History of Novosibirsk

Novosibirsk is a rare exception among megacities: it has not only a precise founding date but also a short, rapid biography that fits into just over a single century. No princely fortress, no voivode’s stockade — the city grew up during the construction of a railway bridge across the Ob, became the capital of Siberia within one generation, and continues to grow in the same place where the first bridge builders’ barracks were put up in 1893.

The bridge, the settlement, and the first name (1891–1898)

At the end of the 19th century, the fate of the Trans-Siberian Railway hinged on one question: exactly where should the line cross the Ob? The main contender was the old merchant town of Kolyvan, but the engineer Nikolay Garin-Mikhaylovsky proposed a different solution — an alignment near the village of Krivoshchyokovo. The choice fell on it because of the narrow riverbed and solid rock foundation, which promised huge savings on the bridge’s construction. In 1891 the route was approved on precisely this spot.

On 30 April 1893, a party led by the engineer Grigory Budagov landed at the mouth of the Kamenka River, and axes began ringing out on the right bank of the Ob. Thus arose a settlement of bridge builders: at first without a common name, then it acquired the nickname Aleksandrovsky — in honour of the recently deceased Alexander III. Work proceeded quickly: by 1897 the seven-span bridge across the Ob had already been put into service, trains began running east, and where the temporary camp had stood there were now streets, shops, and the first wooden church.

On 17 February 1898 the settlement was renamed Novo-Nikolayevsky — now in honour of the reigning Nicholas II. By that time about eight thousand people lived there, railway workshops were operating, along with the steam mills of Kryukov and Lukanin, and grain from the Altai districts was being traded. A stream of goods began crossing the Ob, and the settlement started taking over the role of the main hub from the older Kolyvan and Kainsk.

Novo-Nikolayevsk: a city in ten years (1903–1917)

On 28 December 1903 the emperor signed a decree granting Novo-Nikolayevsk the status of a non-district town of Tomsk Governorate. Administration remained modest — a simplified municipal reform, an elected elder — but the new status made it possible to lay down stone buildings, take out loans, and plan a budget. The first stone church was the Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky, consecrated back in 1899. It was built in the neo-Byzantine style to a design close to the St Petersburg school.

Everything nearly came to a halt on 11 May 1909. A fire that began in a private estate destroyed the central part of the city in three days. 22 blocks and about 800 houses burned down, leaving some six thousand people homeless. After the fire, the city council seriously took up planning for the first time: stone rows appeared along what is now Krasny Prospekt, brick trading houses were built, and the first schools were designed by the architect Andrey Kryachkov. It was then that the recognisable fabric of Siberian red-brick Art Nouveau took shape — later called the calling card of pre-revolutionary Novo-Nikolayevsk.

By 1913 the city had a population of about 70,000, iron foundries and tanneries were operating, and a commercial school, a real school, and a girls’ gymnasium were in session. Not yet having celebrated its twentieth anniversary, the settlement had turned into one of the fastest-growing cities in the empire, outpacing even Chelyabinsk and Omsk.

The city went through the February and October revolutions of 1917 relatively quietly: power passed from the Soviets to the Provisional Siberian Government and then to Kolchak’s regime, but no major battles took place in Novo-Nikolayevsk itself. On 14 December 1919 the city was occupied by units of the Red Army, and after the Kolchak forces withdrew, abandoned trains, typhus, and a ruined urban economy were left behind.

In 1921 Novo-Nikolayevsk took a sharp step upward. The Sibrevkom and other pan-Siberian bodies were transferred here from Omsk. The city became the centre of the vast Novonikolayevsk Governorate, and then of Sibirsky Krai. Its first university appeared — the Siberian Institute of National Economy — along with regional newspapers and the first designs for redeveloping the centre for its role as the capital of Siberia.

By that time the old name increasingly seemed anachronistic. In December 1925 the first regional congress of Siberian Soviets settled the question of a new name, and on 12 February 1926 a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee gave the city its present name — Novosibirsk. The renaming marked a break with the monarchist past and a claim to the role of the leading city of the new Siberia.

Industrialisation and the Opera Theatre (1926–1945)

The late 1920s and the 1930s were a time of explosive growth. Under the master plan of Ivan Zagrivko and the workshops of Andrey Kryachkov, the centre was rebuilt in the spirit of constructivism: the Lenin House, the State Bank building, the Palace of Labour, and the complex of regional institutions on Lenin Square appeared. It was then that the ambitious project of the House of Science and Culture began — a giant multi-purpose building with a theatre, museum, and planetarium under a single dome. By 1937 the architect Aleksandr Grinberg had reworked the design for a classical opera, and construction on Stalin Square (today’s Lenin Square) became the city’s main project.

The Hundred-Apartment House by Kryachkov — a residential building for engineers and scientists, completed in 1937 — won the Grand Prix and a gold medal at the World’s Fair in Paris, placing Novosibirsk on a par with the leading European centres of architecture of that time.

On 28 September 1937, by decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, West Siberian Krai was split into Altai Krai and Novosibirsk Oblast, and Novosibirsk secured its status as a regional centre. Four years later the war began.

From July 1941 trains bearing evacuated enterprises began pouring into the city: in the first months alone the equipment and specialists of more than fifty factories arrived here, including the Leningrad Chkalov Plant, “Elektrosignal” from Voronezh, and part of the “Svetlana” plant. 26 hospitals were set up here; the ensembles of the Leningrad Philharmonic, the Pushkin Theatre, and the Tretyakov Gallery were taken in, part of whose collections were kept in the unfinished opera building. During the war years, Novosibirsk’s industry grew its output almost eightfold, and the city’s population passed the half-million mark.

Construction of the Opera Theatre, paused for the duration of the war, was completed on time. On 12 May 1945, four days after Victory, the grand opening took place. The main hall, beneath a 60-metre dome with no internal supports, became the largest theatre hall in the country.

The capital of Siberian science (1957–1985)

Novosibirsk met the post-war years with a ready-made industry but no clear idea of development. That idea came with the Akademgorodok project. On 18 May 1957, by decree of the USSR Council of Ministers, on the initiative of academicians Mikhail Lavrentyev, Sergey Sobolev, and Sergey Khristianovich, the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences was established with its headquarters outside Novosibirsk. The site chosen was a pine forest by the Ob Reservoir, 25 kilometres south of the centre.

Within ten years, a city of scientists rose in the taiga: Novosibirsk State University, dozens of institutes (from mathematics and nuclear physics to cytology and genetics), the House of Scientists, along with a Technopark and settlements for staff. Akademgorodok became one of the major Soviet engineering projects and cemented Novosibirsk’s reputation as a city of science for a long time to come. Pines, quiet, a campus-style layout — the atmosphere differed noticeably from the industrial centre and drew specialists from across the country.

In parallel, the city broke through the symbolic mark of one million inhabitants. On 2 September 1962 the millionth resident of Novosibirsk was born — the path from founding to a million took 69 years, the shortest span in world history for a city-millionaire. By the end of the 1970s the population had passed 1.3 million, and the city needed transport of a new order.

On 28 December 1985 the state commission accepted the first phase of the Novosibirsk Metro, and on 7 January 1986 the Leninskaya line opened to passengers. Thus the city gained the first — and still the only — metro east of the Urals. The metro bridge across the Ob, about 2,145 metres long, held a special distinction — the longest covered metro bridge in the world, opened in 1985. The bridge connected the left-bank and right-bank parts of the city and joined the recognisable skyline alongside the dome of the Opera Theatre.

Novosibirsk after the USSR

Novosibirsk met the collapse of the Soviet Union as a major industrial and scientific centre dependent on state defence orders and academic funding. The 1990s hit the city hard: some factories shut down, thousands of scientists left Akademgorodok, and the population declined for the first time in a century. In 1993, on the city’s centenary, the Chapel of St Nicholas the Wonderworker was rebuilt on the historic site where a symbolic chapel marking the centre of the Russian Empire had stood until the 1930s.

From the early 2000s the city began to grow again — not on the back of industry, but through trade, transport, IT, and the service sector. Tolmachyovo Airport turned into the largest hub east of the Urals, Krasny Prospekt and Lenin Square underwent renovation, and a renewed Mikhailovskaya Embankment appeared along the Ob. Since 2014, the Trans-Siberian Art Festival of the violinist Vadim Repin has been held here every March — the city’s main classical music event, continuing the musical line begun by the Opera Theatre.

Today more than 1.6 million people live in Novosibirsk; it remains the third most populous city in Russia and the administrative centre of the Siberian Federal District. Over a century and a half, four names, three states, and dozens of generations of builders have changed here, while the city itself still stands on the same bank of the Ob where the bridge builders’ axes began ringing out in 1893.