#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The Severny Gorod media company, together with the Norilsk Museum, within the framework of the project Enrichment Factory Lecture Club, invites everyone on April 8 to a meeting with Ekaterina Kalemeneva, candidate of historical sciences, the St. Petersburg National Research University Higher School of Economics History Department deputy head.
Norilsk is the northernmost city in the world with a full cycle of human life and work. Its inhabitants are well aware of its history, which dates back to 1921, when the outstanding explorer Nikolay Urvantsev discovered the richest deposits of ores and metals on the territory of Taimyr. The history of the region’s industrial heart development, the Norilsk Mining and Metallurgical Combine, created by the heroic efforts of Soviet people, including a large contingent of Norillag prisoners, has also been well studied.
The history of the technical re-equipment of the main production enterprises, carried out during the 60–70s of the 20th century, is also quite well known.
At the same time, Norilsk still keeps many little-studied pages, which are of great interest not only for specialists in regional studies, but also for all those who are not indifferent to their history. Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s, scientists and specialists of the Leningrad architectural school developed a new concept for the development of the USSR Arctic territories, which organically combined the tasks of further development of the Arctic mineral resource base and futuristic motives in architecture and planning solutions for the future urban environment.
The projects of Orbital Cities, Planetary Colonies in the Arctic and so on, based on the idea of progress and development, were supposed to emphasize the uniqueness of the polar space and determine the future face of the cities of the Far North.
And even taking into account the fact that many of those projects are still masterpieces on paper, the appeal to the concepts of the North development and models for projecting its future, based on the idea of progress and development, is not only interesting, but also important – especially in the context of a large-scale industrial, social and cultural transformation of Norilsk, planned for the coming years.
Recall that in our History Spot section we every day tell about interesting facts from the history of the city. For example, about the fact that in the early 1940s the most majestic building here was the CHPP-1, and Norilsk was built six times faster thanks to Mikhail Kim’s method.
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Text: Ekaterina Maksimova, Photo: Nikolay Shchipko and the meeting organizers
