Samara was founded in 1586 as a strategic ostrogue, a fortress for protecting Russia’s commercially valuable waterways. It was built largely by the military, using peasant labor, at the confluence of the Volga and Samarka rivers. Samara was officially recognized as a town in 1688 but would be ruled by a voevoda, a naval officer, until 1775. This official was in charge of collecting customs and attempting to curb the piracy of nomadic tribes along the Volga.

Samara has a rich and varied history. It was razed in 1670 during the bloody First Peasant Rebellion, in which Stepan Razin led 7000 Cossacks, peasants and the disaffected against the czarist government. Razin was later executed in Moscow. He was succeeded by Emanual Pugachev a hundred years later. Pugachev claimed he was the then-deceased Peter III, who was overthrown by his German wife, Catherine (the Great). Whether Pugachev believed his claim is still a matter for historians to debate, but what is not is the destruction his band of rag-tags wreaked on the city. Catherine responded to the violence by creating a colonization project (centered in Saratov) and inviting German peasants to develop the region’s extensive farmland and help tame its frontier. The region would become largely German and remain unaffected by large-scale uprisings until the Russian Civil War, which started in Samara when a group of Czech war prisoners seized control of first, their military train, and then the city.

Today, Samara has been restored its original name and is helping to lead the country back to capitalism. German influence is still felt (see, for instance, the massive Lutheran Church), although the German population is now minimal. It is still an important industrial site as well as a crossroads for many rail and river transportation lines including the Trans-Siberian and routes connecting the Caucases with the Urals. Its beauty and rich heritage have attracted many tourists including Alexander Dumas in 1858 (while writing his book From Paris to Astrakhan). The Soviets changed the name of the city to Kuibyshev in 1935 and considered the city so important to the country’s struggling industry, and particularly to military aviation, that they closed the city (to foreigners, immigration, or emigration) during WWII. WWII would also see most of the area’s 1.5 million Germans dispersed when a reactionary movement sent most of them into exile or to forced-labor camps.

Samara now offers one of Russia's few Social Work programs and numerous volunteer opportunities within the community in areas ranging from business leadership to dance.  Its surrounding national forest and unique archipelago offer unique possibilities to biologists and geologists.  Finally, with some 1.5 million residents, it is now one of Russia’s largest and most important cities, but it is still small enough that people continue to greet each other on the street regularly and to offer help to a stranger in need.

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