Ufa

• 1. Introduction

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  Ufa sits at a confluence of two rivers, two continents, and more than four centuries of contested history. On the 4th of June 1989, roughly 75 kilometers from this city, two passenger trains passed each other near a leaking gas pipeline. The spark from one train's brakes ignited a cloud of accumulated gas, and the resulting explosion killed 575 people. That disaster happened on the doorstep of a city most of the world has never heard of. Ufa is the capital of Bashkortostan, a republic within Russia, and home to over 1.1 million people. It ranks tenth among all Russian cities by population. Yet its name, its origins, and the forces that shaped it remain almost entirely unknown outside its borders. How did a fortress ordered by Ivan the Terrible become a city ranked by Forbes as the best in Russia for business among million-plus cities? What happened to the ancient settlement that may have existed here long before the Russians arrived? And what do oil refineries, ice hockey, and a monument to a tick have in common? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Name with Disputed Roots

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  Russian linguist Aleksandr Matveyev proposed that the word Ufa derives from the Iranian word "ap," meaning water. The river named the city, not the other way around. But in 2014, researchers Karimov and Khabibov from Bashkir State Pedagogical University offered a far older explanation. They argued that before the Russian fortress was built in 1574, an ancient settlement already occupied a hilltop near the mouth of the Ufa River. According to their hypothesis, Turkic-speaking tribes founded this place specifically to perform rituals and sacrifices to the sky god Tengri. In ancient Turkic languages, a site of ritual sacrifice was called an "opo" or "ope," and so the settlement was known as Upe or Ufe. Karimov and Khabibov also propose that the people of this settlement came to be known by the same name, and that the river flowing past them eventually carried that name toward its source. When Russian fortress builders arrived, they may well have inherited the name from what was already there. Ufa's colloquial nickname today, the City of Three Screws, traces to a different kind of peculiarity: something about the way the city's name reads in the Bashkir language.

• 3. Before the Fortress

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  The area's recorded history reaches back to the Paleolithic. A medieval city is thought to have occupied the site from roughly the 5th through the 16th centuries, though that attribution remains presumed rather than certain. Two 14th-century European maps, the Pizzigano brothers' map of 1367 and the Catalan Atlas of 1375, both mark a town on or near the Belaya River under the name Pascherti, which corresponds to the word Bashkort. Gerardus Mercator's 1554 map repeated the same name and the same location. French orientalist Henri Cordier matched the position of this Pascherti with the current site of Ufa. Ibn Khaldun, the medieval Arab historian, called the town one of the largest cities of the Golden Horde under the name Bashkort. An 18th-century Russian historian, Peter Rychkov, wrote that a great city had existed on this territory before the Russians came. Even a local official of the Orenburg Governorate, Vasily Rebelensky, recorded that Ufa was founded by the Bashkirs themselves. The convergence of these sources, from European cartographers to Arab scholars to Russian administrators, points to a place of real consequence long before 1574.

• 4. Ivan's Fortress and Imperial Shuffles

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  By order of Ivan the Terrible, a fortress rose on the site of modern Ufa in 1574. It originally bore the name of the hill it stood on, Tura-Tau. Town status came twelve years later, in 1586. For roughly two centuries the settlement existed under the jurisdiction of Orenburg governors, before becoming the seat of its own Ufa Governorate in 1781. That arrangement didn't last: the 1796 reform merged Orenburg and Ufa back together. Then in 1802, Ufa became the center of the entire Orenburg Governorate, overseeing territories that now make up the Republic of Bashkortostan, Orenburg Oblast, and Chelyabinsk Oblast. A formal split came in 1865, when the Ufa Governorate separated from Orenburg once more and Ufa was named its capital. The city's connection to the wider Russian Empire grew in step with infrastructure: the Belaya River Waterway opened in 1870, and the Samara-Zlatoust Railroad reached the city in 1890. Both links fed the development of light industry. During World War II, when Soviet forces retreated eastward in 1941, many industrial enterprises from the western parts of the country were evacuated to Ufa, and the German military intelligence agency, the Abwehr, operated in the city between 1941 and 1943. In the 1930s, graves of those shot during and before the Great Terror were marked by monuments in two of the city's cemeteries.

• 5. Oil, Industry, and Economic Standing

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  Forbes ranked Ufa the best city in Russia for business among cities with a population over one million in 2013. That reputation rests on deep industrial foundations. The city hosts around 200 large and medium industrial enterprises, concentrated in oil refining, chemistry, and mechanical engineering. The petroleum company Bashneft and several of its subsidiaries are headquartered here, including the Ufimsky Petrochemical Plant, the Novo-Ufimsky Refinery Plant, and the Ufimsky Refinery Plant. The Ufa Engine-Building Production Association, a subsidiary of UEC Saturn, manufactures gas turbine engines. The Bashkir Trolleybus Manufacturing Plant builds the trolleybus vehicles that still run through the city's streets. Ufa's position on a historic branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway and its status as the only Russian city connected to Moscow by more than one federal highway, the M7 running toward Kazan and Moscow and the M5 linking to the Asian part of Russia, have reinforced its role as a transport and logistics hub. The Ufa International Airport offers international flights to Turkey, Tajikistan, Egypt, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Cyprus, alongside domestic routes to many Russian cities.

• 6. People, Faiths, and the Environment

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  As of the 2021 Census, Russians formed 48.9 percent of Ufa's population, with Tatars at 27.0 percent and Bashkirs at 20.4 percent. The city's population crossed one million in 1980, and it now ranks 26th among European cities by city proper population. Sunni Islam and Russian Orthodoxy are the two dominant faiths. Ufa is home to the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims in Russia. The Russian Islamic University opened in 1989, and a mosque described as one of the largest in Europe is currently under construction. The Bezpopovtsy strain of Russian Old Believers also has a registered presence in the city. On the environmental side, residents periodically experience what official monitoring describes as a suffocating chemical odor. Nine stationary air-quality posts operated by the federal hydrometeorological service monitor pollution across the city, but as of the reporting cited in the source, none of these posts were positioned near the residential districts of Inors and Sipaylovo. In 2017, measurements at a post near a heavily trafficked avenue recorded suspended particle concentrations reaching 4.6 times the maximum permitted concentration. Public transport infrastructure includes trams, which have run since 1937, and trolleybuses in service since 1962. A metro system has been planned and repeatedly delayed since the late 1980s; Boris Yeltsin attended a ceremony marking the start of preparatory construction work on the 30th of May 1996, but the system remains unbuilt.

• 7. Sport, Culture, and an Unusual Monument

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  Salavat Yulaev Ufa, the city's ice hockey club founded in 1961, competes at the top tier of the Kontinental Hockey League. The speedway club Bashkiria Ufa won the Soviet Union Championship eleven times between 1962 and 1988, before disbanding in 1998. Their original venue, the Trud Stadium, was demolished in 2005 to make way for the Ufa Arena. The city also supports women's ice hockey through HC Agidel Ufa, founded in 2010, along with football, volleyball, handball, and basketball clubs. In the summer of 2015, from the 9th to the 10th of July, Ufa hosted simultaneous summits of both the BRICS group and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation at the same venue. On the cultural side, 2020 saw the unveiling of what is described as the world's first monument to a tick, placed in the city center on a stone base quarried from the Ural Mountains. The inscription reads: "Same as you I also want to live." The stone base itself connects the monument to the landscape that defines Ufa's geography: the hills of the Ufa Plateau, rising to the west of the southern Ural Mountains, at the point where the Belaya and Ufa rivers meet.