A Trans-Siberian bridge camp became Russia’s third city
Novosibirsk, Siberia’s largest city and third in Russia after Moscow and St. Petersburg, held 1,633,595 people in the 2021 census. Founded in 1893 at the Ob River crossing of the future Trans-Siberian Railway, it was Novonikolayevsk for Emperor Nicholas II before rapid growth.
Novosibirsk lies on the Ob River in southwestern Siberia and is the capital of both its oblast and the Siberian Federal District. The 2021 census counted 1,633,595 residents, placing it behind only Moscow and Saint Petersburg in Russia. No city in North Asia is bigger, and among Russian cities that are not federal subjects in their own right, none has more people.
The Russian town began on 30 April 1893 on the right bank of the Ob, near land long used by Chat Tatars, at the spot chosen for the Trans-Siberian Railway's river crossing. It replaced the village of Bolshoye Krivoshchyokovo, founded in 1696 on the opposite bank and moved to make way for the bridge. From 1895 the settlement was called Novonikolayevsk, honouring both Saint Nicholas and Tsar Nicholas II. When the bridge opened in spring 1897 the town had 7,800 people; it became a regional transport hub, and the Turkestan-Siberia Railway later linked it directly to Central Asia and the Caspian.
Growth was explosive. The first bank opened in 1906, and in 1907, with over 47,000 inhabitants, the town gained full self-government. Before the revolution it reached about 80,000 people and had food-processing plants, a power station, an iron foundry, shipping firms, seven Orthodox churches and forty primary schools. The Civil War of 1917 to 1923 reversed this: typhus and cholera killed thousands, the Ob bridge was destroyed, and population fell for the first time. Soviets seized power in December 1917, the Czechoslovak Legion and White forces captured the city on 26 May 1918, and the Red Army retook it in 1919.
Renamed Novosibirsk in 1926, the city became one of Siberia's biggest industrial centres under Stalin and absorbed factories evacuated from western Russia in the Second World War. Sights range from the neo-Byzantine cathedral dedicated to Alexander Nevsky to the city's opera and ballet house and its zoo, and Tolmachevo is the busiest airport in Siberia.
Source: Novosibirsk
