#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. Victor Kravtsov is the honored geologist of the Russian Federation, Combine’s labor veteran, laureate of the Lenin Prize. He is one of three geologists who discovered signs of the future Talnah deposit at the foot of Mount Otdelnaya. Norilsk could cease to exist without its discovery.
The Novocherkassk Polytechnic Institute’s mining faculty’s graduate Viktor Kravtsov came to Norilsk in 1955 by assignment.
At first he and his two fellow students dreamed of going to work in China ‘to help the Chinese brothers’. The friends even wrote a letter to the ministry, but with a note at the end:
If we can’t go to China, we want to go to Norilsk.
So Kravtsov became the Norilsk Integrated Geological Exploration Expedition’s (NIGEE) specialist.
On July 12, 1960, the NIGEE geological department’s senior geologist Viktor Kravtsov, Yuzhno-Pyasinsky party’s district geologist Vasily Nesterovsky and Yuzhno-Pyasinsky party’s junior geologist Yury Kuznetsov discovered a root intrusion’s outcrop at the foot of Mount Otdelnaya. A drilled well revealed the Talnah deposit’s ores.
The West-Haraelah party, whose chief geologist was Kravtsov by that time, discovered a powerful intrusion similar to the Talnah one in 1965. It became the Oktyabrsky deposit’s part later. Viktor Kravtsov was recognized as the discoverer of two deposits at once: Talnahsky and Oktyabrsky.
A lot of work had to be done to go from the first well to the field’s protection in the State Reserves Commission. The general reserves’ calculation for the Talnahsky and Oktyabrsky deposits includes 23 volumes with hundreds of pages each and 12 folders with graphical applications. This is the merit of a large team headed by Viktor Kravtsov.
Kravtsov became one of the laureates of the Lenin Prize for the Talnah deposit. He was nominated for the State Prize for the discovery of the Oktyabrsky deposit later, but was deleted from the list because ‘he had already received his own’.
In the History Spot photo project previous publication, we told about the fastest sinkers of Siberia and the Far East.
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Text: Svetlana Ferapontova, Photo: Nornickel Polar Division archive
