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PERFORMING COMMUNITY
Yekaterinburg, 1980
Yekaterinburg — which would become Russia’s fourth-largest city with nearly 1.5 million residents at the beginning of the twenty-first century — was established in 1723, late in the reign of Peter I (“the Great”). The settlement was created just on the Asian side of the Ural Mountains, somewhat more than 900 miles east of Moscow, in what is today Sverdlovsk Province. The city was named after Saint Catherine, to honor Tsar Peter’s wife, Ekaterina. It drew settlers from across the Russian Empire, growing slowly and achieving the status of a town only in 1796. It eventually emerged as a major mining and manufacturing center, prospering from the exploitation of rich mineral deposits throughout the Urals region, and enriching great industrial dynasties. The arrival of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the late nineteenth century secured Yekaterinburg’s status as one of Russia’s most important industrial centers. As one of the first cities in the world specifically created for industry, Yekaterinburg quickly attracted a diverse population of workers and specialists. Local mine and factory owners were less concerned with the details of imperial policies than they were with using engineering knowledge to make their businesses profitable. Consequently, they employed people who could do the job, no matter how much they were discriminated
against elsewhere. The city became a place where smart outsiders could thrive. Even today, local residents often claim that they judge someone only by how hard he or she works. Imperial Yekaterinburg developed into the sort of melting pot of empire that promotes unrefined inter-ethnic, interconfessional, inter-professional and inter-class exchange. Many factors promoted a frontier-like sensibility of live and let live, among them being the fact that Yekaterinburg was not as large as it was economically important. The best and brightest throughout the Urals region focused their attention on how to get things done. Intellectual, ideological, political, artistic and even architectural fashions arrived somewhat later there than in the cosmopolitan artistic centers of European Russia; and when they arrived, they often became grounded in the realities of everyday life. During the Soviet period, Stalin’s Great Leap Forward, beginning with the inauguration of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928, stimulated further growth. The city became home to numerous heavy industrial plants, including the “largest machinery plant in a European economy,” the giant Uralmash works. The city exploded, with tens of thousands of new residents streaming in to fill the factories
