Yekaterinburg — major city on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains

The region was developed by the Novgorodians in the 11th century. Industrial development began at the end of the 17th century. The city was founded on 7 Novemberjul/18 November 1723greg by Vasily Tatishchev together with Georg Wilhelm Henning (1676-1750), a German-born officer and merchant in Russian service^. The name of the city is derived from the Empress Catherine I (1684-1727).

Ekaterinburg was one of the first Russian factory towns built from the beginning of the 18th century by tsar's decree for the development of metalworking industry. The settlement core of Ekaterinburg was formed by an ironworks and residential buildings arranged in a square. The core was surrounded by a fortification. Ekaterinburg was thus both a factory and a fortress town, from which the further development of the Urals was to take place. During the Bashkir uprisings of 1735-1740, Toigildy Shulyakov and Kiselyabika Bairyassova were burned at the stake as apostates in Ekaterinburg in 1738 and 1739 respectively.

With the connection to the so-called Siberian Tract in 1763, which was one of Russia's first major west-east axes leading from Moscow to Siberia, which was rich in mineral resources, Ekaterinburg increasingly took on trade and mediation functions between Europe and Asia ("window to Asia"). This was the beginning of the actual urban development and the formation of urban functions. The development of the city slowly detached itself from the requirements of iron production, social buildings increasingly determined the cityscape and stone became the predominant building material for the more important buildings. In addition to factory owners and workers, small entrepreneurs, civil servants and merchants, clergymen and military personnel settled here. In the meantime, the administration of the Ural smelters was transferred from the governorate capital of Perm to Ekaterinburg. In 1781 Catherine II. Ekaterinburg to a city. In the same year it became the capital of the Ekaterinburg Uyezd, a sub-administrative unit in the Perm governorate.

The industrial function of the city remained dominant in the 19th century. Since 1840 Ekaterinburg was considered a center of metal processing, and already at the beginning of the 19th century it was at the top of the Urals cities in terms of industrial production. From the middle of the 19th century, as a result of a crisis in the metal sector, a diversification of the local economic structure took place. In the last quarter of the 19th century, numerous Russian banks settled in the city, and Ekaterinburg increasingly assumed supraregional functions in banking and credit. The city also became the cultural center of the Ural region, and by 1897 had a population of 43,000. After the outbreak of the October Revolution, the city was occupied by Admiral Kolchak's White Guards. On July 25, 1918, Ekaterinburg was taken by troops of the Czechoslovak Legions under Stanislav Čeček, who were on the side of the Komuch (Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly). It was not until July 1919 that the Red Army managed to recapture the city. It became known worldwide for the assassination of the Tsar's family during the Russian Civil War in 1918.

From 1914 onwards, there were plans to merge the parts of the Perm Governorate lying east of the Urals into a separate governorate with Ekaterinburg as its capital. On July 5, 1919, the creation of the Ekaterinburg Governorate was officially announced. Ekaterinburg became the capital of the Ural Oblast when it was created on November 3, 1923, merging the governorates of Ekaterinburg, Perm, Tyumen, and Chelyabinsk. The city's elevation to a supra-regional administrative center (since the dissolution of the Ural Oblast in 1934, it has been the capital of the Sverdlovsk Oblast, which still exists today) and its growing economic importance led to a sharp increase in population. Public institutions and residential buildings built in the style of constructivism at that time still characterize the cityscape today.

In honor of Yakov Sverdlov, from 1924 to 1991 the city bore the name Sverdlovsk. During the Great Patriotic War the art treasures of the Hermitage were stored here. In the city existed the prisoner-of-war camps 377 and 531 for German prisoners of war of the Second World War. The Uralmash factory, founded in 1928 in the course of the industrialization of the Soviet Union, became an important producer of armaments for the Red Army during World War II. Among other armaments, the plant produced the T-34 tank, the SU-85, SU-100, and SU-122 self-propelled guns, and the M-30 howitzers.

Sverdlovsk continued to be an important production center of the Soviet Union's military-industrial complex after World War II. Tanks, nuclear missiles and other weapons were produced there. In April 2, 1979, the anthrax accident occurred in Sverdlovsk. Biological weapons were produced at the Sverdlovsk-19 armaments plant, which was part of the Biopreparat network. Due to a mistake in the maintenance of air filters, anthrax spores entered the environment. At least 100 people were killed, the exact number is still unknown. The cause of the accident was denied by the Soviet government leadership for years and the consumption of contaminated meat from the surrounding area was blamed for this outbreak of anthrax.

During the coup in 1991, the bunker with the "substitute government" of the Soviet Union was located here. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the city was inaccessible to foreigners. Soviet citizens could enter only with permission. A famous personality associated with Ekaterinburg is Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007), the former president of Russia. He came from Butka in the Sverdlovsk Oblast, studied at the Sverdlovsk Polytechnic and was First Secretary of the Oblast Committee of the CPSU from 1976-1985.

The city was the venue for the 2018 World Cup.

In 2019, Yekaterinburg became the scene of protests by the Russian civil rights movement; the occasion was the authorities' plan to build an Orthodox cathedral in a park in the center of the city.

Population development

Note: Census data

The climate of the region is continental with large temperature fluctuations. Summers are up to 35 °C warm, but shorter than in Central Europe. Spring and autumn are decidedly short. Winters, on the other hand, can last up to 6 months and reach temperatures as low as -40 °C.