According to a much quoted Russian saying 'the country has two eternal problems, roads and idiots'.

[it was] perceived that it was easier to rise upwards east of the Urals. A man who left Russia as a common soldier became a sergeant in Tobolsk, a captain in Yakutsk and a colonel in Kamchatka.

The Soviet period was a disaster, not least because supply lines were so long and so corrupt that little was left by the time goods reached the Russian Far East except things nobody wanted, such as the fabled ten thousand left-foot gumboots. (On that occasion, transport planning failed to the extent that the 10,000 left boots went in the opposite direction to the same number of right boots, heading nobody knew where).

The quickest way from St Petersburg to Kamchatka in furthest Siberia is still often westwards via New York.

A resident [of Chukotka] had stuck a flyer on a telegraph pole advertising his flat in exchange for a one-way ticket to Moscow. Unemployment runs at seventy per cent in the surrounding villages.

Their [500 Siberian Tribes] presence predated Russians by thousands of years. Yet they are routinely referred to as 'half-thawed humanity' and 'descendants of fish'...