Secrets of Siberia, or Why Russia Conquered It

Siberia is an astonishing place. Even nature itself—the boundless expanses, virgin forests, alpine meadows, mountain ranges, and the zone of permafrost—tunes anyone who arrives here to mysterious, incredible stories and adventures. It seems that very long ago the battles over possession of the Siberian kingdom had gone quiet, Yermak’s Cossack campaigns faded into the past, and the construction of Russian fortress-towns—Tobolsk, Tyumen, Krasnoyarsk, and Khabarovsk—was completed. Yet the number of people eager to test fate in the remote taiga wilderness hasn’t dwindled for five centuries. Expeditions and airplanes that vanished without a trace, geologists caught in traps set by taiga spirits, searches for gold caches— all this still captivates the minds of adventurers hungry for excitement. And if you add a mix of local myths and legends—about a huge bear, a yeti, “elephants in bristles” (that is, mammoths), a flying man, a golden idol and a silver mountain—then you get an even more fascinating narrative.