The development of Siberia has passed through three stages since the late XVI century: hunting, agrarian and industrial. This history corresponds to the exploitation of its natural reserves. Furs, then arable land and precious metals, followed now by primary and power resources have all been Siberia's living.
In the mid-XVII century some 145 thousand sable were trapped annually; furs accounted for 20% of the Russian state budget receipts. As fur-bearing animals were gradually exterminated and the hunting reduced, Siberia all the same remained the world largest supplier of furs. Even in 1910, according to the Vienna World Exhibition data, its share of the world furs market was 40%.
The fertile lands of Siberia were conducive to grain-growing and to the cattle-raising. In the late XVII century almost 65 thousand tons of grain a year were harvested, and in the early XIX century exports alone amounted to some 320 thousand tons annually. As for per capita quantity of livestock, Siberia in the early part of this century surpassed the European Russia 2-3 times. Prior to World War I the Russia received more gold in payment for Siberian butter than was extracted from Siberian gold-fields.
Throughout recent history, one of the main motives in the development of Siberia was to capture its abundant wealth. Initially attention was attracted by precious metals: in the first half of the XIX century the Altai mining district alone yielded more silver than Britain, Belgium, France and Switzerland put together. Then the "golden" age took over this "silver". By the mid-XIX century annual extraction of gold in Siberia approached 25 tons, and at the close of the century it reached 90% of Russia's total.
By the mid-XX century, attention was concentrated on extraction of primary and power resources on an especially large scale. In the early '90s Siberia established a leading positions in the national economy, being inferior in gross output, only to the Central economic area. Its share in Russian oil extraction was 73%, and of gas - 90%. The receipts from Siberia's natural resource exports covered 4/5 of the former USSR total imports.
The economic development of this giant region was accompanied by emigration and rendering habitable. The resettlement was both free and forced. In the early XX century there were over 250 thousand exiles in Siberia. In the course of Stolypin's reform, only in 1906-07 approximately 4 million people migrated here. In the middle of the century the settling of Siberia accelerated dramatically - due to modernization and industrialization of Russia. Millions of people were sent to the East in the years of Stalin's five-year plans, evacuated during the World War II, and came to the "Construction Sites of Communism" in the times of Khruschev and Brezhnev. Not all of them resettled beyond the Urals of their own free will. This is the place where the main part of the GULAG archipelago was situated after all.
There were no decent living conditions created for settlers in Siberia. The result were the waves of reverse migration. In 1906-14 about one million people returned to European Russia, and in '60s another million moved back behind the Urals. The current reverse migration seems to be even stronger - especially from the severe Northern areas.
Today's Siberia is probably the region of Russia most burdened with problems. Being developed for so long time as a functional appendage of the center, it inherited a poorly differentiated and narrowly specialized economy of colonial kind. Siberia is now endeavoring to build its own systems of foreign trade "insurance" which is to compensate the collapse of the internal Russian market, disproportions in economic structure and the social sector.