>>102523
>They never did. This is normal.
Indeed, this does seem to come up often when looking at their history. For the most part the population seems content to just delegate these things to the state, and the state seems content to keep interactions that do not directly benefit it to a minimum.
> there are fewer than ten million souls in Russia east of the Urals
Google says 25-30 million, but this is indeed disproportionately low.
> Jewish Autonomous Oblast
Population 150,000, almost none of them Jews, oddly enough. The whole thing seems to have been created as a containment area for them except they figured it out and either stayed in Moscow or moved to the Middle East or USA. That place blows.
> millions of square miles of arable land
>If you opened a magical portal to such land from the US, you'd instantly get a gorillion volunteers crossing over, building farms, building towns, panning for gold, building mines, building sawmills to export lumber back to this side.
I'm not sure, imo it's more fitting to compare that region to Canada, not the US. Similar climate, soil and latitude. Novosibirsk (one of the southernmost Siberian cities) is still further north than Regina and has population higher than that of the entirety of Saskatchewan.
It is understandable why no one would want to move there when they could just remain in the Volga, Don, Dnieper basins where you'd have fertile soil, mild climate and more sun (too bad they suffer a genocidal war there every century or so). Siberian soil is passable but barely, there are considerably fewer sunlight hours so you can only harvest once a year. Hell, it snows in June there sometimes. No tornadoes though!
So they ended up with an unwelcoming expanse nearly twice the US coast-to-coast span and instead of prairies they had to go through endless swamps and forests.
During the Tsarist era the area wasn't developed for this very reason and while they did manage a railroad eventually, it came too late.
Once industrialization really came into play with the Soviets (as we know the region is rich not just with oil but all sorts of metals and minerals), it did see major development. The government inundated the public with "let's do this shit!" movies, books and articles, romanticizing the concept, and millions volunteered. They did make strides in turning the area into farmland (accidentally draining a lake the size of Michigan in the process) but again the focus was on the areas with better soil and sunlight, which just happened to be in Central Asia, and ended up on the wrong side of the border in 1991 so they are more or less back to square one except now there is even less incentive for anyone to bother when doordashing in Moscow is more profitable than digging potatoes out of clay while swarms of mosquitoes suck you dry.
