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Main
towns
Saint
Petersburg is situated on
the Baltic Sea on the estuary of the River Neva. It
is the country's main port. It was built in 1703 by
Peter the Great on a site full of forests and
marshes, who made it his capital. There are still
620 bridges which cross the numerous canals and
water ways which run through the town.
During the Second World War it resisted a siege for
900 days, during which 10,000 buildings were
destroyed. The biggest museum in the world, the
Hermitage Palace is in Saint Petersburg. It is also
a large industrial town and port, where
ice-breakers are needed in the winter.
Saint Petersburg with its 4.8 million inhabitants,
is the capital of the north and the second biggest
consumer centre after Moscow. About a hundred
French companies are installed there, particularly
in the service, import-export, transport and
restaurant sectors.To visit : walking and shopping
on the Perspective Nevski and along the Fontaka,
the St Isaac Cathedral, the Peter and Paul Fort ,
the History Museum, the Hermitage Museum, the
Russian Museum, the Cathedral of the Trinity, the
Smolny monastery. And in the region : Novgorod,
Pavlovsk, Pouchkine.
Nizhny
Novgorod (Gorky),
(pop. 1.4 million) built near the lake where the
Oka and the Volga rivers meet. It is a major car
manufacturing centre, as well as a paper mill
centre (Pravdinsk), producing the paper for one of
the leading newspapers in the country, the
'Pravda'.
Novosibirsk
(pop. 1.4 million), the biggest town in Siberia. It
was first built in 1893. Since 1959 it is home to
the 'Town of Science', an enormous ensemble for
research and scientific studies.
Yekaterinburg
(Sverdlovsk)
is a center of metallurgy, mechanics and mining
which is situated in the Urals.
Kazan,
the ancient capital of the Tatars, which is
periodically flooded by the Volga. There is big a
watch factory there.
Arkangelsk
(pop. 420,000) situated
on the White Sea, is a centre for exporting
timber.
Vladivostok
(pop. 645,000), a town on the Pacific coast, is
rapidly developing. There is a lot of foreign
investment there and it has opened its own stock
exchange.
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