History
Yekaterinburg, formerly called Sverdlovsk, was always known as the informal capital of the Urals, a natural divide between Europe and Asia, between Siberia and the European Russia. The city grew very rapidly because it was an important industrial centre and a transport hub. Plans for a rapid-transit system began in the late 1970s, and in 1980 construction began.
The city's uneven landscape, as well as its layout with a very dense city centre, prompted to combine deep and shallow stations. On 26 April 1991, the sixth Metro of Russia and the thirteenth and last Metro of the Soviet Union, which had ceased to exist only a few months later, was finally opened to the public. However, the economic crisis of the early 1990s rocked the Metro very hard and the first stage encompassed only three stations. However, then Russian president Boris Yeltsin diverted funds to complete its construction and by 1995 the Metro was doubled in length. Since then, only two extensions have been built.
Read more about this topic: Yekaterinburg Metro
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)