Category: The Urals

From the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918 to the high-profile Mafia killings in the 1990s, Yekaterinburg is notorious for its bloody history. Contemporary Yekaterinburg remembers these events, attracting pilgrims and tourists alike to the sites associated with the Romanov deaths.

Ufa is capital of the self-consciously autonomous Bashkortostan Republic. Although the Muslim, Turkic Bashkir people now make up barely one-third of Bashkortostan’s population of four million, you will hear their lispy language spoken widely in rural areas and on many city radio programmes, along with their curious style of singing. Written Bashkir requires nine extra Cyrillic letters that are absent from standard Russian. ‘Hello’ in Bashkir is hau-ma; ‘thank you very much’ is zur rakhmat.

The Ural Mountains – the celebrated division between Europe and Asia – stretch 2000km from the arctic Kara Sea in the north to Kazakhstan in the south.

Descriptions of Taganay as the ‘Russian Switzerland’ are – again – a bit exaggerated, but the park’s forested mountains and rocky protrusions are nonetheless splendid. The most convenient starting point for walking in Taganay is the steel town Zlatoust. If you need to stay in town, the lakeside Hotel Taganay(3513-651 225; pr 30 let Pobedy 7; r R700-900; ) is accessible by bus 14.

Dominated by heavily trafficked avenues and concrete blocks, Perm is a modern, industrial city that most travellers could bear to miss. Its chequered history, however, draws them in to bear witness to the combined thousands of years that were lost by prisoners at the notorious labour camp Perm-36. and to discover what has become of the once-secret city of Molotov (named during the Soviet period for the foreign minister who was also the namesake of the explosive cocktail).

Like Frankenstein’s monster, memorable Magnitogorsk is a city brought back from the dead, with pr Lenina as its reanimated Stalinist spine. Across the Ural River, the steel mills of the Ordzhonikidze district are magnificently ugly, with snarling, densely packed gangs of chimneys belching dense curtains of smoke in fearfully multifarious colours. This is most photogenically viewed from Park Pobedy, behind the gigantic, 83-tonne, square-jawed colossus of the Tyl Frontu memorial. Over 15m tall, this pair of Soviet archetypes hold aloft an enormous sword, symbolic of the city’s industrial support for the WWII patriotic effort.

Chelyabinsk, 200km south of Yekaterinburg, is another city of contrasts – a sprawling industrial town set amid the gentle hills and inviting lakes of the Urals.

In an attractive spot in the wooded mountains between Magnitogorsk and Beloretsk, this quaint village is best known for the Abzakovo Resort(3519-259 300; www.abzakovo.ru in Russian), where President Vladimir Putin comes to ski. (You can thank him for the wide new road from Magnitogorsk.)