Today tourism is on an upward trend in Murmansk and the surrounding area, though the climate tends to restrict visitors to the summer months, when, thanks to the Arctic location, almost continuous daylight can be enjoyed (the reverse of course is true in winter). With the region's mountains, lakes, and abundant rivers, sport and ecological tourism are the main sectors, offering fishing, hunting, mountaineering, skiing, walking, and mushroom- and berry-gathering. People are also drawn to the region to explore its minera logical deposits, and excursions are available to view the amethyst deposits of the Tersky Coast, among many others.
Volgograd
Volgograd, the administrative centre of the Volgograd region in south-western Russia, lies on the Volga River, It was founded as the fortress of Tsaritsyn in 1589 to protect newly acquired Russian territory along the river.
Like several other cities in the early twentieth century, Tsaritsyn had its name changed for political reasons: during the Russian Civil War (1918-20) Joseph Stalin organized the city's defence in a major battle against the White armies, and in 1925 the city was renamed in his honour. In the Second World War the infamous battle of Stalingrad proved to be a turning point in the war.
The city was totally rebuilt after the war, and new apartment buildings and factories spread far out along the river. The University of Volgograd was opened in 1980, and the modern city has a population of just under 1 million. Its current name was adopted in 1961, after the denunciation of Stalin.
THE BATTLE OF STALINGRAD, 1942-3
From the summer of 1942 to February 2, 1943, the German army made an unsuccessful assault on the city, marking the farthest extent of the German advance into the Soviet Union. As a major industria! centre, Stalingrad was an important prize in itseif, and control of the city would have cut Soviet transport links with southern Russia via the Volga River. The German campaign against Stalingrad also served to anchor the northern flank of the larger German drive into the oilfields of the Caucasus,
Under some of the harshest conditions of the entire war, the German 6th Army under Friedrich Paulus continued its attack until, faced with the stiff resistance of the Soviet 62nd Army under General Vasily I. Chuikov, the onset of the notorious Russian winter, the increasing difficulty of renewing supplies, and the incessant street fighting, it was eventually forced {against Hitler's express command) to surrender. But the losses were immense, on all sides: the Soviets recovered 250,000 German and Romanian corpses in and around Stalingrad, and total Axis losses (Germans, Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians) are believed to have been 800,000 dead. Official Russian military historians estimate that 1,100,000 Soviet soldiers lost their lives in the campaign to defend the city.
The modern city has numerous sites of historical and architectural interest, including the Volgograd Fine Arts Museum and the State Panoramic Museum. The former, founded in 1960, shows primarily work by Russian artists, though it
also houses collections of European art from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The State Panoramic Museum offers a panorama of the battle of Stalingrad, dioramas, and numerous exhibits relating to the battle, including the tunic of Marshal Zhukov - who oversaw the defence of Stalingrad and planned and directed the successful Russian counter- offensive - and the sword of honour presented by King George VI of Britain to the citizens of Stalingrad in 1943. There are also artefacts relating to other areas of the city's military history.
Siberia
Irrevocably linked since the twentieth century with the Soviet Gulag, the name Siberia conjures up grim images of exile, labour camps, and suffering; but today, though the population remains sparse compared with the pattern in the rest of Russia, the land's rich mineral resources - notably its deposits of coal, petroleum, natural gas, diamonds, iron ore, and gold - are a source of wealth and labour, as are the manufacture of steel, aluminium, and machinery, and agriculture is practised in the more southerly regions, where wheat, rye, oats, and even sunflowers are grown.
The name "Siberia" may be derived from the Tatar term for "sleeping land", perhaps an allusion to its unmitigatedly harsh climate. Russian occupation began in 1581 with a Cossack expedition that overthrew the small khanate of Sibir. During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Russian trappers and fur traders and Cossack explorers penetrated throughout Siberia to the Bering Sea. With the decline of the fur trade in the eighteenth century, the mining of silver and other metals became the main economic activity in Siberia. Though a trickle of runaway serfs and the forced exile of a number of criminals and political prisoners added to the population of the region over the years, larger-scale settlement did not begin until the building of the Trans- Siberian Railway (1891-1905).
Growth continued in the Joseph Stalin era. From the first Soviet Five-Year Plan (1928-32), industrial expansion was considerable, with coal-mining and iron-and-steel complexes begun in the Kuznetsk Coal Basin and along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway, partly through the use of forced labour. Forced-labour camps spread throughout Siberia during the 1930s, the most important being the camp complexes in the extreme north-east and along the lower Yenisey River, whose inmates were used mostly in mining operations. During the Second World War, owing to the evacuation of many factories from the western portions of the Soviet Union, Siberia (together with the Urals) became the industrial backbone of the Soviet war effort for a few years. Agriculture, by contrast, suffered greatly from collectivization in 1930-3 and was neglected until the Virgin Lands Campaign of 1954-6, when south-western Siberia (including northern Kazakhstan) was the principal area to be opened to cultivation.
The late 1950s and 1960s saw major industrial development take place, notably the opening up of large oil and natural gas fields in western Siberia and the construction of giant hydroelectric stations at locations along the Angara, Yenisey, and Ob rivers. A network of oil and gas pipelines was built between the new fields and the Urals, and new industries were also established, such as aluminium refining and cellulose pulp making. The construction of the BAM (Baikal-Amur Main
Line) railway between Ust-Kut, on the Lena River, and Komsomolsk-na-Amure, on the Amur, covering a distance of 2,000 miles (3,200 km), was completed in 1980.
The Trans-Siberian Railway
The Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest single rail system in Russia, stretching from Moscow eastwards for 5,778 miles (9,198 km) to Vladivostok, or on to the port station of Nakhodka beyond Vladivostok, a total distance of 5,867 miles (9,441 km). Today a major tourist attraction, the Trans- Siberian played a significant role in the economic, military, and imperial history of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union.
Historically, the completion of the railway marked the turning point in the history of Siberia, opening up vast areas to exploitation, settlement, and industrialization. Construction began in 1891, with the Russians initially securing Chinese permission to build a line directly across Manchuria (the Chinese Eastern Railway) from the Transbaikal region to Vladivostok, However, with the outbreak of the Russo- Japanese War of 1904-5, Russia feared Japan's possible takeover of Manchuria, and so proceeded to build a longer and more difficult alternative route, the Amur Railway, through to Vladivostok; this line was completed in 1916. The original Trans-Siberian Railway thus had two completion dates: in 1904 all the sections from Moscow to Vladivostok were linked and completed, running through Manchuria; in 1916 there was finally a Trans-Siberian Railway wholly within Russian territory.