But Akhmetzyanov was not a volunteer. He was a dispossessed peasant who had been kicked off his farm in Tatarstan by the communist authorities and sent to Magnitogorsk, where he and his family were forced to work and live in a settlement surrounded by guards and barbed wire.
They lived in tents for the autumn, then an earth-floored barrack through the harsh winter and hot summer, without basic amenities or medical care. Decades of heavy industry have polluted the air and water, but few questions are asked of the now privately owned Magnitogorsk Iron and Steelworks MMK.
Magnitogorsk lies near the northern edge of the steppe: the tawny, featureless grasslands that extend west toward the Volga River and east into nearby Kazakhstan.
Many people commute from Europe to Asia for work each day, travelling from the residential western side of the Ural River to the steel mill on the eastern side. Iron and steel became the watchwords of the era. It became the very embodiment of the push to create an industrialised, socialist society.
Magnitogorsk was reportedly inspired by the US Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, then the largest in the world. The first years of construction, however, were chaos, as the impossibly short deadlines set by Moscow collided with the total lack of infrastructure, chronic fires and a shortage of skilled workers and equipment. According to Vasilyev, 40, families of dispossessed peasants were sent to the Chelyabinsk region, many of them Turkish-speaking Tatars and mostly to Magnitogorsk.
In addition, more than 26, non-political convicts had been sent to Magnitogorsk by the end of The overcrowded, mostly dirt-floored tents and ramshackle barracks in which early residents lived were buffeted by blizzards in the winter and dust storms in the summer.
Rats, bed bugs and lice tormented their occupants. Other newcomers reverted to rural ways, building mud huts dug deep into the ground. Crowded, cold, filthy conditions, combined with the lack of clean water and scarcity of food and medical care, resulted in epidemics of typhus, malaria and scarlet fever.
Even today, the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steelworks website makes no mention of this forced labour on its history page. On 31 January , in temperatures below degrees, blast furnace number one was blown in; the following year, it had to be shut down again and completely rebuilt. Although officials were reluctant to allocate labour or resources away from the factory, a city still had to be built around it. Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Italians, Finns, Romanians, Turks and Poles also streamed in to take part in the giant construction project.
The Americans didn't believe the project could be implemented quickly. Arthur McKee said : "You want to steam ahead at full speed. You are in too much of a rush. It took 12 and a half years to build the world's largest steel works - our American Gary steel mill. Add to this another 11 years which it took to design.
And you expect to put your plant into operation in three years! The first blast furnace was designed in just three months and its foundation laid on July 1, And already on Feb. The town itself dates its beginnings to June 30, , when the first train arrived at the local railway station. The first residents of Magnitogorsk were housed in simple workers' hostels.
But Soviet authorities realized that hundreds of thousands of square meters of standardized housing, capable of being put up within tight deadlines, would be needed to meet the needs of the growing town. It was an acute problem in more places than Magnitogorsk: A policy of accelerated industrialization had been proclaimed in the USSR in the years of the first five-year economic plan , and this produced a need for housing to accommodate the workers of the factories that were being built all over the country.
While the USSR in the s was still building houses with bricks, in Germany houses were already being put up using large prefabricated masonry blocks, which was simpler, cheaper and faster. The Frankfurt am Main architect Ernst May was invited to come to Moscow in , and he arrived with a group of like-minded fellow architects to implement the principles of rationalism at the major building sites of Magnitogorsk, Nizhny Tagil, Novokuznetsk and another dozen or more towns.
In May's design process , everything was organized as on a Ford assembly line. And ready-made templates for the construction of residential developments made it possible to plan the lay-out of future settlements and rapidly to draw up whole blueprints for general urban development schemes. Subsequently, the method of designing housing projects developed by May was adopted by Soviet town planners and scaled up to the whole of the Soviet Union. In actual fact, the USSR tried to make what was already a low-budget approach to construction even cheaper, and that is why May's houses in Magnitogorsk were tenanted and settled without mains water, drains or kitchens which were not part of the design , and sometimes without internal partitions.
This, of course, left the architect very unhappy. However, by the time that May completed his plans for Magnitogorsk, construction of both factory and housing had already started. The sprawling factory and enormous cleansing lakes had left little room available for development, and May therefore had to redesign his settlement to fit the modified site. This modification resulted in a city being more "rope-like" than linear. Although the industrial area is concentrated on the left bank of the river Ural, and most residential complexes are located on its right bank, the city inhabitants are still subjected to noxious fumes and factory smoke.
The book Behind the Urals , by John Scott, documents the industrial development of Magnitogorsk during the s. Scott discusses the fast-paced industrial and social developments during Stalin's first five-year plan and the rising paranoia of the Soviet regime preceding the Great Purge of the late s.
In foreigners were told to leave, and Magnitogorsk was declared a closed city. There is little reliable information about events and development of the city during the closed period. The city played an important role during World War II because it supplied much of the steel for the Soviet war effort.
Furthermore, its strategic location east of the Ural Mountains made Magnitogorsk safe from seizure by the German Army. During perestroika, the closed-city status was removed, and foreigners were allowed to visit the city again. The years after perestroika brought a significant change in the life of the city; the Iron and Steel Plant was reorganized as a joint-stock company Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works MISW or MMK , which helped with the reconstruction of the railway and the building of a new airport.
With the depletion of the substantial local iron-ore reserves, Magnitogorsk has to import raw materials from Sokolvsko-Sarbaisky deposit in northern Kazakhstan. On December 31st, , an apartment block in the city of Magnitogorsk suffered a gas explosion and collapse which killed 39 of its residents, and injured 17 more. Within the framework of administrative divisions, it is incorporated as the City of Magnitogorsk—an administrative unit with the status equal to that of the districts.
Magnitogorsk was mentioned in the Blacksmith Institute's survey of the world's worst polluted cities, placed in the report's unranked list of the 25 most-polluted places outside the top ten. Pollutants include lead, sulfur dioxide, heavy metals and other air pollutants. Map Hotels Places.
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