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.[19]
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.[20] During the excavations of Mangazeya in 1972–1975, professor Mikhail Ivanovich Belov discovered a vast foundry yard.[21] Platinoids were found in the remains of the copper wares unearthed there.
Geologist and explorer Nikolay Urvantsev carried out further studies of the Norilsk region during expeditions between 1919 and 1926, which confirmed the presence of rich deposits of coal and polymetallic ores in the western spurs of the Putorana Plateau.[22]
In 1921, during one of Urvantsev's expeditions, a log cabin was built at the northern foot of Mount Schmidt.[23] 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.[24]
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 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.[25]
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).[26]
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. Russian author Boris Ivanov wrote about the most famous one: "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 [3611 lb], 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.[27]
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.
Also see description of the Norilsk Golgotha and its commemoration in the early 21st century.[28]
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.[29] 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.[30]
Today Talnakh is the area's major mining and ore 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 20 m (a typical spring occurrence on all Siberian rivers, caused by winter ice obstructing meltwater from upstream).[31]
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.[32]
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.[33]
