The City That Should Not Exist

In the center of Norilsk, on a wall next to the entrance to City Hall, a huge, year-old poster proudly commemorates the 50th anniversary of the city’s official founding: “Norilsk is 50. And it is just a beginning.”

The urge to congratulate this northern city on its birthday wheezes away when you look around, gulping in the city’s hopelessly polluted air. Instead, you really feel like asking: “Norilsk, how much longer can this go on?”

Norilsk is a crumbling temple created by long-vanished high priests in one of Earth’s most inhospitable places, intended for the worship of a terribly exacting god. Norilsk was only granted the status of city in 1953, but the Soviet State began building the town in 1939 in this lonely outpost – 217 miles north of the Polar Circle, in something like Siberia’s Siberia. And, ever since the Soviet high priests vanished, the city has been drifting into a growing state of disrepair. The only reason it is still standing is that its god has not abandoned it. That god is nickel. And it is habitually worshiped not with clouds of incense, but with emissions of sulfur dioxide.

Nickel ore, along with other metals, was discovered soon after geological expeditions began here in the 1920s (a copper mine was dug here in the 1860s) and rapidly sparked an industrial boom. The ore was first mined and processed by a state-owned industrial complex, which in 1989 acquired its present name: Norilsk Nickel. In 1995, this huge company, which also has branches in other parts of Russia, was privatized and purchased by oligarch Vladimir Potanin (see Russian Life, Mar/Apr 2004). Norilsk Nickel currently accounts for over two percent of Russia’s GDP.

Nickel is a rare metal essential for producing stainless steel and protective coatings applied to other metals. For that reason, it is widely used in the aircraft and space industries. Norilsk Nickel is the world’s leading producer of nickel, and other precious metals like palladium (one-third of world output), platinum (one-fourth) and copper (one-fifth). Nickel and other metals are the only reason hundreds of thousands of people live in Norilsk. As everyone here will tell you, this place was not made for human habitation.

Unlike many of this city’s residents, Vladislav Tolstov, a burly TV journalist in his mid-30s sporting an untrimmed, greying beard, was born in Norilsk. And he loves his native city. Here, alone in the middle of a hostile environment and all but cut off from the rest of the world, Tolstov said, you feel freer. There is more solidarity between people. Yet even this enthusiast admitted there is something strangely unnatural about the city’s existence. “Norilsk is a real life social experiment, because its people originally came from all over the former Soviet Union, to live in a place not intended for human beings,” Tolstov said as he polished off a huge reindeer meat kebab in the restaurant where we were having dinner.

Norilsk (current population 230,000) is not built on an island, but you would be forgiven for thinking so. This is a place so remote from the rest of civilization that, when people go to another part of Russia, they say they are going “to the mainland.” The nearest large city – Krasnoyarsk – is almost 1,000 miles away; Moscow is over 4,000 miles distant. So the only way to get here is by plane, or, in summer, by boat from southern Siberia. It takes four hours to fly from Moscow to Norilsk. Add the four hours you lose en route (Norilsk is four hours ahead of the capital) and it takes a good day to get here. If you sail here from Krasnoyarsk, it can take a week.

Yet distances are but a footnote to Norilsk’s punishing climactic conditions. Temperatures can fall to -57o Celsius in winter. And winter lasts for nine months – from early September, when the first snow falls, through June, when the snow starts melting. But then, the snow never melts away entirely. Even in July, when temperatures are well above 0o, you can still see patches of snow in shaded areas.

The deep permafrost means you can’t hide unsightly utility pipes below ground. Thousands of miles of pipes snake around the city, wrapped in wooden casings to insulate their liquid contents. Buildings here have no subterranean foundations. They do not touch the ground – they cannot, or the heat they generate would cause them to sink in the frozen soil. So they are built on piles, as if anticipating a flood.

Then there is the polar night. For 45 days in winter, there is no daytime. The sun simply does not rise. And for many weeks on either side of this blackout period surrounding December 21, there is little more than a brief glimpse of light each day. And, said the director of Norilsk Nickel’s local branch, Alexei Tomenko, this has a deep influence on people’s health. “It has serious consequences, physically, but also psychologically, as it generates stress,” said Tomenko, a sturdy blond man in his thirties. Conversely, for 68 days in midsummer, Norilsk experiences the polar day: the sun never sets.

Like Tolstov, Tomenko was born here and is proud of Norilsk Nickel’s operation here, which he sees as a victory of man over the Arctic tundra. He even went so far as to call it “one of the Wonders of the World.” Yet even Tomenko conceded that, if they had it to do all over again, major changes would need to be made. Like, for instance, not building the city at all.

“If we were to start from scratch today,” Tomenko said, “there would be no permanent city, because modern means of transportation would allow us to simply rotate personnel in shifts, as they do in Canada.” Strangely enough, Norilsk Mayor Valery Melnikov, a former union leader and Norilsk Nickel employee, echoed Tomenko’s sentiments: “If we were to do everything all over again, the city should not be built.”

Norilsk is a quintessentially Soviet city. Or rather, a perfectly Stalinist one. This is not only because it boasts a neoclassically Stalinist center, with grand perspectives and monumental arches vaguely reminiscent of St. Petersburg. Instead, it is because Norilsk and its industrial complex (or, one should rather say, Norilsk Nickel and its city) were, to a large extent, built using those heinous means of production central to Mature Stalinism: brutal repression and slave labor. As elsewhere, ultra-heavy industrialization was carried out with a complete disregard for environmental consequences. Or, for that matter, for the health of the laborers.

While some parts of the city and of the mines and factories were built after Stalin by free workers, there would almost certainly be no Norilsk had it not been for the Gulag. The industrial complex and the Norilsk labor camp, or Norillag, were set up in the same year – 1935, as the Stalinist repression was ramping up to full rapacity. In the mind of the Soviet leadership at that time, there was no doubt that the two were linked: Norillag was specifically created to provide free manpower for the industrial complex; over 21 years, an estimated 500,000 people were deported to Norilsk. In fact, said Vasily Romashkin, the inmates’ first task when arriving here in the 1930s was to build the complex.

Romashkin should know. Now a frail 90-year-old, Romashkin, originally from the Moscow region, was arrested in 1936, 10 days after his wedding, for reasons that to him are still largely mysterious. After a rigged trial, he was sent to Norilsk. “As soon as we arrived,” Romashkin said, “we started building our barracks, then we built barracks for the camp’s guards and officers, and then we built the factory in which we later worked.” Romashkin served 11 years in Norillag, which was eventually closed in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death.

But the labor camp’s legacy lingers over the city. As incredible as it may seem, many inmates chose to stay in Norilsk even after they were released. Only forty ex-convicts remain in the city today, but Norilsk Nickel employees who arrived here in the early 1970s clearly remember that many of their fellow workers at that time had served time at Norillag. “When I arrived in Norilsk from the Lake Baikal region in 1970,” recalled Vladimir Filatov, a 46-year-old chief mechanic at the Medvezhy Ruchei opencast mine, “as many as two thirds of the people working in my team were former convicts who had stayed on.”

Each former inmate had their own reason for not leaving Norilsk, even when it was possible. Romashkin said he stayed because, in spite of all the suffering, he felt proud of the city and the factory he helped build.

Another ex-convict, Olga Yaskina, said she stayed after her 1955 release because she feared returning home. Yaskina was 13 when she was deported in 1949 to Norilsk with her family. She said she was arrested for writing a letter to her girlfriend Marusya, whose family was deported shortly before she was. The letter said: “Do not cry, Marusya, for us too, the sun will rise.” It was enough. “Even after I was released, I knew the police chief who had arrested me and sent me here was still working in my hometown, so I was too afraid to go back,” said Yaskina, now 68. “Also, since my parents had died, I had no one to go back to.”

There is a memorial to those who suffered and died at Norillag, but it is located outside the city. Hardly anyone ever goes there. There is a metal plaque that stands at the entrance. One would expect it to be engraved with words of respect and, perhaps, regret. But, tellingly, the plaque is blank. It is just a shining, barren plate of metal. Yaskina and other former inmates want a new monument – this time in the heart of Norilsk, where no one can miss it. But the project has been stalled for years. Mention the memorial to Mayor Melnikov, and he is clearly embarrassed. “You know, it is a difficult question,” he said. “Of course, in some cases, there were abuses, but then again, all those who were sent to Norillag were not deported unjustly. After all, they were prosecuted legally.”

What Romashkin, Yaskina and the free men and women who came after them built was the epitome of a Soviet industrial complex. Norilsk Nickel not only runs mines around Norilsk, it also has several factories that process and refine the ore, most of them aging mills, built at a time when no one cared about the environment. Some are just a stone’s throw from the center of Norilsk, their chimneys spewing gas – mostly sulfur dioxide from the sulfur that is mined with the ore – directly over the city. At least once a week the pollution is so suffocating on the street that you can barely stand to be outside, Tolstov said. Tomenko, the Norilsk Nickel director, disclosed that the factories release some two million tons of sulfur into the atmosphere each year. That is eight and a half tons of sulfur for every man, woman and child living in Norilsk.

Company officials said there are plans to gradually make the production process more environmentally friendly, but, they add, implementing all environmental norms right away would triple current operating costs and not be economically feasible for Norilsk Nickel or the city. Still, the officials said, factory chimneys are scheduled to stop belching gas directly over Norilsk sometime next year.

Needless to say, super-industrialization has had a major impact on this fragile arctic region. Endless acid rain means that, even at the peak of summer, you are hard-pressed to find a flower here. Trees fare no better. In and around Norilsk are just the ghosts of trees, thrusting their blackened, barren trunks towards the sky.

No birds sing here.

Humans pay a price, too. Cases of respiratory diseases, mainly pneumonia, bronchitis and tracheitis, tend to be twice as serious in Norilsk as on the “mainland.” And they take almost twice as much time to cure, said Galina Tirfanova, a lung specialist at Norilsk’s main hospital. When asked what one can do to take care of one’s health here, she shrugged and answered: “One should not live in Norilsk.”

To attract workers to Norilsk after the labor camp was shuttered, Soviet authorities guaranteed salaries, social benefits and a quality of social services that workers in most other parts of the country could only dream of. This is the main reason non-native Norilsk Nickel employees came to the city, often as very young men and women. And that is why they stay. “I came here right after finishing military service,” said Filatov, the chief mechanic. “My father had worked here for a while, so I knew there was work and good money to be made.” Like many, Filatov first signed a three-year contract, then just never left. Paradoxically, it is, in a way, the quality of life that kept him here.

Today, many complain that the salaries and benefits are not as good as in Soviet times. Yet salaries and pensions are still 2.6 times above the national average. After a few years, a worker here can make $1,000 a month, an extremely decent wage by Russian standards. And it is made possible by Norilsk Nickel. In Soviet times, in addition to paying workers’ salaries, Norilsk Nickel ran most of the city’s services and built and maintained its homes and infrastructure. Responsibility for these services has now been largely transferred to the municipality. Individual taxpayers cover some of the costs of local services, but, in reality, little has changed: Norilsk Nickel is by far the city’s largest taxpayer, contributing 90 percent of the city’s revenues. It also still directly funds many institutions, including Norilsk’s main hospital.

What has changed, though, is that Norilsk Nickel is now subject to the demands of the market and has far less money to spend. Since the late 1980s, it has laid off two-thirds of its employees – reducing staff from 150,000 to fewer than 60,000. And while the company resumed local infrastructure investments a few years ago, these came to a near standstill following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

A walk around the city illustrates the gravity of the situation: most buildings are in a sorry state. Many are in need of urgent repair, with holes in the concrete casings surrounding their support pillars. Even the Stalinist center, Norilsk’s pride, looks utterly run-down. On October Square, a circle of monumental postwar buildings surrounds the hotel where Russian President Vladimir Putin stayed when he visited here two years ago. It is not hard to find: it is the only building that has been recently renovated and given a fresh coat of bright green paint. Everywhere else on the square, paint and plaster are peeling away. Unlike in the Russian heartland, construction is not booming in Norilsk. “There has been no new building here for seven years,” said Mayor Melnikov.

So, in a radical shift from Soviet era policies, the city now does everything it can to keep people from coming to Norilsk. “We really try to discourage potential newcomers,” Melnikov said, “unless they are really badly-needed specialists.” In this new spirit, Norilsk three years ago once again became a closed city. Foreigners cannot visit here or buy a plane ticket to here without an official invitation and special authorization from the FSB intelligence service. This is not, as in the Soviet era, to deter espionage in this military-industrial city, but to keep citizens of former Soviet republics from coming here to receive higher quality social benefits and services, to allegedly keep an already fragile system from being put at risk.

The new policy is strictly enforced. It begins once your plane has landed. Before you can even rise from your seat, police board the plane to check passenger documents. If you are a foreigner, your passport is confiscated, to be returned to you only in the airport police station, once it has been established that you can rightfully be in the city.

But even that is not enough, Melnikov said. “Unfortunately, our brothers from the Caucasian republics continue to come illegally. I would like plane tickets to Norilsk to not be sold at all in mainland Russia, but unfortunately we have not been able to reach this point yet.”

The ultimate irony, however, is that often those who actually want to leave this Soviet island cannot. The city is rapidly aging. Of the total population of 230,000. some 37,000 are pensioners. Each year, another 4,000 retire. Most pensioners desperately want to move to a more temperate part of Russia, and they have the company’s and the city’s blessing to do so. But, in most cases, that is about all they have.

The city has a project, funded in part by the World Bank, to encourage people to leave. The goal is to reduce the city’s population by 160,000 before 2010. But, in the two years since the program was launched, only 202 people have been convinced to leave, said Project Leader Vyacheslav Istratov. Marina, a portly woman in her 60s, was going to be the 203rd. But as she listened to Istratov and his colleagues explain how they were going to help her, and what incentives she would get, her resolve rapidly failed.

Theoretically, Marina could obtain a subsidy to leave, as well as a free plane ticket for her and her belongings. But there are several strings attached. First, at under $3,000, the subsidy is hardly lavish. Second, she would have to sell her Norilsk apartment (the aim being to allow vacated apartments to be given to Norilsk residents whose apartments are barely liveable). But in Russia it is not uncommon for elderly people to live in a single apartment with their children, and sometimes their grandchildren. Marina lives with her son, who wants to remain in Norilsk. Forcing her to sell the apartment would give her son no place to live. Finally, there is the issue of her pension. Like all Norilsk retirees, Marina gets a pension that is 2.6 times what she would receive “on the mainland.” If she leaves, her pension would be drastically reduced.

After hearing the list of caveats, Marina rose, banged her formidable fist on the table and announced: “If it’s like that, then, I-WILL-STAY!”

Marina is just one of many. At Norilsk’s central market, health inspector Tatyana Tide, 52, is nearing retirement age. She came here 26 years ago from the Amur region, on the Chinese border. She is now sick of Norilsk, but said she doubts she will ever be able to leave: “Usually, when you have killed someone, you stay, say, 15 years in jail. We have killed no one, but we are stuck in this place.” RL