Acting Krasnoyarsk Mayor Edkham Akbulatov congratulated the city's residents in a statement Wednesday and said the millionth Kranoyarsk native, born into a family of engineers, was in good health. He said he would head a delegation to congratulate the family on the child's special status once doctors began to allow visitations.
The Siberian city, located about 4,000 kilometers east of Moscow, had been awaiting the birth of the millionth resident for four days, Interfax reported. Hospitals around the city were monitored for new births, and a countdown ticker was installed on the city administration's website.
Akbulatov said becoming a city with a million people, known as a "millionaire-city" in Russian, opened up new opportunities for the city and brought with it the responsibility to compete with the country's largest urban centers.
The other cities with at least a million people in Russia are: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Omsk, Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Rostov-on-Don, Ufa, Volgograd, and Perm.
