KEMEROVO OBLAST

Kemerovo Oblast: translation

An administrative region of the Russian Federation. Part of the SiberianFederal Districtand the West SiberianEconomic Region, Kemerovo bordersTomsk,Krasnoyarsk,Khakasiya,Altay Krai,Novosibirsk, and theAltay Republic. The region is also known as Kuzbass, after the Kuznetsk basin, one of the world’s largest coal deposits. It covers an area of 95,500 square kilometers and has a population of nearly 3 million, the vast majority of whom areethnic Russians, though minorities ofUkrainians,Tatars, and ethnicGermansare also present.

The region is heavily urbanized (87 percent) and industrialized, with major centers being Kemerovo, Novokuznetsk, Prokopyevsk, and Kiselevsk.Its mineral resources—particularly coal—drive the regionaleconomy, with more than a third employed in the industrial sector. Symptomatic of the regional focus on heavyindustry, Kemerovo has strongly supported Communists in the postindependence era, receiving a plurality of votes in the 1995 federal election (the second highest in any region in the Russian Federation). In the late 1990s,Boris Yeltsinappointed Amangeldy Tuleyev, a Communist with strong protectionist leanings, to head the region after dismissing the widely disliked Mikhail Kislyuk in a dispute over pension payments. Tuleyev, a railway engineer ofKazakhandTatarparentage, had previously run for the presidency of Russia in 1991 and 1996. Despite being born an ethnicMuslimand making a journey to Mecca, Tuleyev was rumored to have been baptized as aRussian OrthodoxChristian in 1999. He deniedmediareports to that effect but was issued a death sentence for apostasy by Chechnya’s Majlis al-Shura council.

The regional government came under intense pressure from workers in 1998 over wages, a conflict that affected the rest of Russia due to a blockade of a portion of theTrans-Siberian Railway. Despite the controversy, Tuleyev remained extremely popular in the region and won a majority of votes in Kemerovo when he stood againstVladimir Putinfor the 2000 federal presidential election. While losing his bid for president of Russia, he did secure more than 90 percent of the vote when he ran for regional governor again in 2001. In recent years, he has shored up his relations with Moscow; he broke with theCommunist Party of the Russian Federationin 2003, later joiningUnited Russia. In 2007, a methane blast at the Ulyanovskaya mine made international headlines when over 100 miners lost their lives; since the explosion, Tuleyev has campaigned for improved safety regulations across the Russian Federation.

See alsoMining.