A Little Ekaterinburg History

The city was founded in 1723 by Vasily Tatischev and named after Saint Catherine, the namesake of tsar Peter the Great’s wife Catherine (Yekaterina). It was renamed Sverdlovsk after the Bolshevik party leader and Soviet official Yakov Sverdlov from 1924 to 1991.

Soon after the Russian Revolution, on July 17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their children Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Tsarevich Alexei were executed by Bolsheviks in this city.

In the 1920s Yekaterinburg became a large industrial center of Russia. The heavy machinery factory Uralmash, the biggest in Europe, was built.

Between 1932 and 1937, Chiang Ching-kuo, president of the Republic of China from 1978 until 1998, worked in Ekaterinburg on the Ural Heavy machinery Plant (Uralmash). In Ekaterinburg he met his wife Faina Ipatyevna Vakhreva.

During World War II, many government technical institutions and whole factories were evacuated to Yekaterinburg from the war-affected areas (mostly Moscow) and many remained in Yekaterinburg after the war was over.

The traditional border between Europe and Asia

In the 1960s, during the Khruschev government, many similar five-storey apartment blocks were built around Yekaterinburg. Most of them still remain today in Kirovsky, Chkalovsky, and other residential areas of Yekaterinburg.

On May 1, 1960, an American spy-plane U-2, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, was shot down over Yekaterinburg. The pilot was captured and later exchanged for Rudolph Abel, a Russian spy in the United States.

There was an anthrax outbreak in Yekaterinburg (then Sverdlovsk) in April and May 1979, which was attributed by Soviet officials to the locals eating contaminated meat. However, American agencies believe that the locals inhaled spores accidentally released from an aerosol of pathogen at a military microbiology facility. Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov’s account of the outbreak in his book Biohazard agrees with the American agencies’ view.

Boris Yeltsin was from here.