Samara wore the name Kuybyshev for most of the Soviet century
Samara, Russia, anchors Samara Oblast where the Volga meets the Samara River, with over 1.14 million residents (up to about 1.22 million in wider counts). Closed in Soviet years, it reopened as a continental-climate industrial and cultural hub that hosted a 2007 EU–Russia summit.
The area had visitors long before the town. Ahmad ibn Fadlan passed through around 921 on his way to the Volga Bulgars, and a Volga port called Samara shows up on fourteenth-century Italian maps. Until 1586 the Samara Bend was a pirates' lair: lookouts spotted boats and dashed across the peninsula so raiders could ambush them downstream. Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich then ordered a fortress at the meeting of the Volga and Samara rivers to guard Russia's eastern frontier against nomads. It was built of wood with eleven towers, a rampart and a moat on 5.2 hectares, and a customs post followed in 1600.
Trade made it a meeting point between Russia and the East. The town opened its gates to the rebels Stepan Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev with ceremonial bread and salt, and Peter the Great visited. It became a district town in 1780 and on 1 January 1851 the seat of its own province, then home to around 20,000 people.
During the Second World War it was the Soviet Union's reserve capital. In October 1941 the party, government ministries, foreign embassies and major cultural institutions were evacuated there, and a bunker was dug for Stalin that he never used; a parade on 7 November 1941 marked the city's role, which ended in the summer of 1943. Factories poured out aircraft, guns and ammunition, and Polish and Czechoslovak units were raised in the region.
Postwar defence work turned it into a closed city. The Progress Plant built the Vostok rocket that carried the first crewed spacecraft into orbit, and Yuri Gagarin rested there after his flight on 12 April 1961. Oil and petrochemical firms now drive the economy, and the Samara Arena staged matches at the 2018 World Cup.
Source: Samara
