The Urals

The seam between Europe and Asia, and the country's forge. The Urals are old, low mountains - little higher than the Appalachians - but extraordinarily rich in iron, copper, gold, platinum and later bauxite and potash, and their exploitation is essentially a single project begun by Peter the Great. From 1700 he pushed ironworks into the range, and the Demidov family built a metallurgical complex that by the mid-eighteenth century made Russia the largest iron producer in the world and supplied much of Britain's imports. The works ran on ascribed serf labour rather than free wage labour, which made them cheap at first and left them technologically stranded by the nineteenth century, when Britain moved to coke and Russia did not. The region's second transformation was strategic. Its distance from every frontier made it the natural redoubt, and in 1941 and 1942 the Soviet Union evacuated well over a thousand factories east into the Urals and western Siberia, rebuilding an armaments industry behind the mountains while the front collapsed. Tank production at Chelyabinsk and Nizhny Tagil came out of that move. The same logic put the nuclear programme there, along with a string of closed cities that did not appear on maps, and the 1957 Kyshtym explosion, one of the worst nuclear accidents ever recorded, which the state concealed for thirty years. Yekaterinburg, where the Romanovs were shot in 1918, is the region's capital. The range runs some fifteen hundred miles from the Arctic to Kazakhstan. Magnitogorsk was built from nothing in the 1930s on an American design. Perm and Yekaterinburg are the largest cities. The Kyshtym site remains one of the most contaminated places on earth.

• Existed: 1700 CE – present
• Type: Entity