Until 1870, there was nothing here except for the nearby village of Alexandrovskaya. This was windblown steppe and sparsely populated as a result of three centuries of Tatar slave raiding. The region was taken by Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century and became part of her dominion of New Russia, or Novorossiya. Not much happened here on the steppe until Russia lost the Crimean War in 1856 and its leaders realized they needed to modernize, industrialize and build railways to connect the expanding but disparate parts of the empire. What happened next was perhaps serendipity. Two
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