Chelyabinsk

Chelyabinsk is the administrative center and largest city of Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, the seventh-largest city in the country with a population of over 1.1 million, and the second-largest in the Ural Federal District after Yekaterinburg. Founded as a Russian fortress in the eighteenth century, Chelyabinsk became a major center of heavy industry and metallurgy through the Soviet era and drew brief worldwide attention in 2013 when a large meteor exploded in the sky above the city.