History
The fortress of Chelyaba, from which the city takes its name, was constructed on the site in 1736; town status was granted to it in 1781. Around 1900, it served as a center for the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. According to official statistics the population on 1 January 1913 was 45,000 inhabitants.
For several months during the Russian Civil War, Chelyabinsk was held by the White movement and Czechoslovak Legions, becoming a center for splinters of the Romanian Volunteer Corps in Russia. The city later fell to Bolshevik Russian forces.
In the decades after the Finnish Civil War in 1918, some 15,000 "Red" Finns defected into the Soviet Union. About 2000 of them were transferred to Chelyabinsk via railway. In 1938, during the Great Purge, around 1000 of them were executed, largest single action being shooting of 252 Finns in March 10 and 13 in Chelyabinsk. Their mass grave is located near the Zolonyi Gora's former gold mine, and today bears a small memorial.
During the Soviet industrialization of the 1930s, Chelyabinsk experienced rapid growth. Several industrial establishments, including the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant and the Chelyabinsk Metallurgical Plant, were built at this time. 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—still essentially a small city. 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 was essentially built from scratch during this time. A small town existed before this, signs of which can be found in the centre of the city. The S.M. Kirov Factory no. 185 moved here from Leningrad to produce heavy tanks — it was transferred to Omsk after 1962.
Chelyabinsk has had a long association (since the 1940s) 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 other than a British medical team following a two train rail explosion in the mid 1980s.
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