city in Pechora Municipal District, Komi Republic, Russia
Pechora lies on the Pechora River in the Komi Republic, and is often used as the gateway for Yugyd Va National Park.
Modern-day Pechora is home to a little less than 40,000 people (2018), which makes it the fourth-largest town in a republic that is larger than Sweden!
A gulag was operated here under the name Pechorlag (Печорлаг) during the 1940s and 50s. At its height in the early 40s, over 100,000 prisoners were imprisoned in this forced labor camp. There is a small memorial house of prayer at the site.
In 1949, the villages at this section of the Pechora River grew enough to be merged and granted "city" status. Pechora's population ballooned in the decades following, owing to its location making it a river and rail transport hub for the region an onwards to remote Nenetsia and Yamalia. In the 1970s, the construction of the Pechora State District Power Station made Pechora the "energy capital" of the Komi SSR. The city fell on hard economic times in the 1990s, and its population declined by a third of what it was in 1991, but it has stabilized, in no small part thanks to the discovery of oil reserves in the region.
There are a limited number of flights from the regional capital, Syktyvkar.
Trains on the route to Vorkuta and Labytnangi stop at Pechora, coming from major Russian cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, etc.
As of 2020, there is no year-round access from the more populous parts of the country. The construction of the Ukhta-Pechora-Usinsk-Naryan-Mar highway is underway. You can only leave the city either along an unimproved road along the Kadzherom-Rybnitsa-Zelenoborsk-Malaya Pera dirt road, or by using the Pechora-Vuktyl car ferry.
As of 2020, there are 6 bus routes within the town.
