Zmeinogorsk

Zmeinogorsk grew around a rich silver mine in the wooded foothills of the Altai. The settlement and its fortress formed a centre of the Kolyvan mining district, whose ores supplied the Russian treasury. Mines, workshops and reservoirs transformed the hills around Snake Mountain into a landscape shaped by the extraction and processing of metal.

Silver-bearing ore was worked here from the 1740s, and a fortress built in 1744 sheltered the permanent settlement that followed. In the second half of the century the engineer Kozma Frolov developed a system of ponds and channels to power machinery for lifting ore and draining the mines. The richest deposits were being exhausted by the end of the eighteenth century, as other Altai mines assumed greater importance. Zmeinogorsk nevertheless remained a striking example of the scale and ingenuity of Russian mining in Siberia.