Norilsk

Norilsk ( rus, Нори́льск, p=nɐˈrʲilʲsk, ''Norílʹsk'') is a closed city in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, located south of the western Taymyr Peninsula, around 90 km east of the Yenisey River and 1,500 km north of Krasnoyarsk. Norilsk is 300 km north of the Arctic Circle and 2,400 km from the North Pole. It has a permanent population of 182,701 (2021), and up to 220,000 including temporary inhabitants. It is the second-largest city in the region after Krasnoyarsk. Since 2016 Norilsk's population has grown steadily. In 2017, for the first time, migration to the city exceeded outflow; In 2018, according to Krasnoyarskstat, natural population growth amounted to 1,357 people: 2,381 people were born, 1,024 people died.

It is the world's northernmost city with more than 180,000 inhabitants, and the second-largest city (after Murmansk) inside the Arctic Circle. Norilsk and Yakutsk are the only large cities in the continuous permafrost zone.

Norilsk is located atop some of the largest nickel deposits on Earth. Consequently, mining and smelting ore are the major industries. Norilsk is the center of a region where nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum, palladium, and coal are mined. The presence of mineral deposits in the Siberian Craton was known for two centuries before Norilsk was founded, but mining began only in 1939, when subterranean portions of the Norilsk- Talnakh intrusions were found beneath mountainous terrain.

In 2004, two satellite cities (Talnakh and Kayerkan) became districts of the city of Norilsk, and Oganer became a suburb of Norilsk's Central District. The jurisdiction of Norilsk also extends to the settlement of Snezhnogorsk, which originated in 1963 as a settlement to accommodate the builders of the Ust-Khantai Hydroelectric Power Station.

Access to Norilsk is restricted for foreign citizens, who are required to obtain a special permission to visit the city.

Name

Norilsk owes its name to its geographical location. The Norilsk river flows near the city, which is located near the Norilsk mountains. The travelers Khariton Laptev, Alexander Fyodorovich Middendorf, and Fedor Bogdanovich Schmidt mentioned the river Norilsk and the Norilsk mountains in their accounts.

According to the Soviet Arctic explorer Nikolay Urvantsev, the Norilsk river was probably given its former name, Norilka, in the 16th–17th centuries during the existence of the city Mangazeya, when the Taymyr was settled by Russian fishing people. It is likely that the name of the river comes from the word "''norilo''", a long thin pole that was used to stretch a string of trap nets from hole to hole under the ice.

Some argue the name derives from the Yukagir word "''nerile''", meaning "an earthen hill, consisting of some crags, cliffs" (the mountains around Norilsk do indeed resemble "nerile"). According to another version, the name of the river (Norilka) and, accordingly, the city comes from the Evenk word "narus" or "nioril" in the Yukagir language, which means "swamps". It may also derive from the name of an Evenk tribe, the "Nyurilians", or from the nearby Lake Murilskoye.

History

People knew about the minerals in the Norilsk area as early as the Bronze Age - a site with primitive equipment for smelting and casting, as well as raw materials (balls of native copper), has been discovered near Lake Pyasino.

In the 16th-17th centuries, copper from the Norilsk deposits was used by the inhabitants of Mangazeya, a city located beyond the Arctic Circle on the Taz River, which was an important regional trading and craft center. During the excavations of Mangazeya in 1972-1975, Professor Mikhail Ivanovich Belov discovered a vast foundry yard. Platinoids were found in the remains of the copper wares unearthed there.

Geologist and explorer Nikolay Urvantsev carried out further study of the Norilsk region during expeditions in 1919-1926, which confirmed the presence of rich deposits of coal and polymetallic ores in the western spurs of the Putorana Plateau.

In 1921, during one of Urvantsev's expeditions, a log cabin was built at the northern foot of Mount Schmidtikh. This hut is considered to be the first building in Norilsk. The cabin was later moved, and is now located near Norilsk Museum. It has the status of a historical monument.

Norilsk was founded at the end of the 1920s, but the official date of the city's foundation is traditionally held to be 1935, when the Norillag system of Gulag labour camp was established and prisoners began construction work on the A.P. Zavenyagin Norilsk Mining and Metallurgical Plant. Over the next few years Norilsk grew into a settlement for the Norilsk mining and metallurgical complex, and it was granted urban-type settlement status in 1939 and city status in 1953.

In the late 1940s, architects began to design a “new” city on the eastern shore of Lake Dolgoye, and Norillag prisoners started building work in 1951. In the summer of 1953, inmates from one of the Norillag camps, Gorlag, went on strike, sparking the Norilsk Uprising.

In 1947, construction began on the Salekhard–Igarka Railway, a line intended to cross northern Siberia. The railway was to have linked the Arctic coal-mining city of Vorkuta in European Russia to the Yenisei River via Salekhard and the Ob River. A spacious railway station was built in Norilsk, in the expectation that the city would eventually have a train service to Moscow, but construction of the Salekhard–Igarka Railway was halted after Joseph Stalin died in 1953.

To support the new city, the Norilsk railway to the port of Dudinka on the Yenisei River was built, first as a narrow-gauge line (winter 1935–36), later as a Russian standard gauge line (completed in the early 1950s).По рельсам истории
("Rolling on the rails of history"), ''Zapolyarnaya Pravda'', No. 109 (July 28, 2007)

Norillag was officially closed on August 22, 1956, by order No. 0348 of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. According to the Norillag archives, 16,806 prisoners died in Norilsk as a result of forced labor, starvation and intense cold during the years the camp was operational (1935–1956). Fatalities were especially high during World War II from 1942 to 1944 when food supplies were particularly scarce. An unknown, yet significant number of prisoners continued to work and die in the mines until around 1979.

Several memorial structures have been erected in the city to commemorate Norilsk's Gulag past. The Russian author Boris Ivanov wrote about the most famous of them in his book ''Paying for Platinum'': "In the center of Norilsk, on Gvardeyskaya Square, 'in an atmosphere of solemnity', a foundation stone was even set, promising the construction of a monument on this spot to those who created the basis of the plant and this miracle city. This basalt block, weighing 100 poods (), delivered from Mount Rudnaya. On a plaque attached to it are the words: 'An obelisk will be built here, an eternal reminder of the feat of the Norilsk people who conquered the tundra, created our city and the plant'. The foundation stone was laid recently by historical standards, on June 26, 1966..."

On July 17, 2020, a monument to the Metallurgists of Norilsk was unveiled at the site of the foundation stone. The foundation stone itself is part of the sculptural composition.

In the 1980s, the Norilsk Golgotha memorial complex was built on the slope of Mount Schmidtikh to house the mass graves of the prisoners who founded the city. Poland and the (ex-Soviet) Baltic states have erected monuments to their countrymen who died here. Icon lamps also burn in an Orthodox chapel set on the mountainside.

The discovery in 1966 of the Oktyabrskoye deposit of copper-nickel ores, located 40 kilometers northeast of Norilsk, was a milestone in the further development of the region. The mining settlement of Talnakh was founded at the same time. A new complex, the Nadezhda Metallurgical Plant, was built 15 km west of Norilsk to process the raw materials from the new deposits. Work began in 1971 and the complex was finished in 1981.

A number of Finnish companies assisted in the construction and automation of Norilsk's No. 2 copper and nickel smelters (in the Nadezhda complex), which led to substantial numbers of Finnish metallurgical and automation experts and their families coming to Norilsk from 1978 onward, creating a Finnish expat community of some hundreds of people for a couple of years.

Today Talnakh is the area's major mining/enrichment site. Enriched ore emulsion is pumped from here to Norilsk's metallurgy plants.

Enriched nickel and copper are transported from Dudinka to Murmansk by sea, and from there to the Monchegorsk enrichment and smelting plant on the Kola Peninsula, while more precious content goes upriver to Krasnoyarsk. This transportation takes place only during the summer. The port of Dudinka is closed and dismantled during spring flooding in late May, when waters can rise by up to (a typical spring occurrence on all Siberian rivers, caused by winter ice obstructing meltwater from upstream).

Norilsk-Talnakh continues to be a dangerous mine to work in. According to the mining company, there were 2.4 accidents per 1,000 workers in 2005. In 2017, Norilsk Nickel claimed that it had reduced its overall lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) by almost 60% since 2013.

In June 2020, 20,000 tons of diesel fuel spilled from the tank of an NTEK power plant, polluting hundreds of square kilometers and causing serious damage to the local ecosystem.

Norilsk remains a closed city, and foreign citizens require special permission to visit the area.

Administrative and municipal status

Within the Russian system of administrative divisions, it is, together with the urban-type settlement of Snezhnogorsk, Krasnoyarsk Territory, incorporated as the district city of Norilsk—an administrative unit with a status equal to that of the districts.Law #10-4765 As a municipal division, the district city of Norilsk is incorporated as the Norilsk Urban Okrug.Law #12-2697

Since 2005, the city of Norilsk has been divided into three geographically disparate administrative districts:

Central region (including Oganer) - 113,042

Talnakh - 48,478

Kayerkan - 21,181

Government

Norilsk City Council of Deputies

Elected: 10.09.2017

Formed: 21.09.2017. Executive term: 5 years

Chairman: Aleksandr Pestryakov

Source: NORILSK CITY DEPUTY COUNCIL

Mayor of Norilsk

27.01.2021-present — Dmitry Karasyov. Executive term: 5 years.

Legislative Assembly of the Krasnoyarsk Territory

In September 2021, the composition of the Legislative Assembly of the Krasnoyarsk Territory was updated. Sergei Sizonenko was elected deputy for Taymyr constituency No. 23.

Demographics

Population

The population of Norilsk is The large population increase between the 2002 and the 2010 Censuses is due to the merger of the towns of Kayerkan and Talnakh into Norilsk in December 2004 After the fall of the USSR the population dropped by 40,000, but this was offset by the subsequent merger of the towns of Kayerkan and Talnakh into Norilsk, maintaining a permanent population of 175,000. Including temporary residents, the population can reach up to 220,000.

Life expectancy for local residents is about 10 years less than average Russian life expectancy, which as of 2013 was around 69 years.

Ethnic composition

The city has an ethnically diverse population. As of 2010, the predominant ethnic and cultural groups were Russians, Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, Tatars, Lezgins, Chuvash, Bashkirs, Belarusians, Ossetians, Nogai, and Kazakhs. The population of Norilsk consists almost entirely of people who moved to the city in the second half of the 20th century and their descendants, but many of the descendants of prisoners who were amnestied in 1953 still live in the city. There are very few representatives of indigenous ethnicities - Nenets, Enets, Nganasans and Dolgans - in the city.

There were 77 recognized ethnic groups in Norilsk as of 2010.

As of January 1, 2021, in terms of population, the city ranked 103rd out of 1,116 cities in the Russian Federation.

Source — FEDERAL SERVICE OF STATE STATISTICS

Religion

Orthodox Christianity is the main religion in Norilsk. There is a Russian Orthodox cathedral, several Russian Orthodox churches and a Ukrainian Orthodox church. There is also a mosque in Norilsk. Built in 1998 and belonging to the local Tatar

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