Siberia for a long time.

On August 28, 1941, the Supreme Soviet stated an order "About the Resettlement of the Germans of Volga region", by which many of them were deported into different rural areas of Kazakhstan and Siberia.

By the end of war, thousands of captive soldiers and officers of German and Japanese armies were sentenced to several years of work in labour camps in all the regions of Siberia.

The powerplants allowed creation and support of large production facilities, such as the aluminium plant in Bratsk, Ust-Ilimsk, rare-earth mining in Angara basin, and those associated with the timber industry.

The downside of this development is ecological damage due to low standards of production and excessive sizes of dams (the bigger projects were favoured by industrial authorities and received more funding), the increased humidity sharpened the already hard climate.

While this recently constructed through road will at first benefit mostly the transit travel to and from the Pacific provinces, it will also boost settlement and industrial expansion in the sparsely populated regions of Zabaykalsky Krai and Amur Oblast.

The Russian Railroads instead suggest an ambitious project of a railway to Magadan, Chukchi Peninsula and then the supposed Bering Strait Tunnel to Alaska.