Because Russia is the only state which has ruled all of Siberia, to follow the history of Siberia over the past 400 years you must acquire a general grasp of the major periods and events of Russian history as outlined below.
The Pre-Slavic period
(period before the emergence of the Slavs as a separate people in Central-Eastern Europe: 5,000 BC to 1,800 BC, the period of prehistory down to the Bronze Age). The Russians and other Slavs are Indo-European speaking peoples, related by language to Germans, Latins, Greeks and other European peoples.
The Ancient Slavic period (1,800BC-860AD)
The rise, spread and divergence of Slavic tribes during the Bronze and Iron Ages in Eastern Europe. During this period Slavs spead out through the forest zone of into present-day European Russia. There they came into contact with and are dominated by steppe nomads such as the Iranian speaking Scythians (700BC-200BC) and Sarmatians (200BC-100AD). Afterwards, Turkic speaking Huns (375-454), and Mongol speaking Avars (7th century) from Eastern Eurasia swept westward and briefly dominated the Slavs.
The Kievan period (862-1240AD)
The time of the formation of the Eastern Slavic tribes who were later to become the Russians and Ukrainians; the arrival of Scandinavian rulers known as Varangians; the rise of Kiev as the main city of the Eastern Slavic lands, the time when Russia was called Rus; acceptance of Christianity from Byzantium; this period lasted from 862AD, the arrival of Riurik the first Scandinavian prince, to 1240, when the Mongols destroyed Kiev. During this period the agricultural Russians in the forest zone fought the nomadic tribes of the steppe zone (in particular, the Turkic speaking Pechenegs from 960 to 1060 and Polovtsy, also known as Kipchaks or Kumans, from 1060 to 1235.
The Mongol Period (1240-1380, some say until 1506)
Beginning by 1240 most of the Kievan princes had been defeated by Mongol-Tatar armies and forced to pay tribute. Kiev was destroyed in 1240. During this era the Russian principalities paid tribute to the Mongol Khan at Sarai the capital of the Golden Horde, established by Batu, grandson of Chingiz Khan in 1240; the Golden Horde finally disintegrated in 1506 but it had become increasingly weak since the late 14th century due to Mongol civil wars and recurrent epidemics of bubonic plague in the Mongol encampments.
The Muscovite Period(14th century up to 1689)
As the Mongols diminished in power, the town of Moscow, at first with Mongol patronage, rose to take its place. During the 16th century, Moscow unified most of the Russian lands under the rule of their Grand Princes, who often acted and dressed like Mongol Khans. In 1549 Grand Prince Ivan (the Terrible) adopted the title Tsar (Caesar). The Muscovite period lasted until 1689, when Peter the Great became Tsar and soon moved the capital north to his new city St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, other political events were occurring on the steppes to the south and east of Muscovite Russia. By the early 1500's the Golden Horde had collapsed and its former territory was divided into several Khanates, the chief ones centered around the city of Kazan on the Volga and the Crimea on the Black Sea. With the use of Cossacks (Slavs who had adopted a semi-nomadic steppe lifestyle from the Turkic and Mongol steppe warriors) the Russians gradually subdued and incorporated all of these khanates into the growing Russian state. It was during this period that the Cossack Yermak (in 1582) began the conquest of North Asia. The Russian move into Siberia was fueled most by a desire to gain access to the rich fur-bearing animals of the taiga (cold forest) region. Natives were forced to pay a fur tax called the yasak, a practice the Russians adopted from their Tatar and Mongol predecessors. Within less than 100 years, Russian cossacks had traveled to the Pacific in search of furs. (See the map in this packet showing dates of Russian penetration into various areas of Siberia and the founding of the earliest towns and cities.) The Russians do not try to kill off the natives because they are useful to them as fur hunters; however, European-brought diseases such as smallpox decimate the native population.
The Imperial Period
(when Russia became an Empire under Peter the Great: 1689-1917; the Russian nobility tried to dress and act like nobles in Western Europe; time of painful integration of traditional Russian culture and modern Western culture). During this period, most of Siberia was explored and brough into the Russian administrative orbit. This was a period of increasing poverty and gradual cultural disintegration for most Siberian natives. A few south Siberian ethnic groups became extinct, but the majority survived (unlike the situation in the United States during the same years).
The Soviet Period (when Russia was part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: 1917-1991)
Under the rhetoric of Communism, Russia remained the only European power to retain political control of its colonies, notably Siberia. In the first two decades of communist rule, writing systems were developed for most of the Siberian minorities. During the last 40 years of Soviet rule, in a reversal of earlier goals, Stalin and his successors stressed the assimilation of national minority culture and language to the numerically superior Russian. Especially after the 1950's, native languages gave way to Russian, and several have by now died out or are on the verge of extinction. The late Soviet era was also a time of intense economic exploitation of Siberia's resources and of unprecedented ecological mismanagement.
Post-Soviet Democracy (1992 to present)
This period was marked by the breakaway of most territories in which Russians were not a majority of the population (the Caucasus, Baltic, Ukraine, Central Asia). Siberia, however, which has a Russian majority, remains in the Russian Federation. A democracy and the beginning of a market economy were established; this has been a time of confusion and painful economic dislocation. Today Native Siberians continue fighting assimilation to their numerically superior Russian neighbors, as well as ecological threats to their traditional way of life.