Ural (region)

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Ural (Russian: Ура́л) is a geographical region around the Ural Mountains, mostly within Russia but also including a part of northwestern Kazakstan. This is a historical, not an official entity, with the boundaries overlapping its western Volga and eastern Siberia neighbor regions. At points in time, parts of the Urals were considered a gateway to Siberia, if not Siberia itself, or were combined with the Volga administrative divisions. At present time, there are two official namesake entities, the Urals Federal District and the Urals economic region. While the latter follows the historical boundaries reasonably well, the former is purely a product of an imposed political will, as the District omits western Urals and includes western Siberia instead.

The historical center of Urals is Cherdyn, nowadays it is the small town in Perm Krai. Perm was an administrative center of the gubernia with the same name by 1797. The most territory of historical and modern Ural was included in Perm gubernia. The administrative center of Ural was moved to Sverdlovsk (nowadays Yekaterinburg) after Revolution and Civil war. Nowadays Urals economic region don't have a administrative and informal capital. Yekaterinburg's mass media sometimes calls Yekaterinburg as the "capital" of the Urals, but nobody knows about that in Chelyabinsk, Perm, Ufa and other cities in the region. Yekaterinburg is administrative center only of the Urals Federal District.

[edit] Current administrative subdivisions and their affiliations

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