Mining town lives uneasily with its gulag past

Surrounded on all sides by tracts of frozen tundra, the Arctic city of Norilsk in Russia occupies one of the remotest locations of any in the world.

No road or railway reaches this place and access is restricted for foreigners, who must apply months in advance for a permit to fly here.

Huge deposits of copper-nickel ore were discovered in Norilsk in 1920 by a small party of pioneers led by Nikolai Urvantsev, a geologist. By the late 1930s, thousands of prisoners were toiling at Norilsk in a forced labour camp. Known as Norillag, it was a node in the network of similar camps that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn would later refer to in his book The Gulag Archipelago. Inmates fought biting winds and snow storms in winter.

Out of the camp, which closed in 1956, grew modern-day Norilsk. It is dominated to this day by the mines and factories built by the prisoners, and by generations of Soviet and Russian citizens who would follow them to the north in search of the ‘‘long rouble’’ – the perks and high salaries afforded to residents in exchange for their tolerance of the punishing conditions.

Norilsk’s roots in the gulag are a matter of truth, regret and vexation for those who live here. Today the city is dominated by Nornickel, the metals and mining operation, or kombinat, run by the tycoon Vladimir Potanin. It employs almost 60,000 people in a population of 170,000.

Nornickel is ambivalent about its gulag past. At its Nadezhda metallurgical plant outside town, a display in its two-room museum exhibits coils of barbed wire and pictures of watchtowers, in recognition of the business’s dark early chapter. A portrait on the wall of the man who was both first commandant of the camp and first director of the kombinat faces another across the room of a director from the 1980s.

Public relations officers working for Nornickel say the company has nothing to hide, but they are irked that foreign news reports about the business so often mention its history as a gulag. ‘‘Why doesn’t Hugo Boss get this treatment?’’ they ask. The German fashion brand made uniforms for the Nazis.

The city museum also calibrates its response to the past. Behind it, preserved like a temple, is the wooden house in which Urvantsev and his wife spent the winter of 1921. Inside the museum, an exhibition that takes up a whole floor is dedicated to his exploration of the north. Only a small photograph and a few lines of text record the fact that he later ended up in Norillag, on a trumped-up charge of ‘‘wrecking’’.

In fairness, Norilsk has several memorials to the gulag dead, including a cluster called Golgotha at the foot of a hill. These are dedicated to victims sent here during World War II from Poland, the Baltic states and elsewhere. Some were partisans who resisted Soviet occupation.

Larisa Stryuchkova, a tour guide and historian, says these memorials commemorate ‘‘our enemies’’, and dislikes the wording on some of the plaques. One calls Norillag a concentration camp, but it wasn’t that bad, she says. ‘‘These monuments were erected in the 1990s, when we liked to pour ash on our heads about the past. I don’t think they’d be put up now.’’

President Vladimir Putin said last year that ‘‘excessive demonisation’’ of Joseph Stalin was being used by foreigners to suggest that ‘‘today’s Russia carries on itself some kind of birthmarks of Stalinism’’.

Down Lenin Street from the Norilsk museum, Yelizaveta Obst runs a group for victims of Stalinist repression and their children. She was born in the city in 1949, after her ethnic German father was deported here.

She is grateful, she says, to Nornickel for sending members of her group on trips abroad and across Russia, but she dislikes suggestions the Golgotha victims are undeserving of sympathy because of their nationality.- The Times