Krasnoyarsk Krai - History

History

According to archeologists the territory of Siberia was settled around 40,000 BCE The grave-mounds and monuments of the Scythian culture in Krasnoyarsk Krai belong to the 7th century BCE and are ones of the oldest in Eurasia. Among other things a prince's grave Kurgan Arshan exposed in 2001 is known.

The Russian settlement of the area (by Cossacks mostly) began in the 17th century. After the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad the Russian colonization of the area strongly increased.

During both the Tsarist and the Bolsheviks' regimes the territory of Krasnoyarsk Krai was used as a place of exile of political enemies of current government. The first leaders of the Soviet state Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin were in exile on the territory of the nowadays krai in 1897–1900 and in 1903 respectively. In Stalin's era numerous Gulag camps were in the region.

In 1822, Yenisei Governorate was created with Krasnoyarsk as its administrative center that covered the territory very close to the one of the current krai.

On June 30, 1908, in the basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, there occurred a powerful explosion most likely to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5–10 kilometers (3–6 miles) above Earth's surface. The force of the explosion is estimated to be about 10–15 megatons. It flattened more than 2,000 square kilometers (500,000 acres) of pine forest and killed thousands of reindeer.

Krasnoyarsk Krai was created in 1934 after disaggregation of West Siberian and East Siberian Krais and then included Taymyr and Evenk Autonomous Okrugs and Khakas Autonomous Oblast. In 1991, Khakassia separated from the krai and became a republic within the Russian Federation.

On January 1, 2007, following a referendum on the issue held on April 17, 2005, territories of Evenk and Taymyr Autonomous Okrugs were merged into the krai.