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Novosibirsk - Culture |
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In 1943, the Academy of Sciences opened up its Siberian branch in Novosibirsk, which signalled the beginning of the city's transformation into the educational hub of Siberian Russia. While many research institutes are located within Novosibirsk itself, still many more are clustered in Academgorodok, a small city founded in the 1950's by the Academy, 30 km south of Novosibirsk. At its height, Academgorodok was home to 65,000 scientists and their families, and was a priviliged area to live in, with well-stocked stores and dachas for the academic elite. Gorbachev's perestroika was initially conceived here, by economists who where then relocated to Moscow to author the economic revolution. In recent years, Academgorodok has fallen on hard times thanks to slashes in government funding, and many of the younger researchers who once populated the town have left.
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Novosibirsk is the third-largest city in Russia (the biggest city east of the Urals), has the biggest railway station along the trans-Siberian route, the biggest library in Siberia, and the biggest opera/ballet theater in all of Russia, even bigger than Moscow's Bolshoy. The red-brick Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky, while not the biggest, is considered one of the finest existing examples of pure Russian Orthodox architecture.
The Novosibirsk Philharmonic Orchestra is well-known outside Siberia and Russia. When the orchestra toured West Germany in 1989 one of the papers wrote: "In distant Siberia, with its snow-covered plains and wild animals, there is a symphony orchestra which is in the same class as orchestras of Moscow and Leningrad and which can compete with many orchestras of Europe". The Novosibirsk Philharmonic is among the best orchestras of Russia and not only, according to foreign critics, and it has come to represent the culture of Siberia. (1990
