This page was created by Christopher Matthew Jarmas. 

Imperiia: a spatial history of the Russian Empire

Construction of the Samara-Ufa Railway and Industrialization: 1888-1900

Connecting Ufa directly to Moscow via railway did not occur until 1888, when the Samara-Ufa railway was completed. The region was, in fact, a difficult environment for construction. The soil was rocky and building materials had to be brought from far afield. Worse yet, the region was sparsely populated and workers needed to be brought from other parts of the empire. In 1890, the rail line was extended across the Urals into Siberia (Steinwedel, p. 152). This sparked massive growth in the region. Ufa's population reached 49,275 in 1897, nearly doubling its population from a decade before (Steinwedel, p. 152). Industry boomed thereafter. The number of factories employing more than sixteen workers almost doubled in the 1890s and while other cities, such as Kazan, surpassed Ufa economically, it had nonetheless "taken on the trappings of a city, with improved roads, some electricity (1898), a water system (1901), and labor conflicts" (Steinwedel, p. 152). Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii's 1910 photograph, below, shows the city at approximately this stage in its urbanization, with the railroad bridge in the background:

Source: Library of Congress


Source: Library of Congress
 

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