Current Time in Bratsk, Russia

Bratsk stands in the Irkutsk Region of eastern Siberia, on the Angara River some six hundred kilometres north of Irkutsk and Lake Baikal. It is not a compact city but a chain of districts scattered around the vast reservoir created by its dam, separated by stretches of taiga and linked by long roads across the water. Winters are severe, with temperatures that regularly fall well below minus thirty degrees, while the short summers can be surprisingly warm.

About two hundred and twenty thousand people live there, making it one of the largest cities in the region. Bratsk owes its size and its reputation to industry on an enormous scale. The Bratsk hydroelectric station was among the most powerful in the world when it was completed, and the aluminium smelter it feeds has for years ranked among the biggest single producers of aluminium anywhere. Timber, pulp and paper and wood processing form the other pillar of the local economy, drawing on the seemingly endless forests that surround the city.

The name goes back to 1631, when Cossacks built a wooden stockade called Bratsky Ostrog near the confluence of the Oka and Angara rivers to collect fur tribute. For three centuries it remained a remote frontier outpost and at times a place of exile. Everything changed in the 1950s, when the Soviet government chose the Padun rapids as the site of a giant dam. Tens of thousands of workers and volunteers arrived, a new city was laid out in 1955, and the old settlement together with dozens of villages disappeared beneath the rising water, known locally as the Bratsk Sea. The project became a symbol of Soviet ambition and inspired the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who grew up in the region, to write his long poem Bratsk Station.

The dam itself remains the principal sight, a concrete wall more than a kilometre long carrying both a road and a railway across the Angara. The Angara Village open-air museum preserves log houses, an Evenki camp and the surviving watchtower of the seventeenth-century fort, moved to safety before the flooding. The city museum documents the construction years in photographs and personal belongings, and the reservoir, with its islands, bays and fishing, is the focus of summer recreation, while forest trails and ski slopes serve the long winter.

Bratsk is a junction on the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway, has an airport with flights to Moscow and Siberian cities, and is connected by highway to Irkutsk and Ust-Ilimsk. Branches of Irkutsk universities and a large technical institute train engineers, chemists and foresters for the local plants. The population is unusually mixed, drawn from across the former Soviet Union by the construction boom, and the city keeps the youthful, planned character of a place built almost entirely within living memory.

Bratsk is important as a powerhouse of Siberian energy and heavy industry, and as a monument to one of the largest engineering projects of the twentieth century.