Here I present an album of photographs of the city of Chita in Eastern Siberia, some 900 kilometres East of Irkutsk. The city is located at the confluence of the Chita and Ingoda Rivers and gained prominence once it was connected to the Trans-Siberian Railway. The city was founded in 1653 by Pyotr Beketov's Cossacks.
After 1825, several of the Decembrists suffered exile to Chita; thus, Chita is on occasion called the "City of Exiles". Many of the Decembrists were intellectuals and members of the middle class, and consequently their arrival had a positive effect.
Chita was occupied by the Japanese between 1918 and 1920. From 1920 to 1922, Chita served as the capital of the Far Eastern Republic. From the 1930s to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Chita was a closed city. During this period, foreigners were prohibited from traveling to Chita, as were many Russians. I visited her in the late 1990's
