The Urals and Siberia are among the most important spaces and regions that shape Russia’s representations in the world. The images of the Urals and Siberia include several components at once: the land of natural riches, “storehouse” of resources and materials, “green sea of taiga”, industrial workshop.
Siberia and the Urals are, in our opinion, the most important spaces of social and economic transformations in Russia's history from the 19th to 21st century—spaces of “great experiments”. These “experiments” include industrial development, which began in many respects from the Urals, the active colonization of Siberia after the reforms of Petr Stolypin, industrialization of the 1930s and the late Soviet geoengineering projects like the turn of the Siberian rivers.
At the same time, the above-mentioned experiments were often considered apart from the space in which they were implemented. Siberia and the Urals remain tabula rasa, on which the ideas and plans of reforms are simply “written”. We proceed from the fact that the modern understanding of space interprets it as one of the important factors of transformations.