Balashikha

a city in Moscow Oblast, RSFSR, located on the Pekhorka River (a tributary of the Moskva), 25 km east of Moscow. It is the terminus of the railroad line from Reutovo. The population in 1970 was 92,400.

Balashikha is an old center of the textile industry (since 1830). It has cotton-spinning and cloth-weaving factories and an oxygen plant. The correspondence departments of a machine-building institute and an agricultural institute are located in the nearby settlement of Leonovo. In 1928, Balashikha was proclaimed a settlement and in 1939 a city. Gorenki, the former Razumovskii estate that is now a children’s sanatorium, is within the city limits; its 18th-century palace was designed by the architect A. A. Menelas and its landscaped grounds contained the largest botanical park in Russia. The former Golitsyn estate Pekhra-Iakovlevskoe, with a church and rotunda (1779–85) ascribed to V. I. Bazhenov, is also near Balashikha.