Nizhny Novgorod
Founded in 1221 on the banks of the Volga and Oka rivers, Nizhny Novgorod stood as a strong military outpost on the Russian frontier.
In the 1980s, Andrei Sakharov, “father of the H-bomb” and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was exiled to Nizhny Novgorod. The city has a rich cultural history and is home to around 1.5 million people, several dozens of colleges and universities, an art gallery, a planetarium, several theaters, a wealth of museums, a circus, and more than 80 libraries.
There are two usual ways for a foreign visitor to arrive to the region - to the Strigino airport, which is a 40-50 minute drive from the downtown of Nizhny Novgorod, and to the central railway station Moskovsky Vokzal, which is a 10-15 minute drive from downtown. The downtown area is only a few square miles, which, mainly, coincides with the historical center of the city, now actively stuffed with administrative and public buildings, head offices of banks and major regional companies, shopping and business centers, hotels, theaters, cinema-halls, restaurants, casinos, night-clubs, located next to the old historical monuments. In a city geographical map, which one can buy at news-stalls, the downtown area has a shape of an irregular triangular, framed by the Minin street, the Belinskogo and Ilynskaya streets, topped by the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, which is a good orientation point in the upper part of Nizhny Novgorod. Kremlin sites offer a nice view at the confluence of the Volga and Oka rivers, and the lower part of the city, which is home for more than a hundred of large industrial enterprises, the city airport, the central railway station, the exhibition center Nizhegorodskaya Yarmarka (Nizhny Novgorod Trade Fair), and a dozen of dormitory areas.
The following organizations and government bodies can be helpful in providing information on the region business and political environment to international business travelers:
Committee for International, External Economic and Regional Relations of Nizhny Novgorod
Ministry for International Affairs, Representative Office in Nizhny Novgorod
Department for Foreign Economic and Interregional Relations, Nizhny Novgorod City Administration
Ministry of Economy, Nizhny Novgorod Region
Ministry of Investment Policy of Nizhny Novgorod Region
