page_title: History of Siberia
section_title: Industrial expansion
hierarchical_section_title: History of Siberia / Soviet era / Industrial expansion
caption_attribution_description: Picture of Novosibirsk Akademgorodok - the Siberian scientific centre
context_page_description: The early history of Siberia was greatly influenced by the sophisticated nomadic civilizations of the Scythians on the west of the Ural Mountains and Xiongnu on the east of the Urals, both flourishing before the Christian era. The steppes of Siberia were occupied by a succession of nomadic peoples, including the Khitan people, various Turkic peoples, and the Mongol Empire. In the late Middle Ages, Tibetan Buddhism spread into the areas south of Lake Baikal.
  During the Russian Empire, Siberia was chiefly developed as an agricultural province. The government also used it as a place of exile, sending Avvakum, Dostoevsky, and the Decemberists, among others, to work camps in the region. During the 19th century, the Trans-Siberian Railway was constructed, supporting industrialization. This was also aided by the discovery and exploitation of vast reserves of Siberian mineral resources.
context_section_description: In the second half of the 20th century, the exploration of mineral and hydroenergetic resources continued. Many of these projects were planned, but were delayed due to wars and the ever-changing opinions of Soviet politicians.
  The most famous project is Baikal Amur Mainline. It was planned simultaneously with Trans-Siberian, but the construction began just before World War II, was put on hold during the war and restarted after. After Joseph Stalin's death, it was again suspended for years to be continued under Leonid Brezhnev.
  The cascade of hydroelectric powerplants was built in the 1960s–1970s on the Angara River, a project similar to Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States. The powerplants allowed the creation and support of large production facilities, such as the aluminium plant in Bratsk, Ust-Ilimsk, rare-earth mining in Angara basin, and those associated with the timber industry. The price of electricity in Angara basin is the lowest in Russia. But the Angara cascade is not fully finished yet: the Boguchany power plant waits to be finished, and a series of enterprises will be set up.
  The downside of this development is the ecological damage due to the low standards of production and excessive sizes of dams (the bigger projects were favoured by the industrial authorities and received more funding), the increased humidity sharpened the already hard climate. Another powerplant project on Katun River in Altai mountains in the 1980s, which was widely protested publicly, was cancelled.
  There are a number of military-oriented centers like the NPO Vektor and closed cities like Seversk. By the end of the 1980s a large portion of the industrial production of Omsk and Novosibirsk (up to 40%) was composed of military and aviation output. The collapse of state-funded military orders began an economic crisis.
  The Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences unites a lot of research institutes in the biggest cities, the biggest being the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Akademgorodok (a scientific town) near Novosibirsk. Other scientific towns or just districts composed by research institutes, also named "Akademgorodok", are in the cities of Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk. These sites are the centers of the newly developed IT industry, especially in that of Novosibirsk, nicknamed "Silicon Taiga", and in Tomsk.
  A number of Siberian-based companies extended their businesses of various consumer products to meta-regional and an All-Russian level. Various Siberian artists and industries, have created communities that are not centralized in Moscow anymore, like the Idea (annual low-budged ads festival), Golden Capital (annual prize in architecture).
caption: Akademgorodok, a scientific town near Novosibirsk
exif: {}