A version has emerged as to why there is only one metro line in Yekaterinburg.

      A version has emerged explaining why Yekaterinburg has only one metro line

      May 17, 2026 Yekaterinburg is known as a city where, for decades, a second metro line has been built only in words. The publication "Ъ-Ural" offers its assumption as to why this is happening in a large article dedicated to the history of the Yekaterinburg subway.

      The decision to allocate funds for the design and construction of the metro in Sverdlovsk was made by the State Planning Committee of the USSR in 1974, reports "Ъ-Ural". This was preceded by a trip to Moscow by Boris Yeltsin, the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional committee.

      Later, Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs that he personally dictated the text of the resolution to Leonid Brezhnev—due to the general secretary's busy schedule and his acute desire to leave for his dacha as soon as possible. "He wrote what I told him and signed it," recalled the first president of Russia.

      Construction of the Sverdlovsk metro began in 1980. It became the 13th in the USSR, notes "Ъ-Ural".

      The metro in Yekaterinburg faced numerous difficulties—from uneven soil to a lack of funds, which led to debts to the metro builders and, consequently, their dissatisfaction.

      One of the metro builders, suffering from chronic financial hardship, committed suicide in 1999 after a rally outside the regional authorities' building. "Metro builders had not received their salaries for about a year," states a news report from that period on the "First Channel" website.

      "The main work coincided with a period of political and economic upheaval in the country. Perhaps the history of constructing the first metro line, which brought so many losses and problems, slightly frightens the regional authorities," suggested "Ъ-Ural".

      Recall that in the summer of 2019, Yekaterinburg journalists were taken on a press tour to the future stations of the second metro line. The press was shown the area where the future escalator for transferring to the second line at the "1905 Square" station would be located. Later, in 2020, the head of the administration's landscaping committee, Tamara Blagodatkova, informed the deputies that due to the construction of the metro, the Lenin monument would have to be removed from the square.