Niazpetrovsk (Chelyabinsk region). 10 thousand inhabitants. "Big cities". A joint project with the Center for the Study of Small Cities (Ivanovo region). Located on the border with Bashkortostan and the Sverdlovsk Region, in the valley of the Upa River at the confluence of the Nyazi River, 225 km northwest of Chelyabinsk.
The name Nyazpetrovsk combines the hydronyms Niazya (a Bashkir word for "fir river") and the name of the founder Peter Osokin.
In the southern Urals in the early 1830s, due to the resistance of the Bashkir population, the government construction failed. According to the decrees of 1736 and 1739, the private industrialists were allowed to buy and rent land from the Bashkirs. The merchant from Balchana Piotr Osokin took advantage of this and established an iron factory and a foundry in the 1940s. In January 1774, the craftsmen of the Niazpetrovsk factory went over to Pugachev's rebellion. However, the workers refused to participate in the destruction of the factory floors. In the summer of 1774, the factory burned down, and the blast furnace was restored and restarted only in 1776.
In the War of 1812, many military orders were assigned to private factories that were not involved in the production of weapons. In the factories of Lev Rastogov, the owner of the factory at that time, they began to produce types of metal suitable for the production of ammunition and weapons, and created new machines for processing artillery shells. Thanks to the patronage of Restorgiev, a non-popoist former Old Believer, who married his daughters to the Old Believers Alexander Zotov and Pyotr Kharitonov, one of the main centers of the Old Believers was created in the Urals at the Kaslinsky and Niazpatrovsky factories. Nicholas I saw the Old Believers as a threat to power, and Zatov and Kharitonov were in Finnish Kexholm in 1837. The plants were transferred to the state administration and then to the Kishtim Mining Plant Association. In 1916, the Western Ural Railway was opened.