The city originated in 1793 as a fortress built by the Cossacks, and became a trading center for southern Russia.

[5] On December 7, 1920, as a result of the October Revolution, Yekaterinodar was renamed Krasnodar (Gift of the Reds).

[17] The city originated in 1793 as a military camp, then as a fortress built by the Cossacks to defend imperial borders and to assert Russian dominion over Circassia, a claim which Ottoman Turkey contested.

In the first half of the 19th century, Yekaterinodar grew into a busy center of the Kuban Cossacks, gaining official town status in 1867.

In 1897 an obelisk commemorating the two-hundred-year history of the Kuban Cossacks (seen as founded in 1696) was erected in Yekaterinodar.

Lavr Kornilov, a White general, besieged the city on April 10, 1918, only to be killed a week later when a Bolshevik artillery shell blew up the farmhouse where he had set up his headquarters.

[19] During World War II units of the German Army occupied Krasnodar between August 9, 1942, and February 12, 1943 as part of Operation Edelweiss.

[20] In the summer of 1943, the Soviets began trials, including of their own citizens, for collusion with the Nazis and for participation in war crimes.

The Krasnodar tribunal pronounced eight death sentences, which were summarily carried out in the city square in front of a crowd of about thirty thousand people.

[24] Per the 1926 Soviet census, Krasnodar's population consisted of 82,818 Russians (51.17%), 48,511 Ukrainians (29.97%), 12,463 Armenians (7.70%), 2,948 Belarusians (1.82%), 1,746 Jews (1.08%), 1,316 Poles (0.81%), 1,105 Germans (0.68%) and 1,007 Greeks (0.62%), while 9,929 people (6.14%) belonged to other various minorities.

Note that in the crisis year 2009 turnover of Krasnodar continued to grow, while most of the cities showed a negative trend in the sale of goods.

Krasnodar has the lowest unemployment rate among the cities of the Southern Federal District at 0.3% of the total working-age population.

In addition, Krasnodar holds the first place in terms of highest average salary – 21,742 rubles per capita.

Other attractions include St. Catherine's Cathedral, the State Arts Museum, a park and theater named after Maxim Gorky, the beautiful concert hall of the Krasnodar Philharmonic Society, which is considered to have some of the best acoustics in southern Russia, State Cossack Choir and the Krasnodar circus The central street of Krasnodar is Krasnaya Street (which translates as "Red" or "Beautiful Street").

At the beginning of the street, one can see the Central Concert Hall; at the other end, one can see the Avrora cinema center.

Several professional sports clubs are active in the city: As in many other major cities in Russia, the primary mode of local transportation in Krasnodar is the automobile, though efforts have been made to increase the availability of alternative modes of transportation, including the construction of light railways (projected), biking paths, and wide sidewalks.

Public transportation within Krasnodar consists of city buses, trolleybuses, trams, and marshrutkas (routed taxis).

Trolleybuses and trams, both powered by overhead electric wires, are the main form of public transportation in Krasnodar, which does not have a metro system.

It also depicts the date the city was founded, the Imperial double headed eagle (symbolizing Tsar's patronage of the Black Sea Cossacks), a bulawa of a Cossack ataman, Yekaterinodar fortress, and flags with letters "E", "P", "A", and "N" standing for Catherine II, Paul I, Alexander I and Nicholas I. Yellow stars around the shield symbolized 59 Black Sea stanitsas around the city.