SEMEY

formerly called Semipalatinsk, city, eastern Kazakstan. It is a port on the Irtysh (Ertis) River where the latter emerges into the West Siberian Plain. It was founded as a Russian fort in 1718, 11 miles (18 km) downstream from the present site, near the ruins of a Buddhist monastery consisting of seven buildings, from which it got the name Semipalatinsk, meaning seven-halled. It was moved to its present site in 1778 to escape regular flooding in the spring. Semipalatinsk lay at the junction of caravan trails from Mongolia to Russia and from Siberia to Central Asia, and before the 1917 Revolution more than 11,000 camels passed through annually. The writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky spent the years 185459 in Semipalatinsk in exile as a soldier in a line battalion. The city's growth was furthered by the arrival of the railway from Siberia in 1906 and the completion of the Turk-Sib line to Central Asia in 1931. Its name was changed to Semey after Kazakstan's independence in 1991. The chief economic activities are food processing and other light industries. The city has one of the largest meat-packing plants in Kazakstan, as well as textile, clothing, and footwear factories and a large cement works. There are teacher-training, medical, and veterinary institutes, a theatre, and three museums. The gates of the 18th-century fort survive. Pop. (1995 est.) 320,200.