#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. Once he had to carry the proposed operation’s plan to its destination. On the way, he spent the night in a strange house. When the envelope was delivered, it contained old newspapers instead of a secret plan. The soldier was accused of treason.
Many years later it was revealed that the traitor who put the old newspapers in the packet served in the headquarters itself. But 19-year-old Kravets was sentenced to ten years in the camps.
Mikhail Kravets survived in Norillag and went from a worker digging pits to the Norilsk Combine’s deputy director. Talnah veterans still remember him as a talented leader with outstanding engineering ingenuity, a brilliant memory and a decent person.
He was the first Talnahrudstroy (Eng.: Talnah mines’ construction) department’s head. This department built the first production facilities and the growing village.
On May 30, 1989, the Talnah City Council’s executive committee decided to rename Lesnaya street into Kravets street. In 2003, a plaque was installed on the building of the Talnah consumer services’ house (Kravets street, b.16 A) in memory of this honored builder.
The inscription on the memorial plaque says:
The street is named after Kravets Mikhail Stepanovich (1927–1980), the first builder of Talnah, awarded with the Order of the Red Banner of Labor twice. The first Talnahrudstroy department’s head.
In 2018, a memorial plaque was moved from the emergency building to the center for extracurricular activities’ building (Kravets street, b.16).
In the History Spot photo project previous publicatio we told about Norilsk kindergartens.
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Text: Svetlana Ferapontova, Photo: Nornickel Polar Division archive
