Status Updates From Siberia: A History of the P...

Some authors depict Siberians, as freer
and less corrupt than European counterparts. There has been an attempt to create a
‘Siberian’ language – essentially a reconstruction of north Russian dialects
used by free settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

When the Trans- Siberian railway was built, it cost one billion gold roubles.
It also cost a huge amount of money to build the Norilsk nickel plant and
the Baikal- Amur railway. Developing the region further would require new
investment. The problem is we’ve forgotten how to attract investment over
the last decade and now we have to learn how to do it again

The economic collapse in the post- Soviet 1990s had a dramatic impact on
Siberia. Centres of industry – coal, steel, armaments – suffered as trade
contracted and factories closed. Unemployment soared as internal trade fell
apart, prices rose faster than wages, the rouble collapsed and savings became
worthless

The Virgin Lands policy (which mainly applied in north Kazakhstan but
also included land in western Siberia) introduced by Nikita Khrushchev in
the 1950s was, however, supposed to transform the cultivation of the fields,
and the lives of new settlers, in the way that new industries were transforming
the cities

urban population of Siberia grew more quickly than the rural
population. tsarist period, the boundaries separating towns and
villages were difficult to define but village/urban life became
differentiated in Soviet period, started
with Trans- Siberian railway but increased rapidly as a result of mass urbanisation.
Not only did its urban/rural balance shift, so too did the population’s ethnic
and gender composition