Yekaterinburg

Yekaterinburg is a city in Russia on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains, on the Iset River near the boundary between Europe and Asia. Its early mines and ironworks made it the center of the Urals, and it is often called the capital of the region.

Vasily Tatishchev and Georg Wilhelm de Gennin founded the city in 1723 around an ironworks on a dam across the Iset and named it after Empress Catherine I. Gems and minerals from the Urals, such as malachite and emerald, were cut in its workshops for the palaces of Saint Petersburg. From the 1920s it was called Sverdlovsk after the revolutionary Yakov Sverdlov, and its factories grew into one of the main industrial bases of the Soviet Union. The old name returned in 1991, and Boris Yeltsin, who had led the regional party in the city, became the first president of Russia.

Uralmash, the heavy machinery maker of the city, builds mining excavators and drilling rigs. Gems from the Urals are still cut and set by jewelers in Yekaterinburg.

The Plotinka, the dam where the city began, is a promenade on the Iset with a historical park and museums beside it. The Yeltsin Center, a museum of the 1990s on the riverbank, tells the history of modern Russia through the life of the president. Sevastyanov's House, a mansion with green domes and carved white facades, faces the city pond. Bands such as Nautilus Pompilius and Chaif came out of the Sverdlovsk rock club in the 1980s and made the city a center of Russian rock music.