Chelyabinsk

The steppe east of the southern Urals was home to the Sintashta culture in the second millennium BC; its fortified settlements, including Arkaim, lie to the south of the city. Chelyabinsk itself began in 1736, when Colonel Alexey Tevkelev built the fortress of Chelyaba on the site of the Bashkir village of Chelyaby to guard the trade routes. The fortress held out against Pugachev's rebels in 1774 but was taken for several months in 1775, and Chelyabinsk received town status in 1787. For another century it remained a small provincial town.

The railway changed everything. In 1892 the line from Samara through Zlatoust reached the town, and the same year construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway began here. Chelyabinsk became the main gateway to Siberia: in fifteen years more than fifteen million people, a tenth of Russia's population, passed through, and a customs barrier between the European and Asian parts of the empire brought mills and a tea-packing factory. The population rose from 20,000 in 1897 to 70,000 in 1917, and the town was nicknamed the Chicago of the Urals.

The first five-year plans brought the Tractor Plant and the Metallurgical Plant, and in the Second World War Stalin moved whole factories east, including Leningrad's Kirov works. Chelyabinsk built 18,000 tanks, 48,500 tank engines and more than 17 million rounds of ammunition and was called Tankograd. Many industries closed in the 1990s, but the city remained a heavy-industry centre. On 15 February 2013 a meteor exploded above the region; its shock wave blew in windows across the city and injured about 1,500 people.

Chelyabinsk's identity is bound up with heavy industry and its war record. The Tankograd legacy is everywhere, from the monument to the tank volunteers on Kirovka to the tanks in the Garden of Victory, and the meteor has become a local legend, with its largest fragment on show in the regional museum. The city's cultural institutions include the Glinka opera and ballet theatre, opened in 1956 in a building begun before the war, a drama theatre, puppet, youth and contemporary dance theatres, a philharmonic concert hall named after Prokofiev and an organ hall.

Ice hockey is the passion. Traktor Chelyabinsk plays in the Kontinental Hockey League, and the city has produced a long line of Soviet and NHL players; Sergei Gonchar and Evgeny Kuznetsov both began their professional careers with Traktor. Chelyabinsk has also hosted world judo and taekwondo championships, and those born in the city include the composer Lera Auerbach, the ballet dancer Vadim Muntagirov and the cosmonaut Maksim Surayev.

Most residents are Russian; at the 2010 census Tatars made up about 5 per cent and Bashkirs about 3 per cent. Newcomers often notice that people on the streets and in transport rarely smile, a reserve said to hide a helpful, hospitable and frank character. Winter is spent skiing in the forests around the city and skating on the rinks set up in the parks; summer, swimming in the lakes.

About 1,177,000 people lived in Chelyabinsk in 2025 by official estimates, making it the second-largest city in the Ural Federal District after Yekaterinburg. Industry produces almost 40 per cent of the city's economic output, above all metallurgy and military production: the Chelyabinsk Metallurgical Combine, the Tractor Plant, pipe, electrode and forge works, and a zinc plant that produces about 2 per cent of the world's zinc. The city is also home to Russia's largest pasta maker, Makfa, and has universities including South Ural State University and Chelyabinsk State University.

Housing follows the industrial history: merchant buildings in the centre, constructivist quarters near the tractor plant, Stalin-era blocks along Lenin Avenue, and from the late 1960s the high-rise estates of the North-West. Large shopping malls have been built since the 2000s, among them Rodnik, opened in 2011.

The environment is the main daily complaint: official reports for 2020 rated the city's air pollution as elevated, and the Shershni reservoir that supplies drinking water has high organic pollution. The city still faces problems with its economy and with the upkeep of streets and public spaces. In summer residents head for the lakes inside the city and for the mountains to the west.

Chelyabinsk eats the food of the Urals, and pelmeni are the centre of it. These small dumplings of thin unleavened dough wrapped around raw minced meat — pork, beef, lamb or a mix — became a staple of Russian cooking during the expansion into the Urals and Siberia. In the Urals they are boiled in plain water, then served with melted butter or smetana (sour cream), with mustard, horseradish or vinegar on the side.

The Tatar and Bashkir communities bring their own dishes. Tatar pilmän, the equivalent of pelmeni, are always served in a clear soup with dill or other fresh herbs. Bashkir cooking grew out of cattle breeding, and kumis, fermented mare's milk with a mild alcohol content, is important to the Bashkirs and Tatars, as to other peoples of the steppe.

Everyday drinks are kvass, a cloudy, sweet-and-sour, low-alcohol drink fermented from rye bread, and mors, made from lingonberries or cranberries. Kirovka and the streets around it hold most of the city's cafés and restaurants, and cheap self-service canteens, where diners take dishes from a counter, are found across the city.