Ekaterinburg
2003 Population: About 1,257,000
Location: In the Ural mountains, 41 kilometers inside Asian Russia, but still 260 km short of the official start of Siberia.
Latitude/Longitude: 6.85°N, 60.60°E
Founded in 1723, on the banks of the Iset river, during the reign of Tsar Peter I, the Great. Named after Peter's wife, the Empress Catherine I, and the Russian patron Saint of mining, also Catherine. By the 19th century, the city had become Russia's center for mining, gold, platinum, amethyst, topaz, aquamarine, and malachite (and the element Ruthenium was found here).
In July 1918, the last Russian tsar (Nicholas II) and his family were killed in this city. Six years later, the city was renamed Sverdlovsk in honor of Yakov Sverdlov, who had arranged the murders of the tsar and his family. On May 1, 1960, the US pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down in this area in his U-2. Powers spent 21 months in prison before he was exchanged for Col. Rudolf Abel, a Soviet intelligence officer who had been arrested in New York in 1957. During WWII, the city became a huge industrial center as hundreds of factories were transferred there from other more vulnerable areas west of the Urals, and it was closed to foreigners until 1990. In 1991, the city returned to its original name of Ekaterinburg.
It should be mentioned that in 1979, several hundred people in the city died from anthrax, caused by a leak from a biological weapons plant right in the city (the Russians claim the death toll was just 64 people).
Not a very beautiful place. There are some wooden houses with picturesque carved windows remaining along some streets and several large woodland parks with lakes around the perimeter of the city. Just about all of its churches, cathedrals, and monasteries were demolished during the Soviet period (1930s) because they interfered with traffic and their bells disturbed the inhabitants' sleep. It has a small subway, about six big restaurants, five hotels, a theater for opera and ballet, a sports stadium called "Dinamo," a technical university, and about six museums, of which the geological museum is the most interesting. Towards the North of the city is the giant Uralmash machine tool factory. The Fountain "Stone Flower" is in the Square of Labor, Ekaterinburg. The small church was built in late 1990s, and is now open to the public. Until 1930s the church - the Temple of Martyr Ekaterina - was on this site but it was demolished by Stalin's administration like many others.
The city's best known son is Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin. He studied civil engineering at the university there and eventually became head of the Sverdlovsk Regional Communist Party. He left the city after being promoted to head the Moscow Communist Party in 1985. After becoming Russia's first freely elected president in 1992, he had that biological weapons plant closed (the one that had the leak). Yeltsin also had "Ipatiev House" demolished, the house in whose basement the last tsar of Russia was killed. Cathedral-on-the-Blood Russian Orthodox Cathedral is being built on the grounds of the former Ipatiev House and is expected to be completed by June/July 2003.
There is a United States Consulate in Ekaterinburg. Tel. 60-11-43, FAX 60-11-41. It seems to provide only emergency services for U.S. citizens, but it's nice to know it's there.
The main airport (Koltsovo) is about 15 km southeast of the city and has daily flights from Moscow (flight time from Moscow is about 2.5 hours). Lufthansa has a direct flight from Frankfurt. Ekaterinburg is the major stop on the Trans-Siberian railway line, between Perm and Novosibirsk, and has numerous trains going to all parts of the country, also Beijing, China.
Five of the ten "secret cities" of the Soviet Union's "nuclear archipelago" are placed around Ekaterinburg. They are:
Cheliabinsk-70 (aka Snezhinsk) and Arzamas-16 (about 100 km south of Nizhnii Novgorod) are the key research centers; the others are mainly uranium and plutonium production centers. Cheliabinsk-65 (aka Cheliabinsk-40) was the scene of the world's worst nuclear accident before Chernobyl, back in 1957, although this was not admitted by the Russians for decades. A nuclear waste tank exploded, severely contaminating an area of 8 km wide and 100 km long. About 10,000 people were eventually evacuated and 23 villages bulldozed. This explosion, along with deliberate dumping of radioactive wastes into the Techa river and lake Karachai (the lake later dried up, allowing the wind to scatter radioactive dust), have led to severe health and environmental problems in the area. Do not go poking around; radiation levels monitored recently on the shores of lake Karachai would have given a fatal dose in one hour. Click here for more information on contaminated Russian sites.