Siberia

A third of the northern hemisphere's land, crossed in sixty years and populated in four centuries by fewer people than live in Moscow. Russian expansion east began in the 1580s with Yermak's Cossack band, financed by the Stroganov merchant family, and ran on fur - sable above all, which was worth enough to fund the whole enterprise and was extracted as tribute, the yasak, from indigenous peoples at the point of a gun. The rivers made it possible: the Ob, Yenisei and Lena run north, but their tributaries interlock, so a boat could cross the continent with short portages. The Pacific was reached by 1639. Conquest devastated the peoples already there - Khanty, Evenki, Yakuts, Buryats, Chukchi and dozens more - through disease, tribute and displacement, though the Yakuts and Buryats survived as substantial nations with their own republics. Siberia's second function was punitive. Exile there began in the seventeenth century, took in the Decembrists, Dostoevsky and generations of revolutionaries, and reached its extreme in the Gulag, whose camps built the Kolyma road, the Norilsk nickel works and the Baikal-Amur railway on convict labour. The Trans-Siberian, completed in stages to 1916, finally made settlement practical and drew millions of peasants east under Stolypin's resettlement programme. Oil and gas found in western Siberia from the 1960s now supply the bulk of Russia's export earnings, which is the region's central fact today. Lake Baikal holds a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water. Winters at Verkhoyansk fall below minus sixty. Novosibirsk is the largest city and the third in Russia. Akademgorodok was built beside it in 1957 as a science town. Tuva was an independent state until 1944.

• Existed: 1582 CE – present
• Type: Entity