[@Dinh AaronMk]

Perfect. I think I misspoke by saying it was anything approaching a proper government; I was more thinking along the lines of a semi-political alliance of monastic groups trying to keep the peace, share resources and stop everything from going further to hell than it already has. Now, they probably [i]want[/i] to become a real government, but they're not even close to that stage yet. With your blessing, I'm aiming to put them roughly on the land near the Kuril-Aleut oil fields (think Kamchatka and the land to the north and west of it), pretty far north and even farther from the political and economic heart of Russia, where the agricultural situation really would be as bad as described.

My idea is that a lot of their adherents aren't Siberian natives -- they're oilmen, loggers and mining specialists from the west who got stuck there when everything fell apart. So, they have a decent population of people who do have useful industrial skills, but don't know the land very well and might not be very familiar with cold-weather agricultural techniques, trying to share the limited yearly farm output with the locals.

If that's too contrived, it can be altered, but as currently written the famine is important to the group's mythology so I'd like to keep it.