Yekaterinburg

Yekaterinburg sits on the geographic boundary between Europe and Asia—a fact commemorated by an obelisk on the highway—and the city's entire history has been shaped by existing at the edge of things. Founded in 1723 by Vasily Tatishchev as an ironworks on the Iset River, it was named for Peter the Great's wife Catherine (Yekaterina). The factory determined the city: Yekaterinburg was built to smelt the Ural Mountains' iron ore into weapons for Russia's imperial ambitions.

The Romanov dynasty ended here. On the night of July 17, 1918, Bolsheviks executed Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their five children in the basement of the Ipatiev House. Boris Yeltsin—who ordered the house demolished in 1977 when he was Sverdlovsk Communist Party chief—later became Russia's first post-Soviet president. Yekaterinburg produced both the executioners and the reformer.

Soviet industrialization made Yekaterinburg (renamed Sverdlovsk until 1991) a closed military-industrial city. The Uralmash factory complex produced the tanks, artillery, and industrial equipment that won World War II. A secret biological weapons facility at Compound 19 accidentally released anthrax spores in 1979, killing dozens—a disaster the Soviet government concealed for over a decade.

Modern Yekaterinburg is Russia's fourth-largest city and the Urals' undisputed capital. The economy has diversified from heavy industry into banking, IT, and retail—Yekaterinburg is often called Russia's "third capital" after Moscow and St. Petersburg. The 1990s produced oligarchs who built empires from privatized Soviet assets: the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company (UMMC) and Russian Copper Company are headquartered here.

Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, an architecturally striking museum complex, dominates the riverfront—a monument to the man who ended the system that built the city.

Yekaterinburg exists at every boundary: Europe-Asia, empire-revolution, Soviet-post-Soviet. The edge is its identity.