In West Siberia these high plains seem to form a narrower belt towards Barnaul and Semipalatinsk, and are bordered by the Aral-Caspian depression.
Tyumen (29,651) in West Siberia, head of Siberian navigation; Barnaul (29,850), capital of the Altai region; Krasnoyarsk (33337) and Tobolsk (21,401), both mere administrative centres; Biysk (17,206), centre of the Altai trade; Khabarovsk (15,082), administrative centre of the Amur region; Chita (11,480), the capital of Transbaikalia; Nikolsk (22,000); Irbit (20,064); Kolyvan (11,703), the centre of the trade of southern Tomsk; Yeniseisk (11,539), the centre of the gold-mining region of the same name; Kurgan (10, 579), a growing town in Tobolsk; and Minusinsk (10,255), in the southern part of .the Yeniseisk province, trading with north-west Mongolia.
From Tyumen the road proceeds to Omsk, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk, sending off from Kolyvan a branch south to Barnaul in the Altai and to Turkestan.
Russians began to mine in 1727 at Kolyvan, and in 1739 at Barnaul.
The Russian population has rapidly increased since the fertile valleys belonging to the imperial family have been thrown open to settlement, and it has been estimated that in 1908 the population of the region (Biysk, Barnaul and Kuznetsk districts) reached about 800,000.