Yekaterinburg remained Russia’s fourth most densely populated city in 2006; according to Rosstat (a statistics agency), there were 1,308,000 people living in Yekaterinburg in 2006. Moscow, with its 10,425,000 people, was Russia’s largest city, Saint Petersburg (4,581,000 people) and Novosibirsk (1,397,000 people) became the second and third largest cities, respectively.

As a matter of fact, the number of people living in large Russian cities has gone down since 1989. There were, for example, 1,363,000 people living in Yekaterinburg seventeen years ago, or 4.04% more than today. Fewer people now live in Volgograd, Perm, Chelyabinsk, Rostov-on-Don, Nizhniy Novgorod, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Astrakhan, and many other cities, whereas the population of Moscow went up 20.15% (10,425,000 people vs. 8,677,000 in 1989).