Today's #SWEMEX match is being held at Yekaterinburg, a place with a fascinating role in Russian history, as a quick internet rabbit hole exploration informs me. The city is named after Catherine 1, the first empress of Russia, who incidentally had an astonishing life herself.
Her parents die from the plague. She's adopted by a Lutheran pastor. As she grows up, the pastor's wife fears that her beauty might be too alluring for her son, so she gets her married off to a Swedish soldier stationed in town. And then the Russians invade town & kidnap her
And the chap who kidnaps her is attracted to her, and his close friend turns out to be...Peter the Great, and guess what, he is attracted to her too, so much so that he divorces his wife & secretly marries her. And they have 12 children, of which only 2 survive to adulthood
During a siege by the Ottomans, legend has it that she managed to convince the Ottoman vizier to let Peter retreat using her beauty, but hey, history has this ugly tendency to never credit women's intelligence, always settling for the seductress trope, so keep that in mind
She became empress after Peter's death, and set the precedent for a situation where, for most of the 18th century, Russia had women emperors, of which the most famous was Catherine II (The Great)
Yekaterinburg was also the place where the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas & his family were exiled and when the White army (the faction opposed to the um...Red Army) was closing in, the Bolsheviks executed the entire family on the direct orders of Lenin & one Yakov Sverdlov...
& guess what, the Soviet Union renamed the city of Yekaterinburg to...Sverdlovsk, & it stays that till 1991, when there is a coup against Boris Yeltsin. He then picks his home town, Sverdlovsk, as a temp capital & once the USSR collapses, the city goes back to being Yekaterinburg
And if all of that "being at the center of Russian history" wasn't enough, in 1979, there was an Anthrax leak from a Soviet military research facility in that city and it is estimated that more than 100 people died. The accident is apparently called the "Biological Chernobyl"
