TYUMEN

also spelled Tiumen, or T'umen ', city and administrative centre of Tyumen oblast (province), central Russia. The city lies in the southwestern part of the West Siberian Plain. It is situated on both banks of the Tura River at its crossing by the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Founded in 1586, it is the oldest Russian city in Siberia, located on the site of a Tatar town, Chingi-Tura, founded in the 14th century. A river port, it functions as a transshipment point. Its main industries are metalworking, engineering, shipbuilding, timber products, and chemicals. The city grew rapidly after the discovery of oil and gas farther to the north in Western Siberia. Pop. (1991 est.) 494,200. also spelled Tiumen, or T'umen ', oblast (province), central Russia, occupying an area of 554,100 square miles (1,435,200 square km) in the Ob-Irtysh Basin. In the extreme west the Ural Mountains attain 6,217 feet (1,895 m) in Mount Narodnaya, but the remainder of the oblast's huge area is a low, exceptionally flat plain, with innumerable lakes and very extensive swamps. The oblast stretches from tundra in the north, with its scanty vegetation of mosses and lichens and poor soils, through dense swamp forests, or taiga, of spruce, fir, pine, larch, and birch, to forest-steppe with birch in the south. More than 80 percent of the area is occupied by the Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets autonomous okruga (qq.v.). Tyumen city is the administrative centre of the oblast. Until the 1960s economic activity was confined to timber working, fur trapping, and reindeer herding, and communications were extremely sparse; only in the forest-steppe south was agriculture important. Major oil deposits were opened in the 1960s along the Ob, with Surgut and Nadym as the main centres. Towns and communications have developed as a result of increasing production. Pop. (1991 est.) 3,155,700.