YEKATERINBURG / SVERDLOVSK (Pittsburgh of the Urals):
*Mile 1124. This is the actual beginning of the Trans-Siberian proper.
Built on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains, Sverdlovsk's 154 square miles sprawl across the Iset River. It was founded in 1672 by Old Believers who emigrated from settled districts, refusing to accept certain reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church. Peter the Great wanted the town as the nation's window on Asia and to help build Russia's first navy and merchant fleet. An ironworks was established in 1721 and a fortress in 1722. The following year it was named Yekaterinburg in honor of Empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great).
Since the 1780s, the city grew as the center of the Urals mining region and was an important stop on the Great Siberian Post Road established in 1783 (the Trans-Siberian in 1878). It expanded rapidly with Stalin's first [G 08 / Five Year Plan] in the 1930s and again during World War II when industries were moved beyond the Urals out of German bombing range. Today it is home to the largest engineering combine in the country (URALMASH) and has more than 200 factories. Industries include heavy engineering (aircraft, rail and ball bearings), chemicals, rubber tires and gemstones.
The city gained notoriety when on July 16, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered here. Their bodies were dismembered, burned and disposed of in a mineshaft at the outskirts of the city. The city was renamed Sverdlovsk in 1924 after the Bolshevik leader, Yacob Sverdlov, who did much of his early work here for the Communist Party and who apparently ordered the murders of the tsar and his family. Sverdlovsk is also known as the place where Gary Powers parachuted into captivity in May 1960 when the U-2 spy plane he piloted was shot down near the city.
With a population of 1,400,000, Sverdlovsk is today one of the largest cities in the Urals. It has only been open to tourists since late 1990 (previously closed because of the armaments factories there). However, with the city's most famous son, Boris Yeltsin, as president of the Russian Federation, swift changes are possible.
