First schools of Norilsk

#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. However, that school was not located in today’s Norilsk, but in its predecessor, the Norilsk settlement on the Rybnaya river. Today we know it as the Chapel settlement. The children of Dolgans and Russian employees studied there. Whether that school should be considered the first Norilsk school is up to you. In the meantime, we will tell you about how people sat down at their desks in today’s Norilsk.

Since 1935, the first lessons in Norilsk were held in the club building and even in the teacher’s apartment. In 1936, an elementary school was opened in the current Old town under the trade union committee of the Norilskstroy administration. The wooden building was initially one-story. But Norilsk grew rapidly, as well as the number of children, so the first school building was expanded several times. In 1946, a new building was constructed on Octyabrskaya street in the Sotsgorod (the old part of the city), where the senior classes were transferred. And in 1949, in the new part of Norilsk – Gorstroy – on Komsomolskaya street, 6, the current building for school No. 1 was built. It was built by prisoners, and in record time – during the summer of 1949. There was no such school in Norilsk yet: “A huge four-story building, the size of the gym allows for volleyball and basketball courts. A radio center, a reading room, a medical room, an assembly hall with a stage, with busts of great scientists and writers, a winter garden – a room with flowers, an aquarium …” In the library and in the utility areas of the school, at first, there was even room for teachers with their families to live as there was not enough housing in the town.

In 1945, another secondary school opened – school No. 2. It was also quite a traveler, having changed several buildings. At the time of its opening, it was the only one in the new district of Norilsk – Gorstroy (the school building on Komsomolskaya, 6, had not yet been built). Gorstroy began to be populated in 1941, and at first one and a half entrances in a residential building were allocated for the education of younger children. And then a whole two-story building was given, in which school No. 2 was opened. That building stood on Monchegorskaya street, now there is a residential building on this site, Kirova street, 2. In 1949, when the first school moved to Komsomolskaya street, school No. 2 moved into the vacated building in Sotsgorod. Only in 1963, a modern building was erected for school No. 2 in the courtyards of Leninsky prospect, where it is still located, although it has already merged with school No. 7.

In 1947, school No. 3 opened – another mysterious school-traveller. It is known that it opened in the Old town, but in which building exactly – it has not yet been possible to find out. However, almost immediately it occupied a historical wooden building on Zero Point, where the first school was once located. In 1959, school No. 3 moved from the Old town to the New town, where a large five-story building was constructed for it on Sovetskaya street. Incidentally, this was the first five-story school building. For all of its predecessors, typical four-story schools were built. And at the end of the building there was an apartment for the school director.

School No. 4 was built and opened in 1950. As the plaque on the building’s façade states, the fourth school was built in just 67 days. And it’s true: the bedrock in this place comes almost to the surface, so there was no need to dig a deep pit. On June 25, the first brick was laid, and on September 1, schoolchildren entered the new school. As the Norilsk newspaper Stalinets wrote in 1950: “Looking around, surprised and delighted students crossed the threshold. The first day of classes was also unusual for the teaching staff. Of the 20 teachers in this school, 14 were entering the classroom for the first time after graduating from specialized educational institutions. They came from different universities of the country”.

In 1952, school No. 5 was built on Pionerskaya street (a year later it would be renamed Bohdan Hmelnitsky street). On September 19, 1952, Norilsk children crossed its threshold for the first time: 1115 students sat down at their desks.

According to the architectural design, the buildings of the first, fourth, fifth, and sixth schools are ‘close relatives’. This was a standard design for a school building designed for 880 students. Before Norilsk, it had already been used in Moscow and Leningrad, but local architects adapted it for the Arctic.