History of Yekaterinburg

The history of Yekaterinburg is a rare exception: the city has not only an exact date of birth, but also a named list of its founding fathers, and even the original blueprints. It did not grow up around churches or trade routes — it was designed as a factory-fortress that was later allowed to become a city. That engineering precision shaped its character: Yekaterinburg has rarely claimed the role of a political capital, yet it has always remained the administrative and industrial heart of the Urals.

Before the ironworks: the Urals before 1723

By the beginning of the 18th century the Middle Urals were already inhabited, though not by Russian settlers. Along the banks of the Iset and the Chusovaya lived the Mansi, the Bashkirs and Tatars who came here seasonally; hunters and salt-boilers plied the rivers. From the end of the 16th century Russian administration took root in the region, and in the 17th century the first ironworks of the Kamensky and Uktussky districts, Old Believer sketes and postal settlements appeared. But all of this amounted to sparse dots on an enormous territory: no serious urban life existed between the Kama and the Tobol.

The turning point was set by the mining policy of Peter I. When in 1720 the Berg Collegium dispatched Vasily Nikitich Tatishchev to the Urals, his task was not to build a single enterprise but to turn the entire region into a managed mining economy. In January 1721 Tatishchev inspected the bank of the Iset, assessed the potential of the water power and the quality of the ore, and reported to Saint Petersburg: the site for the main ironworks had been chosen.

Tatishchev’s project, however, became bogged down in a conflict with Nikita Demidov, whose private ironworks already dominated the Urals. The dispute quickly reached Peter, and the sovereign preferred to send in a disinterested party. That man was Major General of Artillery Georg Wilhelm de Gennin — a Dutchman in Russian service, an experienced engineer who had previously worked with success in the Olonets region. Arriving in the Urals in the autumn of 1722, he studied Tatishchev’s materials, agreed with the choice of site, and on 12 March 1723 laid the first stone in the foundation of the dam on the Iset.

The factory-fortress of 1723

The factory-fortress was built in haste and at the cost of incredible effort. On the right bank of the future pond an earthen rampart was raised with five bastions; on the left bank the blast-furnace and hammer shops were erected. The dam was hewn from larch — a wood that only hardens in water. It is precisely these piles of 1723 that still hold up “Plotinka” in the Historical Square today. By the autumn the main structures were up, and on 7 (18) November 1723 the new shops carried out a test run of the tilt hammers. That date has ever since been considered the city’s birthday.

The name for the factory-fortress was proposed by de Gennin: “Katharinenburch” — in honour of Empress Catherine I, Peter’s wife. The Latin “burg” in the name was not a nod to tradition but an indication of status: this was what mining and metallurgical centres were called. From its first days Yekaterinburg was not an ordinary town but a special administrative unit — a “mining town”. It was governed not by a voivode’s authority but by the Chancellery of the Chief Administration of Ironworks, which reported directly to the Berg Collegium in Saint Petersburg. In effect, this fortress administered a territory comparable in area to several European states.

The mining capital of the 18th–19th centuries

The city’s special status was retained for almost the entire 18th century. Tatishchev returned here as chief of the mining works and headed it in 1734–1737. In his time Yekaterinburg acquired a mining school, a mint, a lapidary works, and one of the country’s first weather stations. Copper coinage for the entire empire was struck at the ironworks. These 18th-century “Yekaterinburg plates” are still held in major numismatic collections.

In 1781, under Catherine II, the city changed its status: it was removed from the jurisdiction of the mining department and turned into an uyezd centre of the Perm Viceroyalty. Despite this formal demotion in the “mining” hierarchy, for the city it marked the beginning of a new life. A magistracy appeared, along with regular street planning and stone mansions on the shore of the pond. By the early 19th century a recognisable architectural ensemble had taken shape around the dam: neoclassical government offices, the Rastorguev–Kharitonov estate on Voznesenskaya Hill, and the ornate Sevastyanov House, later rebuilt in the neo-Gothic style.

For the city, the 19th century became a time of quiet but steady growth. After rich alluvial gold deposits were discovered on the Berezovka River in 1814, the town was swept by a “gold rush”. Emeralds, malachite and rock crystal were found here — and Yekaterinburg became one of the world’s capitals of the stone-cutting trade. The lapidary works supplied malachite and jasper for Saint Isaac’s Cathedral and the Winter Palace, and local stone-cutting masters carried on their craft over generations. In parallel, merchant dynasties rose to prominence: the Tarasovs, the Ryazanovs, the Rastorguevs, the Kharitonovs.

The real leap into the industrial age came with the arrival of the railway. In October 1878 traffic opened on the Ural Mining Railway, which linked Yekaterinburg with Perm and the Volga river ports. Later, in October 1888, after the merger with the Tyumen branch and the connection to the Trans-Siberian via Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg joined the Trans-Siberian route.

A merchant and industrial but still provincial town turned into a major transport hub: banks, a stock exchange, apartment buildings, a real school and the first power station appeared. The demographic leap was impressive: whereas in the 1860s the city’s population barely exceeded 20,000, by 1917 it had reached 70,000.

From the Ipatiev House to Sverdlovsk

The Revolution and the Civil War transformed Yekaterinburg from a mining capital into one of the grimmest points on the map of Russia. In April 1918 the abdicated Emperor Nicholas II and his family were transferred here from Tobolsk and lodged in the requisitioned mansion of the engineer Nikolai Ipatiev on Voznesensky Avenue. The house was cordoned off with a high fence, the windows were whitewashed; in this confinement the prisoners spent 78 days.

On the night of 16–17 July 1918, Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, Tsarevich Alexei, the four grand duchesses, their doctor and three servants were shot in the semi-basement of the Ipatiev House. The bodies were taken to the Ganina Yama tract, and then to the area of Porosyonkov Log, where an attempt was made to destroy them with fire and acid. A week later units of the Siberian Army and the Czechoslovak Corps entered the city. The Bolsheviks abandoned Yekaterinburg until the summer of 1919, when the Red Army returned for good.

Mining, merchant, “tsarist” Yekaterinburg did not suit the new authorities even by its name. On 14 October 1924 the city council resolved to rename the city Sverdlovsk — in honour of Yakov Sverdlov, chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and one of those who initiated the execution of the Romanovs. A decree of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR of 14 November of the same year confirmed the decision, and for almost seven decades the city was Sverdlovsk. Curiously, the oblast, which was formed later, in 1934, remained Sverdlovsk Oblast and bears this name to this day.

The Sverdlovsk decades are a history of new industrial scale. On the northern outskirts, in an open field, in 1928–1933 the Ural Heavy Machinery Plant — Uralmash — was built, immediately becoming the Union’s principal machine-building giant and giving its name to an entire residential district. In the centre the ensemble of St Catherine’s Cathedral was demolished and Constructivist “townlets” were erected: the Chekist Townlet, the Vtuzgorodok and the Industry House. By the early 1940s almost half a million people lived in the city.

The Great Patriotic War changed the face of Sverdlovsk once and for all. Dozens of enterprises were evacuated here: the Kyiv “Arsenal”, factories from the Moscow region and Leningrad, design bureaus and research institutes. Within months Uralmash was retooled to produce T-34 tanks, casings for the Katyushas and self-propelled artillery. Plant No. 8 from Podlipki near Moscow was already sending anti-aircraft guns to the front by December 1941. The Hermitage moved to Sverdlovsk — part of its collection was hidden in that very Ipatiev House — along with the State Chapel and the Moscow Art Theatre. By 1945 the city had become one of the country’s principal arsenals.

The post-war decades turned Sverdlovsk into a closed city: enterprises of the atomic programme, military design bureaus and testing ranges were concentrated here. In September 1977, by a decree of the Politburo, the Ipatiev House was demolished — the operation was led by the first secretary of the regional committee, Boris Yeltsin. The decision was justified on the grounds that the house had become “a magnet for anti-Soviet elements”. The vacant lot on its site remained nameless for another quarter of a century.

The return of the name

Sverdlovsk became Yekaterinburg swiftly. On 4 September 1991 an extraordinary session of the city council voted to restore the historic name, and on 23 September of the same year the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR approved the decision. The decision fell in the era of Boris Yeltsin — a native of Sverdlovsk Oblast and a former first secretary of the regional committee — and in that sense it was his personal gesture towards the city of his own biography.

The 1990s were hard for Yekaterinburg: defence production collapsed, unemployment rose, and criminal communities grew stronger. But by the end of the decade the city found a new footing: trade, banking, exhibitions, oil-and-gas service and metallurgy. In 2000–2003, on the site of the demolished Ipatiev House, the Church on the Blood was built — a five-domed memorial church to the Romanovs that became the city’s main religious landmark. Nearby, in the pine forest of the Ganina Yama tract, the Monastery of the Holy Royal Martyrs rose up.

The 2000s and 2010s brought Yekaterinburg a metropolitan scale. The 188-metre business tower “Vysotsky” was built here, the Yeltsin Centre was opened, the embankment and Vainer Street were refurbished, the SCO and BRIC summit was held in 2009 and matches of the FIFA World Cup in 2018. The Innoprom industrial exhibition forum secured the city its status as one of the fairs of Russian industry. The city came to its 300th anniversary in 2023 renewed: with a reconstructed Plotinka, a Historical Square and new museum quarters.

Today Yekaterinburg is home to 1.47 million residents and is the largest administrative and industrial hub of the Middle Urals. A city that, as in the days of its founder Wilhelm de Gennin, continues to grow around that very dam of 1723.