The Russian industry is one of the most competitive in the world, capable of producing goods of almost any type. It occupies a significant part of Russia's GDP - 29%. Also, 19% of the working population are employed in industry.

Russian industry is divided into the following sectors: aircraft manufacturing, oil and gas production, processing and extraction of precious metals and stones, production of weapons and military equipment, automotive industry, electrical engineering, space production, aviation, light (textile), food, coal, agro-industrial complex ( livestock, crops, wheat).

A significant part of industrial enterprises are located directly near raw material deposits and bases, which significantly reduces the cost of their transportation and ultimately creates a lower cost of the final product.

The main industry is mechanical engineering, concentrated in large cities - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Western Siberia, the Urals, and the Volga region. The complex produces almost 30% of the total industrial output and provides equipment and machinery to other sectors of the economy.

Mechanical engineering includes more than 70 industries, including: electrical engineering, electronics, robotics, carriage building, shipbuilding, instrument engineering, agricultural and transport engineering, aircraft manufacturing, shipbuilding and the defense industry.

The chemical and petrochemical industries play an equally important role in the Russian economy. The focus is on the extraction of mining chemical raw materials (apatites and phosphorites, table and potassium salts, sulfur), the chemistry of organic synthesis and basic chemistry. Basic chemistry produces mineral fertilizers, chlorine, soda, sulfuric acid. Organic chemistry includes the production of plastics, synthetic rubber, synthetic resins, and chemical fibers. The chemical industry is also concentrated in large cities and boasts the world's largest Solikamsk deposit (in the north of the Perm region).

The fuel and energy complex supplies fuel and electricity to all other areas of industry. Fuel and energy complex products are the basis of Russian exports. Extraction and processing of various types of fuel, electric power, as well as production, processing, transportation of oil, coal, gas. About 85% of gas is produced in Western Siberia and exported to the CIS countries, non-CIS countries and the Baltic countries. Russia occupies a leading position in coal reserves.

The metallurgical complex produces metal ores, their enrichment, metal smelting, and rolled products. It is divided into non-ferrous and ferrous, which accounts for about 90% of the total number of metals used in the national economy - steel. non-ferrous metallurgy. Ferrous metallurgy includes the following types of enterprises: full-cycle metallurgical plants producing cast iron, steel and rolled products; steel smelting and steel rolling plants; production of ferroalloys, iron alloys with chromium, manganese, silicon and other elements; small metallurgy - production of steel and rolled products at machine-building plants. Colored is inferior in production volumes, but has greater value. Includes heavy metals (zinc, copper, nickel, chromium, lead), light metals (aluminum, magnesium, titanium), noble metals (gold, silver, platinum).

The Russian space industry is one of the most powerful in the world, leading in orbital launches and manned space exploration. Russia also has its own GLONASS navigation satellite system.

The agro-industrial complex of the Russian Federation specializes in the production of agricultural products, their processing and storage. Agricultural land in Russia is about 219.6 million hectares. The main agricultural crops are: grains, sugar beets, sunflowers, potatoes, flax. Cereal crops include rye, wheat, barley, oats, corn, millet, buckwheat, rice, as well as legumes (peas, beans, soybeans, lentils). In terms of production volumes of grains and leguminous crops, Russia is in fourth place in the world.

The nuclear energy industry of the Russian Federation is the strongest in the world, both in individual nuclear technologies and in general. Russia ranks first in the number of simultaneously constructed nuclear power plants on its territory. In total, there are 10 nuclear power plants in operation in our country.

The automotive industry maintains a strong growth rate in the number of motor vehicles produced. Major manufacturers are AvtoVAZ, GAZ, KAMAZ.

Industrial centers of Russia

1. The leader in industrial production is Moscow. Enterprises of mechanical engineering, food and pharmaceutical industries, oil and gas refining, R&D.
2. St. Petersburg - enterprises of the food and chemical industries, mechanical engineering, ferrous metallurgy, construction materials production, R&D.
3. Surgut is an oil and gas production and processing city; the city also has large enterprises operating in the electric power industry, food industry and R&D.
4. Nizhnevartovsk, Omsk and Perm, Ufa - oil and gas production and processing. Mechanical engineering and food industry enterprises are also located in Omsk, Ufa, and Perm.
5. Norilsk - non-ferrous metallurgy.
6. Chelyabinsk - ferrous metallurgy, mechanical engineering and food industry.
7. Novokuznetsk - ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, coal industry.
8. Krasnodar region - agricultural production.

Prospects for Russian industry

1. Technical re-equipment and use of new equipment.
2. Rapid development of processing industries in comparison with the speed of development of raw materials industries.
3. Course on

Factories with well-established production are a prime necessity for the success of any company engaged in the production of light industrial goods and even for the well-being of the economy as a whole. Companies can monopolize an entire market by cleverly identifying a sought-after product and building a factory that specializes in mass-producing it.

While a plant is a huge investment with equally extensive maintenance costs, these plants are used for mass production and distribution, keeping final costs to a minimum. These companies not only save money on price, their factories also allow them to create jobs, although not with the highest wages, especially if they are built near cities.

Walmart is the most famous and largest discount store in the United States. The company has a number of huge distribution centers that serve 11,088 stores in their network. Walmart's rival, the well-known Target chain, has four distribution centers for imported goods, which provide the entire network with the necessary quantities of imported goods. Hyundai and Volkswagen have the world's largest automobile factories, through which they maintain their competitiveness in the market by constantly expanding and increasing their production.

These institutions and companies, which have the largest factories in the world, usually also own the most famous and influential brands in the world. Below are fifteen of the largest factories in the world and the brands behind them.

15. NASA Vehicle Assembly Building

The vertical assembly building, located between Miami and Jacksonville, is the largest single-story building in the world.

It was built in 1966 so that it could properly assemble the Saturn V rocket, which was used for the Apollo program. The building covers an area of ​​32,374 square meters and has an impressive volume of 3.66 million cubic meters. The height of the building is 160 meters, and the area it occupies is 3.25 hectares. This assembly building also has some of the most impressive features in the world, setting it apart from other similar buildings. The building contains four 139 meter high doors, which are gigantic by any standards, as well as 71 cranes and over 98,000 tons of steel.

14. Shipyard "Meyer Werft Dockhalle 2"


Meyer Werft is one of the largest shipyards located in Germany.

This company was founded in 1795 and on its territory there is one of the largest shipyards in the world - Dockhalle 2. This shipyard covers an impressive area of ​​63,000 square meters and is mainly used for the construction of cruise ships. This covered dry dock is 504 meters long, 125 meters wide and 75 meters high. Among the ships built at this plant are the following: “Norwegian Star”, “Norwegian Dawn”, “Radiance of the Seas”, “Brilliance of the Seas” ), "AIDAbella" and "Pearl of Norway" (Norwegian Jewel).

13. Aerium


Aerium is a rebuilt factory that was originally supposed to be a boathouse. The Nazis built this huge building in the early years of World War II to develop their military base.

They occupied the building until 1945, when the Red Army captured it. The Soviet army increased the runway from 1,000 to 25,000 meters. This made the building an excellent place to store fighter jets. In 1994, after German reunification, a group of Soviet troops in Germany returned the base to the German government. Two years later, a company called CargoLifter purchased the building to build airships.

Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt after six years. The building was sold to a Malaysian company, which used it to build a tropical theme park.

12. Constellation Bristol


Constellation Bristol is a wine connoisseur's dream, as it is the largest beer and wine storage facility in the world. The storage area is as much as 78,967 square meters. The Bristol Constellation holds an astonishing amount of alcohol, namely 35,961 cubic metres. This is comparable in size to 14 Olympic swimming pools.

There are 57 million bottles of wine in storage, representing approximately 15 percent of the UK's entire wine market. The building took three years and £100 million to construct. The storage facility produces approximately 800 bottles per minute, which is 6,000,000 bottles daily.

11. Tesco Ireland Distribution Center


This distribution center is the largest building in Ireland. It opened in 2007. The area of ​​the center, which stores food and electrical goods, is 80,194 square meters. This building is simply huge. It is almost 805 meters long, meaning it would take the average person about 12 minutes to walk from one end to the other.

The Tesco center also features hundreds of loading ramps and cost €70 million to build.

10. Lauma Fabrics


The Lauma Fabriks company specializes in the production of lace and materials for underwear. It also produces elastic bands and fabric. As one of the largest companies in this industry, Lauma Fabrics has one of the largest factories in the world.

The plant is 225 meters long, 505 meters wide and covers an area of ​​115,645 square meters. Construction of the plant began in 1965 in the city of Liepāja in Latvia, at a time when the unemployment rate in the country was quite high. Initially, the plant was called "Ladies' Toiletries Factory", but later, in 1965, the name of the plant changed to "Lauma Fabriks".

9. Jean-Luc Lagardère Plant


The Jean-Luc Lagardère plant is primarily used as a final assembly line for the $428 million production of the 800-seat Airbus A380. The plant is located in Toulouse-Blagnac. The final assembly line is 470 meters long and covers an area of ​​122,500 square meters.

Parts of the Airbus A380 are manufactured in various locations, including Spain, the UK, Germany and France. These parts are then brought to the Jean-Luc Lagardère factory for final assembly. The assembled airbus is being tested at the same plant. With a total area of ​​200 hectares, the plant also includes the company's restaurants, a full-scale Airbus fuel production plant, and 20 hectares of runways.

8. Warehouse for imported goods of the Target network


Target is the second-largest discount retail chain in the United States, so the company needed a huge warehouse for imported goods. Of all the warehouses in the network, Targets Import Warehouse is the largest and occupies a total area of ​​185,800 square meters.

The company built this warehouse to distribute imported goods to its domestic distribution centers. It's understandable why the company needed such a large building for this purpose: the Target chain has 1,934 stores located throughout North America. Stores are constantly in need of new supplies to keep customers happy. In addition to this warehouse, the company has three more, although they are not as huge as this one.

7. Belvidere Assembly Plant


The Belvidere Assembly Plant is located in Illinois, USA. It is owned by Chrysler, which produces such brands as the Jeep Compass, Jeep Patriot and Dodge Dart. The plant also assembled cars that are no longer in production, such as the Dodge Caliber, Chrysler Imperial, Dodge Dynasty, Chrysler New Yorker and Plymouth Neon.

The plant covers an area of ​​330,000 square meters. Its length is 700 meters and its width is 300 meters. It is located on an area of ​​114 hectares. The workforce is largely made up of robots, of which there are more than 780 in the body shop alone.

6. Mitsubishi Motors North America building


Founded in 1981, Mitsubishi Motors North America manages the production, sales and development of Mitsubishi vehicles in the United States, Mexico, the West Indies and Canada through a well-established network of more than 700 auto dealers.

To keep up with demand, the company built this huge plant, covering an area of ​​220,000 square meters, which mainly produces Mitsubishi Outlander cars. It also produces other car brands such as Mitsubishi Galant, Eclipse, Eclipse Spyder, Endeavor and Chrysler Sebring. This huge plant is located in Normal, Illinois.

5. Boeing Factory in Everett


Everett, Washington, is home to the world's largest Boeing manufacturing plant. The Boeing plant in Everett occupies an astonishingly huge area of ​​398,000 square meters. The territory related to the plant is 39.7 hectares. This is where the Boeing 747, 767 and 777 are manufactured, and where the recently launched 787 Dreamliner is also assembled.

Construction of the plant began in 1966 after Pan American World Airways placed an order for 25 Boeing 747s at a cost of $525 million. The plant also houses Tully's Cafeteria, a theater and a Boeing store. The company also provides tours of the Future of Flight Aviation Center, as well as Boeing tours.

4. Tesla Factory


Elon Musk's Tesla Company has been on everyone's lips lately. Tesla Motors specializes exclusively in the production of electric cars and components for electric road trains. This extensive automobile production plant is located in Fremont, California and covers an area of ​​510,000 square meters.

The company did not build this plant from scratch. Instead, it purchased a plant previously owned by General Motors and Toyota, known as New United Motor Manufacturing. Tesla Motors reportedly paid $42 million for it and took ownership in 2010. This plant produces electric cars such as the Tesla Model S, Model 3, Model X and Roadster.

3. Aalsmeer Flower Auction Building

The flower auction building in Aalsmeer is not, in fact, an industrial plant, however, it is the largest building in the world in terms of its space. It covers a huge area of ​​518,000 square meters. The building hosts the world's largest flower auction. The length of the building is 740 meters and the width is 700 meters.

In this building, 25 million flowers are sold and bought every day from countries such as Kenya, Colombia, Ethiopia and Ecuador. The building sits on a 98-hectare site and is supposedly the most fragrant building in the world. All flowers are checked for defects before sale. Sales increase greatly during the holidays. The peak occurs on International Women's Day and Valentine's Day.

2. Hyundai Motor Company's Ulsan plant


The Hyundai Motor plant in Ulsan covers an area of ​​5,050,000 square meters. This South Korean plant occupies a total area of ​​496 hectares. This area contains five separate factories, which together produce one car every 12 seconds. This is equivalent to 1.53 million cars per year.

This building is so huge that it has its own hospital, fire department, road network and even a sewage treatment plant. Hyundai Motor's Ulsan plant also boasts more than 500,000 trees and its own pier, which can handle three 50,000-ton cargo ships at a time.

1. Volkswagen's Wolfsburg Plant


Over the years, more than 40 million have been produced at the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg. It is the largest automobile plant in the world, covering an area of ​​6,500,000 square meters. This impressive factory is so huge that workers are allowed to ride bicycles to get around. Another interesting fact about this plant is that workers can simultaneously work on assembling five cars without any reduction in efficiency or quality of work.

The plant also boasts the largest paint shop in Europe, equipped with the latest technology. This is the first paint shop to use environmentally friendly water-based paint.

During the Soviet period industrial cities arose, as a rule, on the basis of a systematically developing industry. Thus, at one time Magnitogorsk, Novokuznetsk, Norilsk, Lipetsk developed rapidly on the basis of metallurgy, Kharkov, Chelyabinsk, Minsk on the basis of tractor manufacturing, Berezniki, Solikamsk on the basis of chemistry. Many new cities emerged, including those based on the development of the chemical industry (Nizhnekamsk, Navoi, Tobolsk), automotive industry (Tolyatti, Zhodino, Naberezhnye Chelny), metallurgy (Novolipetsk, Kostomuksha, Stary Oskol), oil industry (Tyumen, Surgut, Nizhnevartovsk) , hydropower, aluminum, forestry and woodworking industries (Bratsk, Ust-Ilimsk). On the basis of nuclear energy, new cities arose near Kostroma, Smolensk, on the Southern Bug, etc. The main city-forming objects were large enterprises of ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, chemistry, energy, mechanical engineering, timber industry complexes, etc.

Industrial cities often arise based on:

• one enterprise or production;
• an industrial complex of enterprises in one leading industry, where the leading enterprise is supplemented by related ones;
• several production complexes of various industries that are not directly related to each other.

When designing a city, the possibility of its development is always taken into account, since the emerging city itself serves as a place of attraction for other industries. It has become commonplace that in a city with an enterprise where male labor predominates (metallurgy, chemistry), production of light and food industries, instrument making, etc. is located, in which women predominantly work.

Also, during the Soviet period, cities emerged - scientific centers with research institutes, higher educational institutions and experimental production facilities. Among such cities, the Novosibirsk Academic Town, the Moscow region cities of Pushchino, Krasnaya Pakhra, Dubna, Chernogolovka, etc., became famous.

In industrial cities, up to 80% of workers are employed in city-forming industries.

In many cities, along with enterprises of class I and II in terms of sanitary characteristics, there is also a relatively harmless industry that requires a large number of qualified personnel. These include machine-building and instrument-making factories, watch factories and enterprises of machine tool, textile and light industries, etc.

With the emergence of the city-forming industry and the growth of the city itself on this basis, an accompanying or, as is commonly called, service industry is created. It includes enterprises of the light, food and meat and dairy industries, refrigerators, food and manufactured goods warehouses, trade establishments, public utilities and consumer services, urban transport, etc. Such enterprises are closely connected with the residential part of the city. Examples of the location of industrial enterprises are shown in rice. 2.

Fig 2. Examples of the location of industrial enterprises in the city: a - the industrial zone is located along the railway line passing through the city center, b - enterprises are located along the railway line passing along the outskirts of the city, and occupy a central position in it: c - enterprises are located along the river and railway lines; d - enterprises are concentrated in two large industrial zones of the city; d - enterprises are dispersed throughout the city; e - enterprises are concentrated in three large zones along railway lines; g - enterprises are located in the central part of the city and form several industrial hubs; and - enterprises are concentrated in one industrial area on the outskirts of the city along the railway line

When locating enterprises, their urban differentiation is necessary. Only on this basis can a harmonious integration of industry into the city organism be achieved. According to this principle, the General Plan of Moscow was implemented in the Soviet Union, which, in particular, laid down the principle of creating eight planning zones of the city. According to this plan, residential areas and places of employment of the capital's population are distributed evenly, which helps to bring housing closer to places of employment.

However, in modern urban planning there are many complex and difficult to solve functional, technical, social, economic, transport, architectural, aesthetic and other problems. Almost all of them are closely related to the development of industry.

A characteristic feature of modern urban planning, developing in the conditions of scientific and technological progress, is the intensity of the implementation of planned plans. For example, in a number of newly created cities, the initial population was planned to be 80-100 thousand inhabitants. However, many of these cities, already in the process of building the first industrial enterprises, grew based on the expansion of the industrial base of related or new industries faster than was determined by planned indicators.

Increasingly, in the strategic development plans of our country, the government places emphasis on the need to move away from the status of a “raw materials power.” At the same time, the main emphasis is on developing its own processing of raw materials and establishing production, and large industrial centers are attracting increasingly close attention.

We offer Top 10 largest industrial centers in Russia, compiled according to data from the Institute of Territorial Planning "Urbanica".

10. Novokuznetsk

The volume of industrial production is 264 billion rubles.

The city has ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy and coal industry enterprises. Among the owners of leading industrial facilities are Evraz Group, UMMC, Sibuglemet, Rusal.

9. Chelyabinsk

277.3 billion rubles.

The city is a recognized leader in Russia in the field of ferrous metallurgy, mechanical engineering and the food industry at a high level. In Chelyabinsk there are enterprises of Mechel OJSC, the Chelyabinsk Pipe Rolling Plant, Cheboksary Electromechanical Plant, Coca-Cola, and the Russian Technologies State Corporation groups.

8. Norilsk

312 billion rubles.

The life of this polar city is built around the activities of the leader in the field of non-ferrous metallurgy, MMC Norilsk Nickel.

7. Ufa

313.6 billion rubles.

The city received the status of a major industrial center thanks to the development of oil and gas processing, mechanical engineering, food and pharmaceutical industries. The owners of the leading enterprises are JSOC Bashneft, State Corporation Russian Technologies, Wimm-Bill-Dann, Pharmstandard.

6. Perm

331.3 billion rubles.

The city can boast of significant successes in the field of oil and gas refining, mechanical engineering, food and chemical industries. The owners of leading industrial facilities are OJSC Lukoil, State Corporation Russian Technologies and Roscosmos, Nestle, Henkel and others.

5. Omsk

348.4 billion rubles.

The city has large enterprises operating in such industries as oil and gas refining, chemical and food industries, and mechanical engineering. The main industrial facilities are owned by OJSC Gazprom Neft, Unilever, Wimm-Bill-Dann, State Corporation Russian Technologies and Roscosmos.

4. Nizhnevartovsk

481.6 billion rubles.

This is one of the leading Russian centers for oil and gas production and processing. The city has industrial facilities of TNK-BP, Gazprom Neft, Russneft, Slavneft, and SIBUR.

3. Surgut

800.3 billion rubles.

A leader in oil and gas production and refining, the city also has large enterprises operating in the electric power, food processing and R&D sectors. The main industrial facilities are owned by Surgutneftegaz OJSC, OGK-2, OGK-4, SIBUR.

2. St. Petersburg

1282.7 billion rubles.

The northern capital has industrial facilities in the food and chemical industries, mechanical engineering, ferrous metallurgy, construction materials production, and R&D. The city has production facilities of Philip Morris International Inc., JTI, BAT, Kraft Foods, Procter&Gamble, United Shipbuilding Corporation, Russian Technologies, Toyota, Nissan, GM, HP, Rosatom State Corporation, Intel and many others.

1. Moscow

1895.2 billion rubles.

The capital's largest enterprises operate in such industries as mechanical engineering, food and pharmaceutical industries, oil and gas refining, and R&D. The main industrial facilities are owned by Roscosmos, Rosatom, Russian Technologies, Sukhoi Design Bureau, Renault, United Technologies, Volvo, Wimm-Bill-Dann, United Confectioners, Kraft Foods, Coca-Cola, RusHydro, GlaxoSmithKline.

Industry in Russia has always occupied a special place, and hundreds of Russian cities grew up around factories. 10 of them, in Russia and Ukraine, even reached regional centers: Petrozavodsk, Izhevsk, Perm, Yekaterinburg, Barnaul, Kemerovo, Ivanovo, Donetsk, Lugansk and Nikolaev.

Do you know where the main street of St. Petersburg leads? That's right, to the Admiralty. The very word “Admiralty” evokes associations with military maps and sailing directions, along which gray-haired admirals move ship figures, planning a campaign... But the Admiralties were not engaged in the use, but in the construction of military fleets, and therefore, the St. Petersburg “trident” converges at the entrance of the shipyard. Between the wings of the Admiralty there were once slipways, and until 1844 the gilded spire in the Nevsky prospect was complemented by masts; over 140 years, a total of about 300 ships were built. With the advent of modern metal ships, the shipyard was moved to the islands at the mouth of the Neva, but it is still called Admiralteyskaya. And even if the center of St. Petersburg is a factory, and not a temple, not a palace or a fortress, what can we say about other cities?

Petrozavodsk

Founded: 1703, Peter I
Industry: metallurgy (copper, iron), mechanical engineering (guns, shells, tractors)
City since 1782, now 272 thousand inhabitants
Regional center: Republic of Karelia

Opening a window to Europe, which was then concerned not at all with the rights of minorities, but with the seizure of colonies, preferably in Russia, without the latest industry and army would be very risky - and Peter I, of course, understood this. The power of the army in those days was determined by the power of metallurgy, the ability to cast enough guns, cannonballs and bullets, and the metallurgical leader in those years was Sweden, through whose possessions the “window to Europe” was supposed to be cut. But the cargo could take months, and Peter found an original way out: to create an industrial area near the theater of military operations. Of the several factories based on the rapids of the Karelian rivers, a special place was given to Shuisky, which was renamed Petrovsky in 1704 - final products, iron products and cannons were made here, which were immediately sent to the Baltic shores to “threaten the Swede.” With the end of the war, the need for the plant disappeared, and most of its capacity was transferred to the Urals; its furnaces finally went out in 1736. But not for good: in 1752 copper began to be smelted here, and in 1774 the Scottish engineer Carl Gascoigne arrived on Onego to build a new Aleksandrovsky plant, the main purpose of which was the production of artillery and shells. They built it to perfection: the office and houses of the authorities (now Round Square) were so attractive to the authorities of the young Olonets province that the factory village became a provincial town. The first horse-drawn railway in Russia was also here - fragments of it now lie at the factory museum. Since 1956, the Onega plant has been producing tractors for logging, but production was moved from the old site in the city center to the outskirts. However, the impressive entrances of the 1880s, the Gascoigne house with old equipment in the courtyard, Round Square, the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in the factory settlement have been preserved... In 1940-56, the Karelo-Finnish SSR existed, and the former factory village was legally on a par with Kiev or Tashkent and higher than Leningrad itself.

Ekaterinburg

Founded: 1723, Vasily Tatishchev and Willim Gennin
Industry: metallurgy (iron)
City since 1781, now 1412 thousand inhabitants
Regional center: Sverdlovsk region

In the Urals, every city is a former factory, and the ambitious one and a half million Yekaterinburg is no exception. It was here that equipment and engineers from Petrozavodsk moved in 1723, and under the leadership of successive Kalmyks Tatishchev and the Dutchman de Gennin, the largest metallurgical plant in the world was built. The name itself, in honor of not only the patroness of metallurgists, St. Catherine, but also the wife of Peter I, the future Catherine I, spoke of the significance of this place: “the city of Peter” and “the city of Catherine” became the flagships of the main imperial projects - “Windows to Europe” and the Mining Urals. In 1725, on the way here, a convoy with salaries for workers got stuck, and in order to avoid a riot, they decided to mint the salaries on the spot - this is how the Yekaterinburg Mint appeared, which until 1876 minted 4/5 of all coins in Russia. Since the 1740s, the Mining Office was located here, in charge of factories from the Volga to Altai. There are a lot of monuments to the mining past in Yekaterinburg, first of all – Plotinka, through which water has been flowing for almost three centuries. Below Plotinka there is a Historical Square with old workshops (partly occupied by a museum) and blocks of Ural rocks, ending with a colorful bridge from the 1840s. Nearby is a factory hospital (1824), and the Philharmonic on Lenin Avenue occupies the former Mining Chancellery. In total, there were three factories of that era on the territory of Yekaterinburg - also Uktussky down the Iset and Verkh-Isetsky above, now only the last one is working, but giants of the Soviet industry appeared, first of all Uralmash - a “factory of factories” that made mine buildings or rolling mills. Many buildings, churches, museums are directly or indirectly connected with the industry, and all this is in the frame of a wealthy merchant city, then a Soviet industrial giant, then a post-Soviet metropolis in the most important federal district.

Permian

Founded: 1723, Vasily Tatishchev
Industry: metallurgy (copper, iron)
City since 1781, now 1036 thousand inhabitants
Region center: Perm region

Although modern Perm is quite industrial, practically nothing remains of the “original” Yegoshikha plant, except for the Peter and Paul Church (1757) on the hill: the workshops at the mouth of Yegoshikha belong to railway workshops, and the copper smelter founded by Tatishchev closed in 1788, when on the site of his village The new provincial city was being built in full swing. However, across the hill from Yegoshikhinsky, a second plant has been operating since 1736 - Motovilikhinsky, the village of which only in 1727 became part of Perm, and therefore has perfectly preserved the harsh historical appearance of the Ural factory village with smoky huts, over which chimneys, hills and bell towers dominate. In the 19th century, the Motovilikha plant turned into one of the largest artillery manufacturers in Russia, and its workshops of different eras, including picturesque pre-revolutionary ones, stretch along the Kama River for tens of kilometers, and in the courtyard of the factory museum you can see its “products” from the local Tsar Cannon to ballistic missiles and MLRS systems.

Barnaul

Founded: 1739, Akinfiy Demidov
Industry: metallurgy (silver)
City since 1771, now 636 thousand inhabitants
Region center: Altai Territory

Although the Demidovs’ surname is associated with the Urals, where they owned up to 40 factories with Nizhny Tagil at the head, Rudny Altai, the Ural “branch” in Siberia, is also associated with them. The cunning Akinfiy Demidov, a renowned counterfeiter, searched for silver here and founded several factories, which received the name Kolyvansky in honor of the first-born factory. However, the “golden age” of Rudny Altai began in 1747, when the factories became the property of the emperor and began to supply the treasury with silver. Barnaul had the status of a “mountain city,” that is, it was subordinate not to the provincial authorities in Tomsk, but to the mining department in St. Petersburg, and was the intellectual center of Siberia with the first theater (1776), the second museum (1823) and the first technical library in the empire (1766). It was led by very strong engineers - say, Ivan Polzunov, who equipped the Barnaul plant with a real steam engine in 1762 (and it was “invented” long before Watt more than once, starting in ancient Rome), or the father and son Frolovs, who previously created a unique mine in Zmeinogorsk . But like the Urals, Rudny Altai began to give up at the end of the 19th century, and irrevocably - in the 1890s, the factories closed, and the current Altai region is known rather as the Siberian breadbasket. However, the center of the mountain city of Barnaul – Polzunova Street and the “corner of St. Petersburg” Demidovskaya Square – are perfectly preserved. The mountain office, laboratory, warehouse, pharmacy, hospital, school and church of the turn of the 18th-19th centuries form the heart of a large and noisy, extremely Siberian city. The museum, which has been housed in the building of a mining laboratory since 1913, has an amazing collection of industrial rarities, be it 200-year-old rails from Zmeinogorsk or models of factories and mines made back in the 1820s. The long-defunct factory itself with classic buildings has also been preserved, but you can only get there with a guided tour.

Ivanovo

Founded: 1746, peasant Butrimov (the village itself has been known since 1328)
Industry: textile industry
City since 1871, now 409 thousand inhabitants
Region center: Ivanovo region

Most of the cities in this selection were born from heavy industry - metallurgy, mechanical engineering. Standing apart among them is Ivanovo - the “city of brides” or “Russian Manchester”, whose region is also called the Textile Region. Although the Textile Region is much wider and includes, for example, the entire Moscow region, and the appearance of its red-brick towns with the huge factory above the blocks of multi-story workers' barracks cannot be confused with anything. They all started the same way: some peasant, perhaps an Old Believer, set up looms and began to sew something for sale; then he involved the whole village in this business, and he himself was engaged in trade; then he built a factory near the village, and he himself was already a bourgeois, a philanthropist, a collector of paintings... At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were always strikes, in Soviet times - the construction of buildings in the style of constructivism and all sorts of monuments to the liberated proletariat; in the post-Soviet period - a decline in production and, at best, the occupation of factories with offices. Ivanovo went all this way, only it was much larger than any other textile city, but even now it sometimes leaves the impression of a hypertrophied village, even with high-rise buildings, trolleybuses, universities and restaurants. One of the most memorable features is polycentrism: several old districts grew up around their factories. Red-brick industrial zones, intricate houses of factory owners, masterpieces of constructivism worthy of Moscow, and next to them corners of a county town, or even a village - this is the appearance of “Russian Manchester”.

Izhevsk

Founded: 1760, Count Pyotr Shuvalov
Industry: metallurgy (iron), mechanical engineering (artillery, small arms)
City since 1918, now 637 thousand inhabitants
Regional center: Udmurt Republic

The capital of Udmurtia is, in general, a typical Ural city-factory, only very large and busy. But everything is there - squat workshops near the dam, a spacious pond, the classic Alexander Nevsky temple on the hill, as if blessing the industrial zone below, and the remains of the local “St. Petersburg corner”. Izhevsk quickly and forever decided on its specialization - the production of small arms; already at the beginning of the 19th century, the plant riveted tens of thousands of barrels annually, and the multi-story main building with a triumphal column instead of a spire was built as a monument to the victory over Napoleon, or rather, the plant’s contribution to this victory. Under the Soviets, the city of gunsmiths (although it did not have the status of a city before the revolution, it certainly was) became the capital of peaceful Udmurtia, and after the war the life of the legendary Mikhail Kalashnikov was connected with it, to whose legacy a very interesting museum is dedicated here. And in general, Izhevsk is a city as original and picturesque as can be applied to an industrial giant.

Nikolaev

Founded: 1789, Grigory Potemkin
Industry: shipbuilding
City since 1790, now 495 thousand inhabitants
Region center: Nikolaev region, Ukraine

The city at the mouth of the Southern Bug was both a commercial port and the main base of the Black Sea Fleet, replacing Sevastopol destroyed in 1855, and a scientific center with one of the first observatory in the Russian Empire (which, by the way, was well preserved), and a provincial city, and even included to the Kherson province, noticeably superior to Kherson itself. But still, from the first years of its history, Nikolaev grew as a city of shipbuilders; the most modern warships of the Russian Empire and the USSR were built at its shipyards, right up to the failed series of Soviet aircraft carriers - the 200-meter cranes of their stocks are still visible from almost anywhere in the city. Now the Nikolaev shipyards are in deep decline, and one of its symbols is the unfinished and quietly rotting cruiser “Ukraine” standing near the central embankment. Although, of course, Nikolaev cannot be called a ghost town - there are a lot of people and cars, all sorts of cafes and shops, newfangled installations, well-kept old houses, in general, life goes on here.

Lugansk

Founded: 1795, Karl Gaiscoigne
Industry: metallurgy (iron), mechanical engineering (guns, ammunition),
City since 1882, now 423 thousand inhabitants (before the start of the war)
Regional center: Lugansk People's Republic

The easternmost and poorest regional center of Ukraine, now engulfed in war, was founded by the already familiar Karl Gascoigne as the first metallurgical plant in the south of Russia, and for the first time in domestic industry, coke was used for smelting, and therefore coal was mined. Lugansk became the starting point of the grandiose Donetsk-Dnieper industrial complex. The old plant eventually switched to producing cartridges, and the more famous Luganskteplovoz was founded in 1892 by the German Gustav Hartmann. In Lugansk, a small historical center has been preserved on a slope, a couple of houses from the early 19th century, in one of which Dal lived; the amazing Moscow Hotel of the 1950s, the style of which is closer to Bazhenov’s “false Gothic” and as many as two British tanks from the First World War out of 7 surviving in the world... Which of these will survive the war is a scary guess.

Donetsk

Founded: 1869, John Hughes
Industry: metallurgy (steel)
City since 1917, now 951 thousand inhabitants (before the start of the war)
Region center: Donetsk People's Republic

One of the descendants of Lugansk was originally called Yuzovka, as it was founded by the Welsh manufacturer John Yuz. A generally typical story for Donbass at the end of the 19th century, where factories in huge numbers were founded by foreigners, attracted by the cheapness of the labor of Russian men. The Yuzovsky plant turned out to be extremely successful, producing rails for the rapidly expanding railway network of the Russian Empire, and by the beginning of the twentieth century its village had grown into a rather large city. It was a showcase of Soviet industrialization, more than once recognized in the mid-twentieth century as the most comfortable industrial city in the world, and in post-Soviet times it became one of the poles of political life in Ukraine, for which it now paid with war. But in general, a beautiful city: with the main street of Artyom, lined with pompous Soviet houses, above which several skyscrapers have risen, with the gloomy district of the former Yuzovka behind the railway, near the factory, where the golden dome of the temple is adjacent to rusty blast furnaces, with a memorable symbol - the iron a palm tree that the worker Mertsalov once forged from a single piece of rail. Donetsk has clean streets and heavy air, and waste heaps and mine piles hang over the cozy promenades. At least that's how it was before recent events.

Kemerovo

Founded: 1912, JSC "Kopikuz"
Industry: coal mining
City since 1918, now 546 thousand inhabitants
Regional center: Kemerovo region

Kuzbass, unlike Donbass, is mainly the brainchild of Soviet industrialization - and yet it began under the Tsar, when the joint-stock company "Kopikuz" (that is, "Mines of Kuzbass") arose, and its center became Krasnaya Gorka - the high bank of the Tom River between the villages of Kemerovo and Shcheglovka (closer to the second, so the city formed in 1918 was initially called Shcheglovsk). And in the 1920s, enthusiasts from Holland came there, led by engineer Sebald Rutgers and architect Johan van Loghem, who created the unique appearance of the workers' village. The current center of Kemerovo is behind Tom, where there is a huge coke plant. At the bridge to Krasnaya Gorka you are greeted by a creepy monument to the dead miners by Ernst Neizvestny. And the central estate “Kopikuza”, exactly opposite the coking plant above the slow and Siberian-magnificent river, is now occupied by a museum.