Perm sits on hills alongside the deep waters of the Kama river, which flows south from the northern Urals into, eventually, the Volga. The name comes from the Komi word meaning a hilly, wooded place.

The area first became home to Russian settlers in the middle ages when fur traders and Christian missionaries arrived in what was then the north-east part of the Principality of Novgorod. The fur trade was so lucrative that in 1472 Moscow annexed the region. However it was not until the early eighteenth century, when Peter the Great began to develop the metallurgical deposits of the Urals, that the modern history of Perm really starts.

The town was founded in 1723, and given municipal status in 1781. As the administrative centre of the Perm Gubernia (‘Government’, or province), the city developed rapidly. By the middle of the nineteenth century it had a population of 20,000. This expansion brought cultural facilities, most notably the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre, which opened in 1870. Today the city’s ballet school is the most famous in Russia after the Bolshoi and Maryinsky schools.

In 1916, at the height of the First World War, Perm State University opened. Today there is also a teacher training college in the city, as well as medical, pharmaceutical and agricultural academies, a business school and technical (scientific) university.

In the nineteenth century, the industries established in Peter the Great’s time expanded, and were joined by river-boat construction yards and, inevitably in an area so densely forested, paper and pulp mills. Since then, aviation and chemicals have been added to the mix, alongside defence plants. Perm was one pf the main centres of tank and artillery production during the Second World War. It was a closed city until 1987.

It was because of its munitions factories—smaller though they were then—that Perm became such an important target for both sides in the Russian Civil War. It was in Bolshevik hands in the summer of 1918, when the Grand Duke Michael was murdered there. Michael was Tsar Nicholas’s younger brother, but he had refused to accept the throne after the Tsar’s abdication, in March the previous year. His remains have never been found.

Infrastructure – still room for development KRASNOV TOURIST AGENCY