#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. Once they arose around factories, mines and enterprises under construction. People were settled next to their workplaces, because the transport issue was then still a sore point in Norilsk. Most often, each such village was at first a camp department, and later it turned into a workers’ village.
In the 1960s, when construction of Khrushchev houses was puton stream, the settlements were no longer needed. The old barracks were set on fire by firefighters. Those were the villages of Kirpichny, Zaozerny, Stroiteley, Krugloye Ozero, Zub-Gora, the Central Coal Sorting and the Big Concentrating Plant villages – about ten in all. As the city newspaper later wrote: “The camp past of Norilsk was on fire.”
But 1300 families of ‘fire victims’ at the same time celebrated housewarming in new houses on Nansen, Begichev, Krasnoyarskaya streets and Kotulsky proezd. From the upper floors they could see huge bonfires.
The city was getting rid of old small mobile houses and camp barracks, and the developing transport network made it possible to travel to work by bus, rather than settling next to production.
If in 1959 Norilsk was surrounded by about 30 settlements built at mines and construction sites, then by 1970 there were only 11. Medvezhka and the Geologov settlements in Talnah held out the longest – until the end of the 1980s. Today, only Kayerkan remains from all the Norilsk settlements of the 1940s.
In the last issue of the History Spot photo project, we told about the Taimyr National District history.
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Text: Svetlana Samohina, Photo: Nornickel Polar Division archive
