#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. For some years, all city power structures had been located in one building – on Sevastopolskaya, 7.
The project of the new building – the ‘gray house’, as the Norilsk residents later called it, belonged to the architect Jakob Trushins. This was not his most beautiful work, but there was a struggle against architectural ‘excesses’.
By the way, in 1971, a building for the administration of Zapolyaryegaz, the predecessor of Norilskgazprom, was built according to the same project at the junction of Talnahskaya and Begicheva streets. It was an exact copy of the city executive committee office, and in old photographs, until Norilskgazprom got a three-story extension, it is easy to confuse them.
The builders handed over the administrative building in 1964: they raised the RSFSR flag over it and settled the City Council of Deputies executive committee, city party and Komsomol committees there.
At the entrance, which was demolished later, various art panels replaced each other over the decades. First, these were portraits of Lenin and Marx, then a worker and a cosmonaut with the inscription Years of Great Achievements, then – the profile of Lenin, but alone. For the longest time, the entrance group was decorated with a bas-relief with a symbolic image of the Soviet coat of arms with a hammer and sickle.
In Soviet times, the upper part of the facade was crowned with the RSFSR coat of arms, later it was replaced by the symbol of Norilsk.
In the 1980s there was a project for the city executive committee office second building: behind the main building, in the courtyard. It would be a diamond-shaped structure with a large conference room inside. Naturally, they were supposed to be connected by a transitional gallery, but the project was not implemented.
In the last issue of the History Spot photo project, we told about the first open pit mine in the Arctic was opened in Norilsk.
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Text: Svetlana Samohina, Photo: Nornickel Polar Division archive
