ABSTRACT
Chelyabinsk Oblast is situated in the Southern Urals, with much of the region lying on the eastern slopes of the Southern Ural Mountains. It forms part of the Urals Federal Okrug and the Urals Economic Area. Orenburg Oblast lies to the south, the Republic of Bashkortostan to the west, Sverdlovsk Oblast to the north and Kurgan Oblast to the east, and there is an international border with Kazakhstan in the southeast. The major rivers in the Oblast are the Ural and the Miass and there are over 1,000 lakes, the largest of which are the Uvildy and the Turgoyak. The Oblast covers an area of 88,529 sq km (34,181 sq miles). At the census of October 2010 it had a population of 3,476,217 and a population density of 39.3 per sq km. Some 82.0% of the population lived in urban areas. Of those resident in the Oblast who stated their ethnicity at the census, 83.8% were Russian, 5.4% were Tatar, 4.8% Bashkir, 1.5% Ukrainian and 1.0% Kazakh. The administrative centre, Chelyabinsk, had a population of 1,130,273. Other major cities are Magnitogorsk (408,401), Zlatoust (174,985), Miass (151,812) and Kopeisk (137,604). Chelyabinsk Oblast is in the time zone GMT+6.
