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Tom Kalbfus wrote:

Russia shares one trait with your country Canada, its under populated.

Well, the Soviet Union had the same population as the US before it broke up. Now Russia has half. The other half is in the other 14 "republics".

Your idea is interesting. Homesteading. But you forget how cold Siberia is. I live in Winnipeg, just 60 miles north of North Dakota. Once I looked at weather statistics. I saw a TV show of an American dating a Russian woman in Moscow, complaining about the cold. They walked with coats open, beside a river that was still liquid. That isn't cold! Here the river freezes over, several feet of ice. The sports car club has ice races on lakes and rivers. The website for the Weather Channel has average daily high and average daily low for each month of the year. The cities in Russia that most closely match Winnipeg are Omsk or Tomsk, both in Siberia. No where west of the Ural mountains gets this cold. This year is a cold year; it didn't set any record low temperatures, but the number of cold days (not nights) was greater. Ground froze to greater depth, water mains are freezing, a few homes are without water. March is always a month of melting snow, full blown winter at the beginning of the month, but most of the snow gone at the end. First weekend of April is usually the last snow storm. Then what's left melts in a week. But this is March 31, and most of the snow is still here. Right now it's -10°C, wind chill is -22. Winnipeg normally has snow from the beginning of November to end of March. It's chilly in April. Growing season is short.

So you are advocating Russia give away land for homesteading in Siberia. Omsk and Tomsk are both in southern Siberia. Omsk is roughly 100km (60 miles) north of the border with Kazakhstan. Most of Siberia is north of that, meaning colder than Winnipeg. There's a reason why both Canada and Siberia are thinly populated. Arable land in western Canada is a triangle, a small portion of southern Manitoba extending north-west to the Rocky mountains. In Alberta, it's arable pretty far north, almost to the border with Yukon. That's due to soil and rain as well as temperature. Northern boundaries of Canadian western provinces are 60° latitude. Moscow is 55° north, but warm because of the Gulf Stream. West of the Urals, temperature is as cold as Canada west of the Rockies. Don't expect northern Siberia to be arable.