#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The Norilsk residents were provided with 553 various consumer services. In total, over 2.5 thousand people worked in the service sector in the city.
The culmination of the service growth was the construction of a universal consumer service house Norilsk, which were few in the whole country. The household house at 31 Komsomolskaya street was commissioned in December 1984. It was the last word in architectural and design ideas: marble columns in the lobby, decorative mosaic panels, walls sheathed with mahogany…
Artists from Novosibirsk, Leningrad, Moscow, Tbilisi, headed by the Norilsk resident Boris Poley, worked on the interiors. The consumer services center has taken upon itself the task of providing a high culture of northern service, to ensure that everything manufactured in Norilsk is the most fashionable, modern and beautiful.
The level of the Norilsk service compensated the northerners for the harsh climatic conditions with a developed network of shops, cafes, and other social and cultural institutions. In addition to the outlets that provide the usual services: shoe repair, home delivery of bulky goods, engraving, repair of radio and musical products – in Norilsk there were also those that today seem exotic. For example, a fountain pens refueling point or household items rental.
The culmination and recognition of the high level of service in Norilsk was the All-Union meeting dedicated to consumer services for the population, which took place in our city in 1988. The Norilsk residents proudly demonstrated their achievements in the field of serving the population to responsible workers from different cities of the country: household factories, gyms and saunas at enterprises, service centers in all three cities of the Norilsk industrial district, products of local producers: a state farm, a dairy, a bakery, a meat processing plant, and so on.
In the last issue of the History spot photo project, we told how in 1983 they shot a motion picture in Norilsk – the Mosfilm film To the Friends.
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Text: Svetlana Samohina, Photo: Nornickel Polar Division archive
