A Khanate’s name still blankets North Asia in Russian minds
Siberia stretches from the Urals to the Pacific as a geographic idea, not a single polity, covering North Asia under Russian rule since the sixteenth century. January averages near −25 °C brand winters that keep “Asian” land feeling culturally Russian to many outsiders.
It covers more than 13.1 million square kilometres, and over 85 percent of its people are of European descent, though Yakuts, Tuvans and other Indigenous Turkic groups remain sizeable minorities. Borders blur: Arctic south to Kazakhstan–Mongolia–China approaches depending on the definition. In Paleozoic times it formed its own continent, Angaraland, and the Siberian Traps eruptions may have caused the Great Dying about 250 million years ago.
Frozen ground has preserved Yuka the mammoth, cave lion cubs and a Kolyma woolly rhinoceros, and mammoths survived on Wrangel Island until about 2000 BC. Around 40,000 years ago modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans all lived in the south. The toponym entered Russian via the Khanate of Sibir from the fifteenth century; earlier Yugra labeled northern lands. Folk “sleeping land” (Sib-ir) tales clash with actual Siberian Tatar; Mongolists and Slavic “north” (sever) theories compete without consensus. Other ideas link the name to a Mongolic word for dense forest or to the Sibe people.
Novgorod sought furs along routes to the Ob, and after the Khanate of Sibir fell in 1582, forts like Tobolsk, the de facto capital from 1590, pushed Russian control to the Pacific by the mid-seventeenth century. Over 800,000 people were exiled there in the nineteenth century, and the Trans-Siberian Railway, built from 1891 to 1916, brought millions of settlers.
On 30 June 1908 the Tunguska blast flattened millions of trees, and Soviet labour camps such as those along the Kolyma held many of the more than 14 million prisoners of 1929 to 1953.
Source: Siberia
