Word: siberia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Siberia is much, much more, however, than the locus of past political evil. For every person sent unwillingly to exile in its arctic wastelands, many others came to hunt, trap, fish, log or mine. The harsh life drove many back, but others stayed, captivated by the sublime beauty of earth's greatest northern landscape. Vitali Menshikov, an oceanographer by training, came to the Kamchatka peninsula in the Far East 27 years ago. He has returned to Leningrad only once; instead, he has used his vacations to take expeditions--61 so far--on ski and foot through this breathtaking land...
...would disagree, but, as Schaller knows, the comforting image of Siberia as the world's last pristine northern frontier also misses the mark. Kamchatka is but a tiny piece of Siberia, and elsewhere this continent-size region has been grievously wounded, and continues to be wounded today. "Let's say you decide to get away from it all in Siberia," says Alexei Yablokov, Russia's leading environmentalist and once President Boris Yeltsin's top adviser on ecology. "You travel up the Yenisey River toward the Arctic. You look across the empty tundra and think you are alone in nature, miles...
Under 70 years of communist rule, Siberia became not only a place of punishment but also a punished place, and nuclear trauma was but one of the tortures visited on the land. Possibly the largest single source of air pollution in the world is a complex of smelters in Norilsk in central Siberia; it pumps 2 million tons of sulfur, along with heavy metals and other poisons, into the air each year, contributing heavily to a noxious arctic haze that plagues residents of the northern latitudes as far away as Canada. Siberian industrial emissions contribute heavily to the threat...
...perverse genius of the Soviet system was its ability to maximize the problems associated with modern industrial societies without producing many of the benefits. Perhaps never has so vast a territory been so despoiled so rapidly. Now the question is whether the capitalism of the new Russia will save Siberia and its reeling ecosystems or finish them off. The stakes could not be higher, involving the future of earth's grandest northern landscape and the political stability of a nuclear superpower...
...expanse and the magnitudes of Siberia are mesmerizing. Officially Siberia is the territory east of the Ural Mountains and west of the Russian Far East, which includes the maritime provinces of Khabarovsk and Primorski on the Pacific coast; however, convention has labeled as Siberia all Russian lands east of the Urals--an area that covers more than 5 million sq. mi. Within these boundaries are nearly the entire lengths of four of the longest rivers on earth--the Yenisey, the Ob, the Lena and the Amur, which constitutes most of Siberia's border with China. Yakutia, now designated the Sakha...