Siberia
a vast region of northern Asia, a possession of Russia. It comprises nearly all Asia north of the fiftieth parallel. It extends from the Ural Mountains to Bering Sea, a zone of territory 3,600 miles in length. The area of Siberia proper is given usually at 4,833,496 square miles. This estimate must be reduced somewhat by the recent cession of the southern half of the island of Saghalin to Japan. The population in 1907 was returned at 6,893,900. The southern district of Siberia has a general altitude of from 2,000 to 3,000 feet. The entire region slopes northward to sea level.
It is convenient, at least, to divide Siberia into an eastern and a western section separated by the one hundred fifth meridian, or, in other words, by a north and south line passing near the western edge of Lake Baikal. The western section is not unlike eastern Russia. Four belts of soil and climate may be noted. Named from south to north, they are the steppe region, in parts arid and salty and in others adapted to grazing; next a belt of black soil not unsuitable for agricultural purposes; then a zone of birch, fir, and pine forests inhabited by fur-bearing animals; and, lastly, a wide extent of tundra, or mossy, half frozen plains sparsely inhabited by reindeer and other arctic animals. This vast territory is drained into the Arctic Ocean by many streams, including the Obi and the Yenisei, along whose banks a scattered population lives chiefly by hunting, fishing, and trapping. This section is one great plain. The rivers are uninterrupted by cascades. Were it not that the Arctic and the lower courses of the rivers are ice-bound for ten months in the year, they might afford waterways for ships of great size.
The eastern part of Siberia is the higher and its surface is, on the whole, mountainous. There are valleys capable of cultivation. Those near Lake Baikal are the most fertile in all Siberia, but the eastern section is generally rough and inhospitable. Its mineral wealth and forests are as yet little known.
When first known to the historian Siberia was part of the extensive domain of Genghis Khan. In 1580 a band of Russian Cossacks, who had been accustomed to plunder ships on the Volga, fled from justice and established themselves in Siberia. Later they offered to bring a section of the country under the "protection" of the czar on condition of peace and forgetfulness of the past. The Russian advance from one river to another was rapid. In 1689, a century later, a treaty with Peking allowed the claim of Russia clear to the borders of the Pacific Ocean.
It would be difficult to describe the native tribes. They are Turks, Mongols, Tartars, or Yakuts, and tribes allied to the Eskimo. Some tribes are hunters and fishers; others move with their flocks from place to place. Siberia is used as a place of banishment, or rather confinement, for Russian political offenders. The story of Siberian exiles, people often of refinement and education, doomed to wear out their lives in the mines and swamps of Siberia is a long one. The Trans-Siberian Railway, constructed near the southern border, connects with Moscow and St. Petersburg and runs to the Sea of Japan at Vladivostok. Passenger trains require thirteen days for the trip; freights take fifty to sixty days. The chief articles of west-bound freight are wheat, oil, seeds, flax, honey, wax, eggs, meat, fish, tallow, furs, timber, cedar nuts, and tea.
See Baikal; Yenisei; Irkutsk; Yakutsk; Vladivostok; Saghalin, etc.