Russian Empire Bolsheviks followed in 1918. The administrative boundaries of European Russia, apart from Finland and its portion of Poland, coincided approximately with the natural limits of the East-European plains. In the North it met the Arctic Ocean. Novaya Zemlya and the Kolguyev and Vaygach Islands also belonged to it, but the Kara Sea was referred to Siberia. To the East it had the Asiatic territories of the Empire, Siberia and the Kyrgyz steppes, from both of which it was separated by the Ural Mountains, the Ural River and the Caspian Sea — the administrative boundary, however, partly extending into Asia on
Severnaya Zemlya appeared to the north of the archipelago. Although located not far off the northern coast of Russia, nested among Arctic ice-locked waters, the archipelago that is now known as Severnaya Zemlya was not formally recorded until the 20th century. Earlier explorers deemed that there was a land mass in the general area of the archipelago, such as in the report by Matvei Gedenschtrom and Yakov Sannikov made in 1810 at the time of their exploration of the New Siberian Islands. Later in the 19th century Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld during the Vega Expedition sailed very close to this land in 1878