Perm

Perm gave its name to an entire geological period—the Permian, 300 to 250 million years ago—because the rock strata first described by Scottish geologist Roderick Murchison in 1841 were so distinctively layered here that they defined a new chapter in Earth's history. That geological fame is apt: Perm itself is built on layers. Ural Mountains minerals on the bottom, Russian imperial trade routes in the middle, Soviet defense industry on top.

The city's position on the navigable Kama River—the Volga's largest tributary—made it a gateway between European Russia and Siberia centuries before anyone thought to industrialize. Salt and potassium deposits along the Kama attracted extraction industries. The Motovilikha cannon works, established in the 1860s, made Perm a pillar of the Russian military-industrial complex. By the Soviet era, the city was a closed defense-industry center, its factories producing rocket engines, artillery, and the aviation motors that powered Soviet military aircraft.

Perm today produces the largest industrial output among Ural cities, ahead of bigger neighbors Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, and Ufa. Oil refining dominates—about 3% of Russian output passes through Perm—alongside petrochemicals, machine building, and timber processing. The Kama hydroelectric station provides 500 megawatts of power. The economic structure is diversified by Russian industrial-city standards, but still weighted toward heavy industry and resource processing.

The city's ongoing challenge is the same one facing every Russian industrial center: converting Soviet-era defense infrastructure into something that functions in a market economy without losing the engineering talent that made the old system productive. Perm's rocket engine factories—including those supplying components for the Russian space program—represent the highest-value remnant of that inheritance.