Kemerovo Oblast

   An administrative region of the Russian Federation. Part of the Siberian Federal District and the West Siberian Economic Region, Kemerovo borders Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Khakasiya, Altay Krai, Novosibirsk, and the Altay 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 are ethnic Russians, though minorities of Ukrainians, Tatars, and ethnic Germans are 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 regional economy, with more than a third employed in the industrial sector. Symptomatic of the regional focus on heavy industry, 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 Yeltsin appointed 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 of Kazakh and Tatar parentage, had previously run for the presidency of Russia in 1991 and 1996. Despite being born an ethnic Muslim and making a journey to Mecca, Tuleyev was rumored to have been baptized as a Russian Orthodox Christian in 1999. He denied media reports 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 the Trans-Siberian Railway. Despite the controversy, Tuleyev remained extremely popular in the region and won a majority of votes in Kemerovo when he stood against Vladimir Putin for 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 the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in 2003, later joining United 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 also Mining.