The pitch-black polar night loosens its grip for only a few hours a day, between one and three in the afternoon. The city glows with thousands of lights, like a mirage floating on an endless, snowy desert. The walls of homes huddle together, bracing against the arctic winds’ icy onslaught – this time of year it is not uncommon for the thermometer to dip to -50° Celsius. The children’s playground lies covered with snow. A blizzard whips through the rectilinear courtyard, as if fighting to find an escape from this man-made trap and, angered, it tries to knock passing humans from their feet. It is January, and here, in Norilsk, there are still four more months of winter...
The city of Norilsk (the name derives from an indigenous, Yukagir word meaning “swampy river bank”) is located almost at the end of the Earth, on the Taymyr peninsula, 300 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. It is the world’s second largest polar city (after Murmansk) and it is home to over 130,000 people, not including inhabitants of the two satellite towns, Talnakh and Kayerkan.
Even though built on permafrost, Norilsk is a full-fledged city, with multi-storied buildings, schools, theaters, hospitals, museums, stadiums, institutes of higher learning, parks, restaurants and clubs. Still, for the majority of the city’s residents, this is just a temporary home. People start families and have children and grandchildren here, yet, sooner or later most all of them leave Norilsk for somewhere else in Russia – someplace where there is no polar night, where spring comes in April, and where you do not feel the need to soak up every ray of sunlight, because tomorrow the Cold is coming.
What, then, is the attraction of this severe outpost for Russians, some of whom even defy the trend and spend their whole lives here? Without a doubt, the most powerful magnet is the wealth hidden under the Taymyr tundra – resources which fill the coffers of the State and the pockets of those working in city enterprises. In the Soviet era, people went to Norilsk for the “long ruble.” This meant it was a place where one could quickly earn money for a car or a coop apartment – the outer bounds of Soviet man’s consumerist aspirations.
And yet there is something more. For the polar region also bears an inexplicable force: there is a certain attractiveness to testing one’s strength against the extreme conditions of life. The North is a surprisingly beautiful region where, if you can get past the cold and wind, the air can be uncommonly crisp and clean. For those who have come to work in Taymyr, this land has a claim on them for the rest of their lives, even if they have long since left behind its unfriendly climes.
“Siberia has the virtue of not startling or astonishing you right away but of pulling you in slowly and reluctantly, as it were, with measured carefulness, and then binding you tightly once you are in. And then it’s all over – you are afflicted with Siberia... for a long time after being in this land a person feels hemmed in, sad, and mournful everywhere else, tormented wherever he goes by a vague and agonizing sense of his own inadequacy, as if he’s left a part of himself in Siberia forever.”
– Valentin Rasputin, Siberia, Siberia
How it All Began
Taymyr was mined for its natural resources as far back as the Bronze Age, 2000 years ago. Over the centuries, the peninsula was repeatedly visited by travelers, scientists, entrepreneurs and adventurers. Industry arrived in the 17th century. In 1601, the town of Mangazeya (also known as Zlatokipyashchaya) was founded in the Yenisey guberniya, along the river Taz. Mangazeya became one of Siberia’s most important trading and artisan centers, and had political and economic relations with Western Europe through the Northern Sea Route. But, after a series of fires (and Tsar Alexei’s ukaz closing the Northern Sea Route in 1619), Mangazeya faded away and Taymyr dropped off the map for almost four hundred years.
The great arctic geographic explorations at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries reinvigorated interest in Taymyr and led to its eventual industrial exploitation. The 1893-1896 expedition of the sailing vessel Fram, led by Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen (who would receive the 1922 Nobel Prize), opened up the Northern Arctic Ocean. The success of Nansen’s expedition helped later Soviet scientists open a polar station in the arctic and establish year-round navigation to and from the Taymyr peninsula. Today, most of the supplies between Norilsk and the “mainland” (materik in Russian) go by sea.
Norilsk residents (Norilchanye in Russian), as well as people living in most remote regions of Siberia, use the term materik to refer to Moscow and European Russia, a term that is certainly not technically correct, but which nonetheless underscores their sense of separation – materially and psychologically – from a world thousands of miles away but still on the same continent. The materik is also a symbol of one’s future life beyond the North, about
which most Norilchanye think quite often.
In 1913, a Russian expedition led by naval Captain Boris Vilkitsky discovered a huge archipelago off the coast of Taymyr. He named it Emperor Nikolai II Land (the Soviets subsequently renamed it Severnaya Zemlya, Northern Land). But the island was added to maps only in 1931, as a result of an exploration of the region led by the Soviet scientists Gyorgy Ushakov and Nikolai Urvantsev. An island in the Kara Sea now bears Ushakov’s name, as does an iceberg, a river and cape on Severnaya Zemlya. The geologist Urvantsev, for his part, discovered the copper-nickel deposits in Rudnoy mountain, which were named Norilsk-1. As a result of geological expeditions between 1919 and 1923, Urvantsev and his colleagues estimated that the copper-nickel reserves in Rudnoy mountain were 19.2 million poods, or 320 tons (a vast underestimate: present reserves are estimated at 6-8 million metric tons of nickel ore). But there was more: Norilsk ore was found to contain many metals from the platinum group. In fact, the region contained over half the elements on Mendeleyev’s Table of Elements, many of which were vital for Soviet industrial development.
Today, one of Norilsk’s main thoroughfares is named for Nikolai Urvantsev. The town also preserves a a building named Urvantsev House – where the explorer spent his first long winter here in 1921. Yet even Nikolai Urvantsev could not escape the terror that was to come.
In a horrific irony of fate typical of the Stalin era, Urvantsev’s discoveries led to the decision to build mining facilities at Norilsk, which in turn led to the creation in 1935 of one of the worst Soviet gulags – the Norilsk labor camp. The inhospitable conditions on Taymyr, Soviet planners decided, meant that only involuntary laborers – i.e. political prisoners – would dig the mine.
The Norilsk camp, Norillag for short, was opened in June 1935. Among many other tasks, the slave laborers would build the city of Norilsk, the mining complex, river and ocean ports in nearby Dudinka, a train line from Dudinka to Norilsk, and the Kayerkan mines.
Among its first 1,200 internees in October 1935 were several hundred mining engineers, including Urvantsev, who had been sentenced to 10-year terms on trumped-up charges of “sabotage.” The zeks (the name for political prisoners, an acronym derived from zasekrechyonny kadry – “cadres classified as secret”) had to endure the first winter at Norilsk in abhorrent conditions, sleeping in unheated barracks, building a railroad with inadequate tools.
The following summer, another 5,000 zeks, selected for their strength and youth, were floated down the Yenisey to hack away at the permafrost, build barracks and carve a mine from the God-forsaken landscape. Conditions were so severe at Norillag that an estimated half of all prisoners exiled there died of starvation, exposure or diseases. But the Stalinist machine had no trouble replenishing the “human raw material”: another 20,000 prisoners arrived in 1937 and 35,000 more the following year. Karlo Stajner, a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party who spent 20 years in Soviet gulags, was one of the few who survived, passing through Norillag twice. He observed that, in 1938, just three years after Norilsk was founded, it had a cemetery equal in size to that in a city that had been around for a century.
In the winter, when the blizzards struck, Stajner wrote, “it felt as if the world was coming to an end. Darkness fell and all you could hear was the shrieking of the storm: ‘Sheee... sheee... sheee,’ like a thousand devils.... It was so cold that I sometimes feared my brain would freeze inside my skull.”
A former zek, Vitaly Babichev, who spent 18 years in the gulags, wrote of his transfer to Norilsk:
“In 1939, exhausted by the Stalin regime, by scurvy and dystrophia, we were brought to the Krasnoyarsk transit prison. They hauled us down the Yenisey to Dudinka on wooden barges outfitted with plank bunks eight high. They fed us in a manner designed to break us: water from the Yenisey, salt and flour. Each soul received a portion consisting of three spoonfuls. But, instead of dishes, everyone received their scoops differently: some in a boot, others in a cap, a sleeve or the hem of a coat. He who did not receive something, died. They had taken away our aluminum spoons, and did not give us wooden ones. So we had to eat like dogs, lapping up the contents with our tongues. They gave out neither water, tea nor bread. There were 600 zeks on the barge when we started out. On our barge alone, we lost 150 souls during the two month passage.”
In 1938, Avrami Zavenyagin, who for the previous four years had headed up the Magnitogorsk Industrial Complex, was put in charge at Norilsk. He was tasked with creating not merely a mining operation, but a “full-cycle” production enterprise and city – a complex that mined, refined and smelted a finished product. This required capable engineers, not gulag fodder, so Zavenyagin had technically capable zeks like Urvantsev assigned to “special departments,” where they oversaw research and technology for the factory’s (and the city’s) development in the relative comfort of indoor offices. The first tons of nickel were exported to the materik in 1942, in time to play a critical role in beating back the Nazi invasion.
Notably, after his successful stint at Norilsk, Zavenyagin was in 1941 promoted to Deputy Commissar of the Interior Ministry, in charge of the entire gulag organization. He later oversaw production of the Soviet atomic bomb and the development of the Soviet atomic industry.
During World War II, the barracks of Norillag were replenished with thousands of zeks from the Baltics, which had been gobbled up by the Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. By 1951, population at the camp reached its peak, according to data compiled by Memorial, housing 72,500 souls.
According to official Norillag figures, 16,806 prisoners died in Norilsk’s forced labor camp between 1935 and 1956. The real number of victims is likely ten times that or more, and may never be discovered. Yet these unfortunates’ resting place is well-known: at the foot of Mount Schmidt, on the edge of the city, where even today bones are sometimes uncovered during the spring melt.
On May 14, 1953, just two months after Stalin’s death, some 30,000 prisoners at the camp staged a brave strike, demanding the right to communicate with their families, to have a shorter (nine-hour) work day, to have labels removed from their clothes and informers removed from their midst, and to have the amnesty granted after Stalin’s death expanded to include political prisoners.
It was perhaps the largest protest against the Soviet regime (and the first in the gulags) since Stalin took power 30 years prior. The prisoners held out for 55 days, until a brutal crackdown by elite troops killed over a thousand zeks.
As a result of the strike and its aftermath, a commission was sent to the camp to investigate conditions there. Its findings eventually led to the camp’s closure.
While certainly there were many “free” workers involved in the construction of the mining complex and the city, the overwhelming majority of work was done by camp slave labor. It is estimated that half a million persons passed through Norillag during its 20 years of operation.
At Mount Schmidt, many monuments commemorate those who were sacrificed. The first was built in 1990, just a few years after the town’s citizens beat back a disreputable plan by the nickel complex to build on top of the graveyard. There followed a monument to the Baltic victims and another to the Poles. In 2001, Norilsk Nickel (which recently decided to build a major memorial complex at Mount Schmidt) erected a log belfry adorned with a plaque, “To the memory of the political prisoners of the Norilsk camps, 1935-1956, from their grateful descendants. Norilsk Nickel Co.”
Building a City
The massive buildings required for Norilsk’s forced labor enterprise and city buildings could not be built directly on the permafrost of the arctic tundra, since the heat generated by their habitation or industrial activity would have caused them to sink into the swampy ground. So concrete pylons were fabricated and driven into holes bored in the tundra, creating something like floating structures.
Despite such technological feats, the plan for the city of Norilsk, worked out in 1939-1940, did not fully take into account the city’s polar climate. So the city’s plan was reworked in the 1960s and 1970s by Leningrad architect Vitold Nepokochitsky, who put a Petersburgian stamp on Norilsk (which was upgraded from a “labor settlement” to a city in 1953). He bequeathed to the arctic metropolis wide avenues in the Stalinist, Soviet Empire style. Thankfully, however, the roads were built perpendicular to prevailing arctic winds, with drops at intersections to weaken their force. Closed courtyards and surface-contouring in micro-regions were also used to create “wind-shadows” and shield buildings from drifting snow.
Yet none of this helped the polar city escape the fundamental problems posed by its industrial activity. To save money and time, much of the mining at Norilsk has been done in open pit mines, and the smelting and refining process for the metals has been done at factories that have, for half-a-century, paid no attention to their effects on the environment.
In 2006, the New York-based Blacksmith Institute included Norilsk in its list of the ten most polluted places on Earth (three of the ten are in Russia; the other two are Dzerzhinsk and Rudnaya Pristan). According to the institute, Norilsk is a place “where the snow is black, the air tastes of sulfur and the life expectancy for factory workers is 10 years below the Russian average.” The by-product of being the world’s largest heavy metals smelting complex is that “over four million tons annually of cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, arsenic, selenium and zinc are dispersed into the air.” In 1999, a report found elevated copper and nickel concentrations in soil up to 60 kilometers from the town. Other studies have shown abnormally high levels of childhood diseases and ailments, and elevated incidents of premature births and mortality from respiratory diseases. By some estimates, one percent of the world’s global emissions of sulfur dioxide – two million tons – come from Norilsk. According to the Globe and Mail, the city has dumped “about a billion tons of solid waste around the city, primarily in huge mountains of tailings from which vast quantities of dust blow. Its average daily output of sulphur dioxide is triple the maximum allowed by law, and sometimes the amount is 26 times the limit.” A study by the European Union said the environmental damage around the city “has reached the level of ecological catastrophe” which will take at least 150 years to recover from.
Victor Tomenko, director of Norilsk Nickel’s polar affiliate, said “emissions have decreased by several percent, but gas – as before – is still noticeable on the streets of Norilsk.”
Journalist Maria Makhanova, a native of Norilsk, said she feels that the environmental situation has improved somewhat since the Soviet era. “I remember how in the past,” she said, “a blue-grey gas would descend on the city and there would be a fog that made it impossible to see houses and cars... and there was a sweet, metallic taste in your mouth. We called it ‘copper,’ meaning emissions from the copper factory. Or there was a transparent, bitter tasting gas, which burned your nasal passages – ‘that’s the nickel,’ we thought... There was also in our lexicon the word “hope” [nadezhda, from of the Nadezhda Metallurgical Factory in nearby Talnakh]. Its emissions had a sulphuric smell, like rotten eggs. We were used to all that. This is not to say that this was okay. It was actually very annoying. After you walked home, you had to drink a glass of milk or you had to breathe through a scarf in order not to breathe in the gas [when walking outside]... that is what my childhood was like. But in recent years a lot has changed. First, there are new ‘standards and rules’ – I know that at enterprises they cannot do now what they did in the Soviet era. Second, they have ‘seriously optimized production,’ which means that several of the factories are no longer operating. The nickel factory, for example, is not emitting anything into the air any longer, as they installed purifying filters a few years ago, and there is strong environmental control.”
Mikhail Petin disagrees. Petin has worked at Norilsk Nickel for 11 years and is presently the head of the Norilsk Mining Trust’s automated management systems. “They are poisoning the city now the same way they did then,” Petin said. “There are many things to be angry about, but what can you do? Still, in the media they talk a lot about their successes in environmental management.”
Vladimir Larin has lived in Norilsk since 1979. As director of the Putoransky State Preserve (zapovednik), he oversees what he calls “one of the world’s largest and most beautiful nature preserves.” Indeed, Putoransky encompasses some 7,300 square miles of tundra and taiga on Taymyr, much of which has never been trod by humans.
Larin, interestingly, is sanguine about the effects of the Norilsk’s Industrial Region (NIR) on Taymyr’s environment. “The first thing that is important to remember,” Larin said, “is that the NIR, along with all of its technological by-products, including pollutants, is no more than the head of a pin on the map of Taymyr – a huge, primordial territory practically untouched by humans. This is truly one of the things that makes Taymyr valuable. At the beginning of the 21st century, there are very few such places left on Earth.”
Company Town
For better or worse, the entirety of Norilsk’s past and future is tied up with Norilsk Nickel – both as the cause of the city’s deplorable environmental condition and its only hope for economic survival.
In 1989, on the eve of Russia’s privatization grab, the Norilsk complex (then named for Zavenyagin) was transformed into the state concern, Norilsk Nickel, comprising a number of other nickel and non-ferrous metal factories across the country. The concern’s unique position at the nexus of such an important industry helped it to weather the more difficult economic storms of the early 1990s. Even after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, employees at Norilsk Nickel were earning five to ten times what comparable factory workers were earning in the materik.
During privatization, in 1994, shares were distributed to employees and investors (the State retained a 38% equity share). Then, in 1995, through the infamous “loans for shares” deal, Russian businessman Vladimir Potanin, president of Interros, using government assets in a fixed auction, won the right to loan the government $170 million against a lien on the state’s 38% share in Norilsk Nickel. Two years later, when the State defaulted on the loan (as expected from the outset) Potanin sold the collateral to himself for $250 million – a rather good price for a $3 billion company with 1995 profits of $1.2 billion. Alexander Khloponin took the helm of Norilsk Nickel and presided over the restructuring of a 125,000 employee company with crippling social services obligations, an aged physical plant and a huge tax liability to the government. (A measure of Khloponin’s success is that he went on to become governor of Norilsk’s administrative region, Krasnoyarsk Krai, the largest region in Siberia; Mikhail Prokhorov, a long-time Potanin business associate, took over the helm at Norilsk Nickel in 2001.)
After a few years of major financial losses, compounded by the Asian financial crisis (when nickel prices crashed) and domestic devaluation of the ruble, Norilsk Nickel began to rebound. A halving of the workforce helped. By 2000, the company had turned the corner and was showing a profit. But that same year the federal government filed a lawsuit to overturn Norilsk Nickel’s fixed privatization. The suit was eventually thrown out.
Buoyed by rising prices for metals (nickel is primarily used in the production of stainless steel; platinum and palladium are critical elements in the production of catalytic converters), Norilsk Nickel has gotten very rich. So rich it is buying up other mineral companies (including U.S. companies) while starting to invest in other areas, such as fuel cell technology (Potanin, meanwhile, has turned to philanthropy and is a major donor to the Guggenheim, among other organizations). The company is Russia’s monopoly producer of nickel and cobalt and the world’s largest producer of nickel (18.7%) and palladium (51.5%), and one of the largest producers of platinum. With annual sales of over $7 billion and net profits of over $2 billion, Norilsk Nickel now accounts for over 4% of Russian exports.
Petin is critical. “If you look just at the share price of Norilsk Nickel, then of course they have chosen the proper direction,” Petin said. “But I personally don’t consider the company’s present course to be the correct one.... We are working for the benefit of private capital. The price for metal is constantly on the rise, but pay for workers has not increased. Sure, there is stability, but there is no confidence in tomorrow. Yes, things are getting produced, but due to insufficient personnel, workers have to do the work of two or even three people. People don’t believe the company’s declarations about a brilliant future and often ‘flee’ Norilsk. Unfortunately, we are experiencing a huge drain of good specialists.
In actuality, the talent drain is a by-product of government and company policy to restrict incoming workers and encourage pensioners to leave the city. Norilsk was a restricted settlement zone from its creation in 1935 until 1990, when most of Russia’s internal travel restrictions were lifted. In the 1990s, Norilsk Nickel’s high salaries began to attract workers from across the former Soviet Union, flooding the city with an estimated 35,000 “unofficial residents.” The city administration appealed to the federal government for assistance and, on November 25, 2001, Soviet-style travel restrictions were re-imposed. It now requires special permission and an invitation to visit this polar outpost.
In addition, since 2005, the city has had a program, in concert with the World Bank, to encourage pensioners to move out of the city, paying them one-time settlements of R50,000 ($1,500). In 2007, unemployed pensioners departing rural regions of the Taymyr peninsula will receive one-time payments of R20,000 to make the move, according to the newspaper Taymyr.
Yet, there are thousands who stay and many who take pride in this little city above the Arctic Circle. Journalist Makhanova, who is director of the media holding company Severny Gorod (Northern City) sees no reason to lament Norilsk’s “isolation” from the materik. “The world has truly changed,” Makhanova said, “we used to only leave Norilsk for the materik once a year, for vacation. Now Norilchanye are constantly traveling to and from somewhere. No, I am certain that there is no longer the sense that this is some kind of polar station. Instead, I would say that the image of a ‘distant polar station’ has been swapped for ‘an unusual city and unusual people, living in special circumstances.’ Norilchanye like to think of themselves as a chosen people.” And, for those Norilchanye, Makhanova said, the most important concerns are “the heating systems in apartment blocks – the certainty that nothing will go wrong during the winter, that the power plant will not blow up and that the heating pipes will not freeze; the certainty that one can provide one’s children with a good education and give them the possibility to one day leave for the materik.”
Which makes Norilchanye far from unusual. RL
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