Siberia: A Cultural HistoryBefore Russians crossed the Urals Mountains in the sixteenth century to settle their colony in North Asia, they heard rumors about bountiful fur, of bizarre people without eyes who ate by shrugging their shoulders and of a land where trees exploded from cold. This region of frozen tundra, endless forest, and humming steppe between the Urals and the Pacific Ocean was a vast, strange, and frightening paradise. It was Siberia. Siberia is a cradle of