The city of Yekaterinburg isn't on the map. In the Soviet Union, there was the closed industrial giant of Sverdlovsk; in Russia, it transformed into the high-tech metropolis of Yekaterinburg, and Yekaterinburg is an intermediate stage between the Soviet and Russian formations.

Alexei Ivanov's new book, 'Yekaterinburg,' features one hundred short stories about Yekaterinburg at the turning point of history: stories about real people who didn't give in to circumstances and stubbornly built the future. The era of change gave birth to heroes and titans, many of whom the entire country knew by name. Yekaterinburg never 'dropped out of history,' always made its own decisions, and therefore provided its own vivid answers to all the burning questions of the era. And this happened during the time of Yekaterinburg.