Siberia is big, I mean really big (with apologies to Douglas Adams).
It's not all the same. Siberia is also rich in minerals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia
Climate
The climate of Siberia varies dramatically. On the north coast, north of
the Arctic Circle, there is just a very short (about one-month-long) summer.
Almost all the population lives in the south, along the Trans-Siberian
railroad. The climate here is continental subarctic, with the annual
average temperature about 0 °C (32 °F) and roughly -15 °C (5 °F) average
in January and +20 °C (68 °F) in July.[3] With a reliable growing
season, an abundance of sunshine and exceedingly fertile chernozem
soils, Southern Siberia is good enough for profitable agriculture, as
was proven in the early twentieth century.
The southwesterly winds of Southern Siberia bring warm air from Central
Asia and the Middle East. The climate in West Siberia (Omsk,
Novosibirsk) is several degrees warmer than in the East (Irkutsk,
Chita). With a lowest record temperature of -71.2 °C (-96.1 °F),
Oymyakon (Sakha Republic) has the distinction of being the coldest town
on Earth. But summer temperatures in other regions reach +36...+38 °C.
In general, Sakha is the coldest Siberian region, and the basin of the
Yana River has the lowest temperatures of all, with permafrost reaching
1,493 metres (4,900 ft). Nevertheless, as far as Imperial Russia plans
of settlement are concerned, the cold was never viewed as an issue. In
the winter, Southern Siberia sits near the center of the semi-permanent
Siberian High, so winds are usually light in the winter.
Precipitation in Siberia is generally low, exceeding 500 mm (20 inches)
only in Kamchatka where moist winds flow from the Sea of Okhotsk onto
high mountains - producing the region's only major glaciers - and in
most of Primorye in the extreme south where monsoonal influences can
produce quite heavy summer rainfall. Despite the region's notorious
cold, snowfall is generally extremely light, especially in the east of
the region.
A bit further down:
Economy
Siberia is extraordinarily rich in minerals, containing ores of almost
all economically valuable metals—largely because of the absence of
Quaternary glaciation outside highland areas. It has some of the world's
largest deposits of nickel, gold, lead, molybdenum, diamonds, silver and
zinc, as well as extensive unexploited resources of oil and natural gas.
Most of these are in the cold and remote eastern part of the region,
with the result that extraction has proven difficult and began on a
large scale only after Stalin came to power and developed labor camps to
deal with the difficulty of attracting labour to such unpleasant climates.
Agriculture is severely restricted by the short growing season of most
of the region. However, in the southwest where soils are exceedingly
fertile black earths and the climate is a little more moderate, there is
extensive cropping of wheat, barley, rye and potatoes, along with the
grazing of large numbers of sheep and cattle. Elsewhere food production,
owing to the poor fertility of the podzolic soils and the extremely
short growing seasons, is restricted to the herding of reindeer in the
tundra - which has been practised by natives for over ten thousand
years. Siberia has the world's largest forests. Timber remains an
important source of revenue despite the fact that many forests in the
east have been logged much more rapidly than they are able to recover.
The Sea of Okhotsk is one of the two or three richest fisheries in the
world owing to its cold currents and extremely large tidal ranges, and
thus Siberia produces over 10 percent of the world's annual fish catch,
though fishing has declined somewhat since the collapse of the USSR.
Industry, developed during the interwar period (1920s and 1930s) and
increased vastly during World War II, has declined greatly since the
collapse of the USSR. At one point there were huge factories in Western
Siberia and many even around Lake Baikal but these have largely ceased
operation since the USSR collapsed.
