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Siberia - HighBeam Encyclopedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03) |
 | | Siberia's administrative units are the Altai, Buryat, Khakass, and Tuva republics, the Altai and Krasnoyarsk territories, the Omsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Kemerovo, Irkutsk, and Chita regions, and the Taymyr, Ust-Ordyn-Buryat, and Evenki autonomous areas. |
 | | Siberia may be divided, from north to south, into the zones of vegetation that run across Russia—the tundra (extending c.200 mi/320 km inland along the entire Arctic coast), the taiga, the mixed forest belt, and the steppe zone. |
 | | Siberia was used as a penal colony and a place of exile for political prisoners; among the latter there emerged (especially after the exile of leaders of the Decembrist Conspiracy of 1825) a small but vocal Siberian intelligentsia, who agitated for an end of Siberia's colonial status. |
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