Krasnoyarsk

On 19 August 1628 a party of servicemen from Yeniseysk led by Andrey Dubensky built a fort where the Kacha River joins the Yenisei, to guard the frontier. They named it Krasny Yar, a translation of the local Turkic name Kyzyl Char, the red steep bank. With Kansk to the east it marked the southern limit of Russian expansion in the Yenisei basin in the 17th century, and it became a town in 1690. Growth began with the Siberian Route, built through the town in 1735–1741. In 1822 Krasnoyarsk became the capital of Yeniseysk Governorate, and gold strikes and the arrival of the railway in 1895 brought prosperity; eight of the exiled Decembrists were sent here.

In the Civil War Kolchak's Whites held the region until December 1919. In 1934 the city became the capital of the newly formed Krasnoyarsk Krai, and in the Stalin years it was a major centre of the Gulag. Dozens of factories evacuated from Ukraine and western Russia during the Second World War stimulated its industrial growth, and after the war came an aluminium plant, metal works and the giant Krasnoyarsk Dam, built from 1956 to 1972 upstream at Divnogorsk.

The 1990s brought privatisation, unemployment and strikes, and a long struggle for control of the aluminium plant. From 1996 a new mayor restored historic buildings, paved walkways and laid out squares, and much of the drab post-Soviet look disappeared. The old Trans-Siberian bridge of 1893–1896 was dismantled in 2002–2007, and in 2019 the city hosted the Winter Universiade.

Krasnoyarsk prides itself on its setting: Anton Chekhov judged it the most beautiful city in Siberia, and the forested hills, the wide Yenisei and the Stolby pillars are part of local identity. Climbing on the pillars has its own tradition, stolbizm, in which local climbers deliberately go without ropes. The painter Vasily Surikov, known for his large history paintings, was born here, and his family house is a museum.

The city's cultural life includes the Krasnoyarsk Children's Choir, which tours abroad as the Little Eagles of Siberia, an organ hall in a former Catholic church, and festivals such as the Day of the City in June, the Mana Festival of bard songs on a river outside the city, and an international museum biennale. Siberian Federal University, formed in 2006 from four institutions, and the research institutes of Akademgorodok make it one of the prominent scientific and educational centres of Siberia.

Sport is serious. Yenisey was Soviet bandy champion every year in the 1980s and has won the Russian title several times since; the city is a stronghold of Russian rugby union, with two top-flight clubs, Krasny Yar and Enisey-STM; and it hosts the Ivan Yarygin international wrestling tournament. Most residents are Russian, with growing communities from Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and the Caucasus, and Chinese traders who run much of the business at the bazaars.

About 1,212,000 people lived in Krasnoyarsk in 2025 by official estimates, making it the second-largest city in Siberia after Novosibirsk. Industry still matters — the city is one of the largest producers of aluminium in Russia, and most of the dam's power goes to the aluminium plant — but so do the universities, the regional government and trade, including the large Chinese markets.

The Yenisei divides the city. The left bank holds the historic centre on the peninsula between the Kacha and the Yenisei, with Mira Avenue and the embankment, and large residential districts; Sovetsky district, the most populous, had about 281,000 people at the 2010 census. The right bank has industrial and residential districts that run up to the forested hills and the national park. Many old villages absorbed into the city keep wooden houses with backyards, and two-storey wooden houses built as temporary housing in the mid-20th century are still lived in.

Getting around depends on buses, with trams and trolleybuses, while a light rail line is being built in the tunnels of the abandoned metro. Air pollution from the aluminium plant, power stations and heating boilers is a long-standing issue, and in summer smoke from forest fires can drift over the city. In winter people ski at Bobrovy Log and in the woods; in summer they head for Stolby, the islands and the dacha.

Krasnoyarsk eats the food of Siberia. Pelmeni became a staple of Russian cooking during the expansion into the Urals and Siberia, and in Siberia they were traditionally frozen outdoors in winter and kept as preserved food; in Siberia they are boiled in salted water or broth and carefully drained, since serving them in their broth is thought poor taste, and eaten with butter or smetana (sour cream), or Siberian-style with vinegar and ground pepper.

Siberian Russian cooking uses the whitefish of the northern rivers, such as muksun and the Arctic cisco, and local ways of eating them raw, frozen or with spices. The best known is stroganina, long, thin shavings of frozen raw fish, a dish of the northern Russians and the Indigenous peoples of Arctic Siberia, made with nelma, muksun or other whitefish.

The city's trade with China shows at the table: there are many Chinese restaurants on Mira Avenue near the Theatre of Musical Comedy, and Chinese traders run stalls at the city's bazaars, including the large Sodruzhestvo market. To drink there is kvass, a cloudy, sweet-and-sour, low-alcohol drink fermented from rye bread, and mors, a still drink of lingonberries or cranberries.