Pavlodar

Pavlodar (Павлода́р) is a city in northeastern Kazakhstan, 350km northeast of the country capital Astana, and 350km southeast of Russia's Omsk along the Irtysh River. With a population of 330,000, it is the capital of Pavlodar Oblysy.

History

Pavlodar was founded by Siberian cossacks in 1720 as fort Koryakovskiy, named after the nearby lake where salt was mined. It remained a small cossacks' settlement well into the 19th century, focused on salt-mining, and slowly developing mining of lead, copper and silver. The growing trade finally resulted in 1861 in an upgrade to zashtatnyj (districtless) town Pavlodar, meaning the Gift of Paul, in honor of the newly born Prince Pavel Aleksandrovich.

The town was no royal place. Open to the dry, sandy winds of the steppes, it was little more than a collection of dusty clay huts and warehouses with no paved streets or central plumbing. Even the little character it had suffered the typical country-wide fate: all of the churches and the mosque's minaret were destroyed during the Soviet anti-religion campaign in the 1930s (one unfinished cathedral survived till 1970s).

In 1955, the Virgin Lands Campaign gave start to modern Pavlodar. Mass youth immigration, industrialization and rapid construction created a fully-serviced clean new city, though at a price of being a faceless Soviet template.

Since the fall of communism, Pavlodar has seen some character-defining projects, including ethnic festivals, new parks and fountains, churches, grand mosque, Irtysh embankment. As one of independent Kazakhstan's bigger cities, Pavlodar shares in the energy and mineral-exporting profits the country rakes in. Predominantly Russian-speaking, the city is also watched by the government seeking to control the country under one national idea.

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