Chelyabinsk, city and administrative centre, Chelyabinsk oblast (province), west-central Russia. It lies on the eastern flank of the Ural Mountains and on the Miass River.
Chelyabinsk was founded as a fortress in 1736 on the site of a Bashkir village; it became a town in 1787. First a local centre of an agricultural region, it began to grow with the coming of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 1894–96. Thereafter growth was continuous; it was greatly stimulated by the eastward evacuation of industry in World War II. Today Chelyabinsk is the major focus of the southern half of the Urals industrial region, well served by rail connections to other industrial cities.
One of the most important industrial centres of Russia, it has large ironworks and steelworks, a zinc refinery, a ferroalloys plant, chemical industries, and a wide range of heavy- and medium-engineering industries, producing steel pipes and pressings, bulldozers, scrapers, tractors, industrial machinery, and machine tools. The first natural gas from Urengoy, the largest Siberian gas field in operation, reached Chelyabinsk in 1979. Chelyabinsk has a university and a large polytechnic institute as well as medical, teacher-training, and agricultural-mechanization institutes and many scientific-research institutes. There are also an opera, ballet, and other theatres and a philharmonic hall. Pop. (2006 est.) 1,092,958.