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The Soviet Union was located in the middle and northern latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Nearly . times larger than the landmass of the United States, it was a continental-sized country onlyslightly smaller than the whole of North America, though its population density, at people per square kilometer was just two-thirds that of South America at , and only a little more than the . of SaudiArabia. As opposed to any contemporary industrial nations, the Soviet Union's geographical position and climate were largely arctic. Its geographical center of landmass is north of all countriesother than Canada, Iceland and the Scandinavian countries[citation needed. Three quarters of the country was north of the 50th parallel it was, on the whole, much closer to the North Pole than to theequator.

Climate[edit] Winter's impactNotorious cold and long winters have, understandably, been the focus of discussions on the Soviet Union's weather and climate. From the frozen depths of Siberiacame baby mammoths perfectly preserved, locked in ice for several thousand years. Millions of square kilometers experience half a year of subfreezing temperatures and snow covered over subsoil that waspermanently frozen in places to depths of several hundred meters. In northeastern Siberia, not far from Yakutsk, hardy settlers coped with January temperatures that consistently average −50 °C (−58°F).[citation needed] Transportation routes, including entire railroad lines, had been redirected in winter to traverse rock-solid waterways and lakes.

Howling Arctic winds that produced coastal windchills as low as −152 °C (−242 °F) and the burany, or blinding snowstorms of the steppe, were climatic manifestations of the USSR's close proximity to the North Pole and remoteness from oceans thattended to moderate the climate. A combination of the "Siberian high": cold, high-pressure systems in the east, together with wet, cold cyclonic systems in the west largely determined the overall...