Word: yakutia
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...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 Republic and the largest of Siberia's dozens of political divisions, is more than seven times the size of California. Magadan is three times; Krasnoyarsk is nearly six Californias. The entire region is frigid in winter. Oimyakon in Yakutia is often cited as the coldest inhabited...
...just one item in Siberia's bulging portfolio of natural resources. Soviet exploitation managed to poison and degrade 35,000 sq. mi. of the vast republic, but that only scratched the surface of its mineral wealth. Bob Logan, an economist at the University of Alaska, has made trips to Yakutia to study the region's economic prospects, which he describes as "staggering." As much as 20% of the territory is known to have oil and gas deposits that could make it the Saudi Arabia of the north. The area is one of the world's leading sources of diamonds...
While the liquidation of forests preoccupies Siberia's south, the northern regions are obsessed with the dream of better transportation links to the outside world. In giant Yakutia, officials speak of the benefits of a sea route across the top of the continent that will open their territories. They long to be free of extortionate transportation mafias that saddle the region with what may be the highest shipping costs in the world. The fees are so high that merchants in Cherski often find it more economical to import food products from Alaska than buy from elsewhere in Russia--and Alaska...
...former Soviet Union, fourth in diamond production, smuggling is on the rise in part because of the breakdown of law and order that accompanied communism's collapse. For years it was an open secret that communist Party and KGB officials pilfered diamonds from mine operations in Yakutia. Now that the old communists have fallen on hard times, millions of dollars' worth of their ill-gotten diamonds appear to be making their way into Western salesrooms. According to Mikhail Gurtovoi, the head of a Russian government anticorruption unit, large batches of illegally acquired Russian diamonds are turning up in Belgium...
...issued an order to all government institutions and local authorities to stop hoarding goods and fulfill contracts for delivery. The order, however, looks unenforceable. Meanwhile, new problems keep piling up: a threat of another coal miners' strike and a declaration of economic sovereignty by the Far Eastern region of Yakutia, a part of the Russian Republic. No wonder rumormongering is so popular. Gossipy speculation can be a welcome relief from grim reality...