Chelyabinsk, Russia Webcam

Category: Urban

Chelyabinsk is a city in Russia, located just to the east of the Ural Mountains, on Miass River.

Fortress Chelyaba, from which the city takes its name, was constructed on the site in 1736; the city was incorporated in 1781. Around 1900, it served as a center for the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In the decades after the Finnish Civil War in 1918, some 15,000 “Red” Finns defected into the Soviet Union. Most of them were transferred to Chelyabinsk via railway.

During World War II, Joseph Stalin decided to move a large part of Soviet factory production to places out of the way of the advancing German armies in late 1941. This brought new industries and thousands of workers to Chelyabinsk. Several enormous facilities for the production of T-34 tanks and Katyusha rocket launchers existed in Chelyabinsk, which became known as “Tankograd” (Tank City).

Chelyabinsk has had a long association with top-secret nuclear research, though this is more properly applicable to Chelyabinsk Oblast as a whole, as nuclear facilities such as Chelyabinsk-70 (Snezhinsk) are, or were, located far outside the city. A serious nuclear accident occurred in 1957 at the Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, 150 km north-west of the city, which caused deaths in Chelyabinsk Oblast but not in the city. The province was closed to all foreigners until 1992.