Krasnoyarsk

Krasnoyarsk sits at the geographic center of Russia—literally the midpoint between Moscow and Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian Railway. That centrality is deceptive: the city feels far from everything, buried in the Siberian interior where the Yenisei River carves through mountains before flowing 3,000 kilometers north to the Arctic Ocean. Winter temperatures routinely hit minus 40 degrees. Yet over a million people live here, making it Russia's largest city east of the Urals.

The city's modern economy rests on a single corporate pillar: Norilsk Nickel, the world's largest producer of palladium and refined nickel. Norilsk Nickel's smelting operations in the Krasnoyarsk Krai generate massive revenue but also massive environmental damage—the company has been one of the world's largest sulfur dioxide emitters. The Krasnoyarsk aluminum smelter, operated by Rusal (the world's second-largest aluminum company), adds to the industrial base. Together, these operations make Krasnoyarsk Krai one of Russia's wealthiest regions by GDP while creating pollution that blankets the city in smog during winter temperature inversions.

Hydropower provides the energy that makes it all viable. The Krasnoyarsk Dam on the Yenisei, completed in 1972, generates 6,000 megawatts—one of the most powerful dams in the world. Cheap electricity from hydropower is the metabolic subsidy that allows energy-intensive aluminum smelting to be profitable this deep into Siberia. Without the dam, the economics collapse.

Krasnoyarsk hosted the 2019 Winter Universiade, which triggered a construction boom—new sports facilities, airport terminal, roads. But the city's fundamental equation remains: mineral extraction and hydropower in, industrial products and pollution out. Whether a Siberian industrial city of a million people can evolve beyond that exchange is an open question that Russia's geography makes extraordinarily difficult to answer.