Who ruled Novosibirsk?

Novosibirsk lies on the River Ob in south-western Siberia, at the point where the Trans-Siberian Railway was built across the river in the 1890s. It is one of the youngest large cities in the world: a construction camp in 1893, it passed a million inhabitants in 1962 and is now the third-largest city in Russia. Its story is almost entirely one of railways, industry and Soviet planning, set on land that had been the domain of steppe and forest peoples for thousands of years.

Long before the city, the upper Ob was home to Bronze Age herders and later to Turkic-speaking groups whose territories shifted with the rise and fall of steppe powers, from Kipchak confederations to the Golden Horde and its successors. By the sixteenth century the riverbanks around the future city were inhabited by the Chat Tatars, who fished, hunted and kept livestock. Russian expansion into Siberia, which began with the campaigns against the Khanate of Sibir in the 1580s, reached this stretch of the Ob in the seventeenth century, and the village of Krivoshchyokovo was founded on the left bank in 1696. For two centuries the area remained a thinly settled farming district of the Russian Empire, overshadowed by the older towns of Tomsk and Kolyvan.

Everything changed when the engineers of the Trans-Siberian Railway chose a narrow, rocky stretch of the Ob for their bridge. Workers arrived on 30 April 1893 (old style) to build housing for the construction teams, and a settlement quickly grew on the right bank. In 1895 it took the name Novonikolayevsk, honouring both Saint Nicholas and the new tsar, Nicholas II. The bridge opened in 1897, and the town, which gained urban status at the end of 1903, became a hub for the grain, butter and timber trade of western Siberia. It grew so quickly that by 1915 it had roughly 75,000 inhabitants, despite a fire in 1909 that destroyed hundreds of houses.

The Russian Revolution and civil war brought hardship. Soviets took power in December 1917, but in May 1918 the rebellious Czechoslovak Legion and White forces seized the town; the Red Army returned in late 1919. Typhus and cholera killed thousands, and the railway bridge was wrecked. Recovery came in the 1920s, and on 12 September 1926 the city was renamed Novosibirsk, "New Siberian", as the capital of a vast Siberian administrative region.

Under Joseph Stalin the city became a centre of heavy industry and the largest city in Siberia, nicknamed the "Chicago of Siberia". The Turkestan–Siberia Railway, completed in 1930, linked it to Central Asia. It also had a darker role as a major transit point for prisoners and deportees heading to camps further east. During World War II more than 50 factories were evacuated here from western Russia, together with refugees, scientists and museum collections, making the city a key supplier of aircraft and munitions to the front. Its great opera and ballet theatre, under construction since the 1930s, opened in 1945.

Post-war planners added a hydroelectric dam and the reservoir known as the Ob Sea, and in 1957 began building Akademgorodok, a science town about 30 kilometres south of the centre that became the headquarters of the Siberian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Novosibirsk has remained the main city of Siberia, with about 1.6 million people and an economy built on transport, trade, research and higher education.