Yekaterinburg

• 1. Introduction

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  Yekaterinburg sits almost exactly in the middle of Russia, straddling the invisible line where Europe ends and Asia begins. On the 17th of July 1918, in a basement of a mansion called the Ipatiev House, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their five children were shot by Bolshevik guards. The Czechoslovak Legions arrived less than a week later. They were too late. That single night fixed Yekaterinburg in history as the place where the Romanov dynasty ended. But that story is only one layer of a city that was already two centuries old and would go on to be renamed, reinvented, and rebuilt again and again. What kind of place murders a tsar, becomes the Soviet Union's armour factory, produces some of Russia's most beloved rock bands, and ends up being called the third capital of Russia? And how did a wilderness on the Iset River, covered in forest and dotted with Stone Age settlements, become a metropolis of roughly 1.5 million people?

• 2. Before the City

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  The Isetskoe Pravoberezhnoye I archaeological site on the eastern slope of the Urals contains a Neolithic settlement dated to 6000-5000 BC. Excavators found grinding plates, anvils, clumps of rock, and finished tools made from more than fifty different types of rock and minerals, suggesting the people who lived there had worked out the region's geology with remarkable precision. The Gamayun peninsula, on the left bank of the Verkh-Isetsky Pond, preserves workshops and two dwellings from the Chalcolithic period. Below the upper area, archaeologists found evidence of the Ayat culture. Dishes decorated with bird images and traces of metallurgical production mark the presence of the Koptyak culture from around 2000 BC. The Tent I site holds the only Koptyak culture burials ever found in the Ural Mountains. Later, the people of the Gamayun culture left behind fragments of ceramics, weapons, and ornaments in the Bronze Age layers of the same ground. Most of these artifacts were only discovered at the end of the 19th century, during railway construction. They are now held at the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, at the Hermitage, and at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography.

• 3. Peter's Iron City

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  On the 1st of March 1721, the statesman Vasily Tatishchev began digging the foundations of a new iron-making plant on the banks of the Iset River, seven versts from the failing Uktus plant. He had not yet received permission from the Collegium of Mining. He sent a formal request on the 6th of February and simply started without waiting for a reply. The Collegium responded by removing him from the leadership of mining affairs in the Urals on the 10th of December 1721. A year later, the German engineer Major General Georg Wilhelm de Gennin arrived by decree of Peter the Great, reviewed Tatishchev's plans, agreed with them entirely, and resumed construction on the 12th of March 1723. The official founding date is the 18th of November 1723, when the shops carried out a test run of the bloomery for trip hammers. The plant was fully commissioned six days later. The city was named after the Orthodox name of Catherine I, born Marta Helena Skowrońska, the wife of Peter the Great. The writer Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak described the scene as though soldiers, peasants, and hired craftsmen appeared on the deserted Iset riverbanks "as if by the dictates of a fairy tale." They felled forest, prepared a dam, laid blast furnaces, raised a rampart, and set up barracks all at once. By 1763, the so-called Siberian Route was operational, and the city's position between east and west earned it the description of the "window to Asia." Between 1820 and 1845, roughly forty-five percent of the world's gold was mined in the Yekaterinburg region. Until 1876, eighty percent of the coins circulating in the Russian Empire were struck at the Yekaterinburg mint.

• 4. Romanovs and Revolution

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  Following the October Revolution, the deposed Tsar Nicholas II and his family were sent into internal exile and imprisoned in the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. In July 1918, the Czechoslovak Legions were closing in on the city. In the early hours of the 17th of July, the Bolsheviks murdered the Tsar, the Tsarina, Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and Tsarevich Alexei in that basement. Other Romanov family members were killed the same day at Alapayevsk. The city fell to the Legions days later but was retaken by the Red Army on the 14th of July 1919. In 1924, the city was renamed Sverdlovsk after the Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov. In 1977, by order of Boris Yeltsin in line with a Politburo resolution, the Ipatiev House was demolished to prevent it from becoming a gathering point for monarchists. Yeltsin later became Russia's first president and represented the country at the funeral of the former Tsar in 1998. In the place where the house once stood, the Cathedral of the Blood was eventually built.

• 5. Stalin's Arsenal

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  During the Soviet era, the Uralmash factory in Sverdlovsk became the primary production site for armoured vehicles. By the end of the 1930s, the city held 140 industrial enterprises, 25 research institutes, and 12 higher education institutions. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, more than five hundred military units and formations were organised through the city's headquarters, including the 22nd Army and the Ural Volunteer Tank Corps. Whole factories were relocated to Sverdlovsk from Moscow and other cities threatened by the front. The Hermitage Museum sent part of its collections from Leningrad to the city in July 1941; they remained there until October 1945. Many of the factories that relocated never left. The population of Sverdlovsk tripled during the Stalin years, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in the Soviet Union. In April and May 1979, an anthrax outbreak struck the city. It was later attributed to a release from the Sverdlovsk-19 military facility. During the 1991 coup attempt, Boris Yeltsin chose Sverdlovsk, his home city, as a temporary reserve capital for the Russian Federation, sending a reserve cabinet headed by Oleg Lobov there in case Moscow became too dangerous for the government.

• 6. Culture and Rock

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  A number of well-known Russian rock bands formed in Yekaterinburg, including Nautilus Pompilius, Chaif, Agata Kristi, and Urfin Dzhyus. Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg are considered the main centres of Ural Rock, treated as a distinct variety of the genre. Opera singers including Boris Shtokolov, Yuri Gulyayev, and Vera Bayeva trained at the Urals State Conservatory. The Ural Philharmonic Orchestra, founded by Mark Paverman and currently conducted by Dmitry Liss, has an audience in Russia and in Europe. The Sverdlovsk Film Studio opened in 1943, produced its feature debut Silva a year later, and went on to make up to ten feature films a year after the war. The oldest cinema in the city, Laurage, opened in 1909. The Yekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theater won four awards at the Golden Mask 2020 Festival in Moscow, including the top prize for Best Opera Performance. The United Museum of Writers of the Urals holds the Shigir Collection, which includes the oldest known wooden sculpture in the world. Found near Nevyansk, the sculpture was originally estimated at around 9,500 years old; it is now dated to approximately 11,500 years ago. The Kaslinski cast iron pavilion, on display at the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, received the main award at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris and was registered by UNESCO as the only cast-iron architectural structure held in a museum collection.

• 7. The City Today

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  According to the 2021 Census, Yekaterinburg's population stood at 1,544,376, up from 1,349,772 a decade earlier. The city ranks fourth in population among all Russian cities and third by the size of its economy, after Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In 2010, one consulting firm estimated the gross product of Yekaterinburg at about 19 billion US dollars. The city's financial sector includes more than 100 banks, among them 11 foreign institutions, and the software company SKB Kontur, which ranked first among Russian software manufacturers in the RAEX rating. Yekaterinburg ranks first in retail trade per capita in the Russian Federation, ahead of Moscow. In 2018, the city hosted four matches of the FIFA World Cup. It also demolished its unfinished television tower, which had been the tallest uncompleted structure in the world, by detonation on the 24th of March 2018 as part of preparations for the tournament. The Yeltsin Center, opened in 2015, was recognised as the best museum in Europe by the Council of Europe in 2017. In May 2011, the merger of the Ural State University and the Ural State Technical University created the Boris N. Yeltsin Ural Federal University; by 2021 it was the largest university in Russia by student count, ranking 351st in the QS World University Rankings. The Iset Tower, completed as part of a building boom that began around 2010, stands 209 metres tall, making it the tallest skyscraper in the city.