page_title: Tyumen
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Tyumen / History
context_page_description: Tyumen is the largest city and the administrative center of Tyumen Oblast, Russia, located on the Tura River 2,143 kilometers east of Moscow.
  Tyumen was the first Russian settlement in Siberia. Founded in 1586 to support Russia's eastward expansion, the city has remained one of the most important industrial and economic centers east of the Ural Mountains. Located at the junction of several important trade routes and with easy access to navigable waterways, Tyumen rapidly developed from a small military settlement to a large commercial and industrial city. The central part of Old Tyumen retains many historic buildings from throughout the city's history.
  Today Tyumen is an important business center. It is the transport hub and industrial center of Tyumen Oblast — an oil-rich region bordering Kazakhstan — as well as the home of many companies active in Russia's oil and gas industry.
context_section_description: The Cossack ataman Yermak Timofeyevich annexed the Tyumen area, originally part of the Siberia Khanate, to the Tsardom of Russia in 1585. Both capitals of the Siberia Khanate, Sibir/Qashliq and Tyumen/Chimgi-Tura (the capital in the 15th century), were completely destroyed. Sibir was never rebuilt, though it gave its name to all concurrent and future lands in North Asia annexed by Russia, but Tyumen was later founded again. On July 29, 1586, Tsar Feodor I ordered two regional commanders, Vasily Borisov-Sukin and Ivan Myasnoy, to construct a fortress on the site of the former Siberian Tatar town of Chingi-Tura ("city of Chingis"), also known as Tyumen, from the Turkish and Mongol word for "ten thousand" – tumen.
  Tyumen stood on the "Tyumen Portage", part of the historical trade route between Central Asia and the Volga region. Various South Siberian nomads had continuously contested control of the portage in the preceding centuries. As a result, Siberian Tatar and Kalmyk raiders often attacked early Russian settlers. The military situation meant that streltsy and Cossack garrisons stationed in the town predominated in the population of Tyumen until the mid-17th century. As the area became less restive, the town began to take on a less military character.
  By the beginning of the 18th century Tyumen had developed into an important center of trade between Siberia and China in the east and Central Russia in the west. Tyumen had also become an important industrial center, known for leatherworkers, blacksmiths, and other craftsmen. In 1763, 7,000 people were recorded as living in the town.
  In the 19th century the town's development continued. In 1836, the first steam boat in Siberia was built in Tyumen. In 1862, the telegraph came to the town, and in 1864 the first water mains were laid. Further prosperity came to Tyumen after the construction, in 1885, of the Trans-Siberian Railway. For some years, Tyumen was Russia's easternmost railhead, and the site of transhipment of cargoes between the railway and the cargo boats plying the Tura, Tobol, Irtysh, and Ob Rivers.
  By the end of the 19th century Tyumen's population exceeded 30,000, surpassing that of its northern rival Tobolsk, and beginning a process whereby Tyumen gradually eclipsed the former regional capital. The growth of Tyumen culminated on August 14, 1944 when the city finally became the administrative center of the extensive Tyumen Oblast.
  At the outbreak of the Russian Civil War in 1917, forces loyal to Admiral Alexander Kolchak and his Siberian White Army controlled Tyumen. However, the city fell to the Red Army on January 5, 1918.
  During the 1930s, Tyumen became a major industrial center of the Soviet Union. By the onset of World War II, the city had several well-established industries, including shipbuilding, furniture manufacture, and the manufacture of fur and leather goods.
  World War II saw rapid growth and development in the city. In the winter of 1941, twenty-two major industrial enterprises evacuated to Tyumen from the European part of the Soviet Union. These enterprises went into operation the following spring. Additionally, war-time Tyumen became a "hospital city", where thousands of wounded soldiers were treated.
  During Operation Barbarossa, when it seemed possible that Moscow would fall to the advancing German Army, Tyumen also became a refuge for the body of the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin's body was secretly moved from Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow (October 1941) to a hidden tomb located in what is now the Tyumen State Agriculture Academy (former Tyumen Agriculture Institute).
  Between 1941 and 1945 more than 20,000 Tyumen natives saw action at the front. Almost a third, about 6,000, perished in action (the exact number remains uncertain as official data includes non-local soldiers who died in Tyumen's hospitals).
  The town was affected by the discovery of rich oil- and gas-fields in the Tyumen Oblast in the 1960s.  While most of these lay hundreds of kilometers away, near the towns of Surgut and Nizhnevartovsk, Tyumen was the nearest railway junctio
caption: Monument to deceased graduates of Tyumen schools
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