Samara
The USSR's secret wartime capital when Moscow was threatened in 1941. Stalin's bunker—37 metres deep—was declassified in 1990. The evacuated aircraft factories became a permanent aerospace hub: Soyuz rockets and Gagarin's Vostok were built here.
Samara was the Soviet Union's secret capital—and almost nobody knows. When German forces approached Moscow in October 1941, Stalin evacuated the government, foreign embassies, and the Bolshoi Theatre to Samara (then called Kuybyshev). A bunker was built 37 metres underground for Stalin himself, though he never used it. For several months, this Volga River city functioned as the administrative centre of a nation fighting for survival. The bunker was declassified only in 1990 and is now a museum. Samara's wartime role established its aerospace industry, which still defines the city.
The city's origins are older and more conventional. Founded in 1586 as a fortress on the Volga to protect trade routes and the Russian frontier, Samara grew as a river port handling grain from the surrounding steppe. The Trans-Siberian Railway arrived in 1877, and the city became a distribution hub for agricultural products moving between Central Asia and European Russia. The Volga at Samara is 1.5 kilometres wide—a natural transport artery that predates any road or railway.
The wartime evacuation of Moscow's aircraft factories to Samara created a permanent aerospace cluster. The city produced Il-2 Sturmovik ground-attack aircraft during the war—36,000 units, the most-produced military aircraft in history. After the war, the facilities transitioned to rocket production. The Samara Space Centre (TsSKB-Progress) builds Soyuz launch vehicles—the rockets that have carried every cosmonaut to the International Space Station. The Vostok rocket that launched Yuri Gagarin in 1961 was assembled here. Samara's aerospace industry employs tens of thousands and accounts for a significant share of the regional economy.
Modern Samara has 1.16 million residents and an economy diversified across aerospace, oil refining (the Volga-Ural oil region), automotive (the AvtoVAZ plant in nearby Tolyatti produces Lada vehicles), and food processing. Western sanctions since 2022 have disrupted supply chains but also redirected government investment toward domestic aerospace production—perversely benefiting Samara's core industry. The city that became a secret capital in desperation continues to build the rockets that project Russian power into orbit.