ABSTRACT
ORIGINS, HISTORY, AND SCOPE NOVOSIBIRSK WAS FOUNDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE CONSTRUCTION of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 1893 by Tsar Nicholas II and initially named after him as Novo-Nikolayevsk. The young city was expected to become the administrative center of Siberia, and so it outgrew the older Western-Siberian cities of Tomsk, Tobolsk, and Omsk. Indeed, a rivalry developed between Tomsk and Novosibirsk for the unofficial title of the western Siberian capital. Tomsk in the 19th century was described as the “Siberian Athens” since it had a university established in 1878, it was a center of a dynamic economy with extensive trade, and from 1804 it was the capital of Tomsk gubernia (province) that embraced the territories of four contemporary regions in Western Siberia (Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Kemerovo oblasts, and Altay kray) as well as parts of eastern Kazakhstan and Eastern Siberia (Krasnoyarsk kray). However, the Trans-Siberian Railway was built to run through the newly-founded Novo-Nikolayevsk (a.k.a. Novosibirsk since 1926), so it passed much below the marshy soils of Tomsk. The favorable geographic location of Novosibirsk as a transportation hub played a significant role in the rapid economic and financial ascendance of the new Siberian city in the 19th century. It also preconditioned the prominence of Novosibirsk as the Siberian financial capital during the late 1980-early 1990s of decentralization in the contemporary Russia despite the fact that Novosibirsk similar to Tomsk lacked the rich natural resources of her neighbors-the oil and gas rich Tyumen’ oblast and coal-and nonferrous-metal rich Kemerovo oblast (Kuzbass).
