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This paper reconstructs Ekaterinburg’s economic landscape in 1914. The research is based on the 1910 city map and quantitative data from the 1914 city phonebook and relies on the space syntax method. During the study, the authors created a database including 390 local companies’ phone numbers before World War I classified in accordance with the Fisher-Clark economic sector model (primary sector — extraction of raw materials, secondary — manufacturing, tertiary — service industries, quaternary — finances and information services, quinary sector — administration, education, medicine, sciences, etc.). The research demonstrates that there were just a couple of primary sector businesses in Ekaterinburg in the early twentieth century. Most secondary sector plants and factories had been moved outside of the city, while the others were evenly distributed following the environmental regulations and proximity to labour force. Tertiary sector firms dominated in the western part of the city and formed a commercial district around Market Square. The quaternary sector companies had almost the same location, spreading further to the northwest. Quinary sector organisations were dispersed all over the city with a notable concentration in the center and north-western part. The reconstruction of the Ekaterinburg economic landscape reveals that its centre occupied the area around the dam that locked the Iset River running through the city and spread towards the west and north-west part in the early twentieth century forming the city’s future business district.

This article focuses on the decline of the Russian Orthodox Church landscape during the period 1917-1941 in one of the key Russian provincial cities — Ekaterinburg (named Sverdlovsk in 1924). It was during this period that the Soviet state carried out the most comprehensive attacks on religion, closing churches, destroying religious organizations and their buildings as well as persecuting religious leaders. We use the “religious landscape” concept to analyze the evolution of the religious situation in the city. However, we studied not only the main markers of religion in Ekaterinburg, but also the number of parishioners and the frequency of everyday religious rites. The study is based on documents extracted from the local archives and statistical aggregates. This allowed us to reconstruct the decline of the Orthodox landscape and its main features in three different periods between 1917 and 1941. We argue that the Bolsheviks’ anti-religious measures in the 1920s should be considered as part of the general European secularization, which started before 1917. The data obtained give grounds to put forward a hypothesis about the weak effect of the Bolsheviks’ measures regarding the Orthodox Church nucleus — its active parishioners, for about 25% of the city’s population kept practicing the main religious rites until the mid-1930s.

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