ASBEST

city, Sverdlovsk oblast (province), west-central Russia. It lies in the eastern foothills of the middle Ural Mountains. Developed from the settlement of Kudelka, founded in 1720 around the first Russian discovery of asbestosfrom which it takes its nameit became a city in 1933. Asbestos production from the Bazhenovo deposit has been carried on since the 1880s. A century later the city was still the largest producer of asbestos in the U.S.S.R., contributing about 70 percent of Soviet output. There is a local factory for the concentration of asbestos, a medical institute, and a mining college. Pop. (1991 est.) 84,900.