Why Is Siberia So Empty? Russia's Frozen Three Quarters

Why is Siberia so empty? How cold, permafrost and rivers that flow north into the Arctic left Russia's vast Asian half, about three quarters of the country, with only around a fifth of its people. Siberia is larger than Canada. It covers roughly three quarters of Russia, the biggest country on Earth. And yet only around one Russian in five lives there. Siberia is larger than Canada, yet almost all of its people live in a thin strip along the southern railway. The cold is only part of the reason: its great rivers flow the wrong way, into a frozen ocean, and much of the population that is there was placed there by the Soviet state rather than drawn by the land. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Emptiest Big Map on Earth 4:12 Cold Ground 11:03 Rivers That Run to the Ice 16:37 Furs, Cossacks and the Iron Road 23:46 The Price of the Cold SOURCES Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, Brookings Institution Press, 2003 Janet M. Hartley, Siberia: A History of the People, Yale University Press, 2014 W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians, Random House, 1994 Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850-1917, Cornell University Press, 1991 Rosstat (Federal State Statistics Service of Russia), 2021 All-Russian Population Census results, published 2022-2023 UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Lake Baikal, inscription 1996 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Doubleday, 2003 Encyclopaedia Britannica, entries "Siberia", "Ob River", "Yenisey River", "Lena River", "permafrost" Where the sources disagree, the narration says so. Illustrations are artistic reconstructions created with AI tools; narration voice is synthetic. #geography #geopolitics #maps