Magnitogorsk: The Soviet City Built from Scratch

hello everybody welcome back to a brand new episode of mega projects this one is all about magnetogorsk and i looked up the pronunciation on that but just to alert you there's gonna be some russian pronunciations in this video i'm almost certainly gonna get some of them wrong so well that is just kind of how it is let's just jump into it the place where europe and asia meet the motto of the city of magnetogorsk speaks of its unique geographical location but tells only a fraction of the darkly fascinating story of this soviet city that was essentially built from scratch located in chelyabinsk oblast in russia magnetogorsk lies at the southern edge of the ural mountains besides the ural river set on the boundary of europe and asia it's a city where a commute to and from work often involves changing continents it is a place where time seems to hover built to satisfy stalin's increasingly ambitious desires for a mighty industrialized soviet union mannitogorsk was designed to be the world's first fully planned city it was to be the envy of the world a socialist utopia but things didn't quite work out like that when we're building a socialist utopia when does it ever what was supposed to be a model soviet city degenerated into a hellish place of forced labor and horrific pollution that still lingers to this very day today it is a city that lies in limbo the street still haunted by the past the cooling towers of the steel plants belching out smoke over in the distance [Music] while the city that we know as magnetogorsk rose in the 1930s the area was inhabited well before then it began life in 1734 as part of the oremburg line a series of defensive ports built during the reign of empress elizabeth the small settlement grew steadily over the next decade and in 1747 construction of its first church began which became the church of the holy trinity iron ore mining began in the area in the early 1750s when two entrepreneurs successfully petitioned the empress to mine nearby mount magnet nya magnetic which is also where the town gets its name the mountain was said to be so rich with iron ore that compasses would dance with confusion while in its presence and birds would refuse to fly over it the petition was successful and in 1759 iron ore mining began [Music] the soviet union's five-year plans were a series of centralized economic developments generally designed to boost electricity capital goods and agriculture output similar concepts were implemented in other communist nations with varying degrees of success in total the soviet union commenced 13 five-year plans between 1928 and 1991 when the ussr finally collapsed think of them as short bursts of productivity with really specific and often just wildly unattainable goals not all of them lasted five years and when you consider that there were so many so close together it's easy to view the whole thing as sort of a maniacal never-ending surge forward but that's not to say that they didn't create success it just depends on what exactly you considered to be success between 1928 and 1940 the number of workers throughout the soviet union in industry construction transportation grew from 4.6 million to 12.6 million while production output in factories absolutely skyrocketed the changes they undeniably made the ussr one of the leading industrial nations in the world it also caused utter devastation though and during the 1932-1933 famine only between 5.7 and 7 million people starved as a result of stalin's collectivization of agriculture in which the nation's agriculture production was brought under state control and heavily redirected towards the booming industrial cities it's thought that as many as 14 million people may have died due to these policies the first five-year plan began in 1928 and it was during this period that the ambitious plans for magnetogorsk were drawn up at the time the soviet union was still dogged by a stigma of backwardness but with the words of joseph stalin himself it would quickly become a country of steel one of the flagship programs of the first five-year plan would be the magnetogorsk metallurgical complex mmk which at its peak would eventually become one of the largest steel plants in the world and the city of magnetogorsk would be built almost from scratch around this factory the plan was to build a one industry city in the same mold as two cities in the united states gary in indiana and pittsburgh in pennsylvania there's a place called gary so who should we name it after i know a bloke called gary in 1928 a soviet delegation traveled to the u.s to collaborate with an american team and draw up plans that would effectively mimic the steel mill in gary no doubt this was something that was later brushed under the carpet as the soviets wouldn't have wanted its citizens to know that the pride of soviet production was in fact an american copy it was not just the metalworks that were designed to a u.s layout a german architect by the name of ernst may was recruited to plan the residential side of magnetogorsk the whole city was first planned as a linear city design essentially something like new york but further elongated the idea was to segregate different sectors by their uses into parallel zones so the industrial section would be altogether as would the residential area there were even lofty plans to position the housing upwind of the industrial sector meaning its residents would be free from the noxious gases coming from the complex that doesn't sound like a lofty plan that just sounds like a really good idea and it should definitely be done i mean why not there would also be plenty of green areas between the zones making it not only a highly productive city but a delightful place to live as you could probably guess it didn't work out like that shocker i know by the time construction began on the city work was already well underway on the mmk unsurprisingly considering the five-year plan was all about raising production output the complex took precedence over everything else the sprawling industrial center and the vast cleansing lakes that it required meant that areas initially put aside with residents well-being in mind were just quickly swallowed up soviet propaganda often painted the early settlers at magnetogorsk as great heroes of the communist cause pioneers building something that the whole of the ussr could be immensely proud of the reality was completely different most of those who arrived in magnetogorsk did so either under duress or because of hopelessness after their lands had been confiscated during the collectivization of agriculture these were not heroes of the communist cause most were pitiful hungry peasants the first trainload of special resettlers as they were known arrived in may 1931 with an estimated 40 000 families eventually making the journey many being turkish-speaking tartars coming from the west many had been pulled from gulag prisons around russia by the end of 1933 roughly 26 000 non-political prisoners had been brought to magnetogorsk and just put to work yes socialist utopia everybody the planned utopian industrial city i know it's an oxymoron if i ever heard one was little more than a prison with thousands forced to work under armed guard with the settlement surrounded by barbed wire this was not a place you came and went from easily it's therefore no surprise to hear that this city was constructed at a record-breaking pace you put a gun to somebody's head and you'll be surprised how quickly they can work i mean how do you think i make so many videos there's someone i'm just kidding as many as 250 000 workers came to magnetogorsk during its first phase of construction and the conditions in which they lived were nothing short of atrocious when workers first arrived they were housed in flimsy tents it was only as the first winter approached that they moved into rat-infested barracks in the 1930s the average inhabitant of magnetogorsk received just 1.9 square meters in space and it's probably no surprise to hear that the human cost was horrific it's believed that around 10 000 people died during the first five years most from hunger disease and exhaustion with the total number who died to build magnetogorsk almost impossible to say as was often the case in the soviet union government officials and their families lived in relative luxury in comparison to the foul conditions the workers found themselves in in the early days foreign supervisors had been brought in to oversee the chaotic work and they had been housed in what came to be known as the american town a fairly pleasant wooden complex set well away from the masses once the foreigners had been ordered out in 1937 this became the home for all the high-ranking soviet officials [Music] the construction of magnetogorsk was indeed completed at an astonishing speed but the early years were absolute chaos the vast majority of the workers brought to the city were completely unskilled for this kind of labor and the deadlines handed down from moscow ranged from the unrealistic to the are you absolutely crazy but the soviets knew how to squeeze what they could out of their workers socialist competitions were often set up with each competing team racing to complete certain sections this sounds like a recipe for disaster the results especially in the early years were really badly built and well downright dangerous in 1930 two teams raced each other to build a dam across a river the result was a rather shoddy piece of engineering that wasn't even deep enough for its original purpose the dam was eventually built over by a larger second attempt at a dam the mmk began operations on the 31st of january 1932 with the residential parts rising sporadically around it but utopian plans were altered from the very get-go when ernst may finally arrived in 1930 found that the land was not only unsuitable for his vision but that local officials had already commenced building work what was once planned as a semi-elegant linear city became a soccer rod or socialist city complete with seemingly never-ending superblocks of rectangular three and four-story flat buildings located south of the metallurgical complex may's vision of buildings well-spaced to provide plenty of light was certainly well-meaning but during the brutal winter months the space between the superblocks caused great corridors of freezing air the inside of these superblocks was sparse and some might say rather grim one interesting fact about this whole project was that many of the original superblocks were built without any kitchens was this because the soviets had finally perfected forced starvation well no not really it had much more to do with the soviet union's desire to emancipate women well sort of i mean a woman slaving away in the kitchen at home is obviously a woman that couldn't slave away in a factory for the good of the regime the construction of canteens throughout the city was designed to free women from the constraints of the patriarchal society but in reality their time was simply requisitioned for the state's purposes the city seemed to be surging forward in certain areas just as it was falling flat on its face in others magnetogorsk received its first streetcar in 1935 but still had no paved roads and relatively few vehicles the city would eventually have the second largest streetcar network in the entire country after leningrad by 1939 magnetogorsk had a bulging population of 200 000 inhabitants but only one hospital crime was rife and it was quickly becoming clear that this soviet dream city was in fact an absolute nightmare perhaps sensing this soviet authorities had deemed magnetogorsk a closed city in 1937 and ordered out all foreigners it's not a good sign this was a state that existed until the reformation period of the 1980s for this reason exact information of how quickly the city sprang up during this time is a little bit sketchy the city had its heights during world war ii when roughly half of all steel used by soviet forces originated from the mmk of the 56 000 men working in the factory at the time 30 000 were sent to the front lines and were replaced by the women of the city fortunately they weren't in the kitchen so they could work in the steel mill a large memorial which i think i can safely say is incredibly soviet lies on the banks of the river and portrays a magnetogorsk worker handing over a huge sword to a soviet soldier those in the city still boast that every second tank and every third shell during the war came from their city today mmk still produces vast amounts of steel but with the nearby mountain depleted it's all now travels from rodney in kazakhstan and the kursk magnetic anomaly of kursk and belgarrod in western russia the size of the production plant is simply staggering with one workshop all located under one roof being more than a mile in length the mmk produces 400 different types of steel and in 2014 13 million tons of crude steel left the plant along with 12.2 tons of commercial steel products it remains the very heart and soul of the city employing 38 of magnetogorsk's working age population it's almost unheard of to me somebody in the city who does not have a family connection to a current or past mmk worker but all this heavy industry has come at an equally heavy cost russia's state statistics service ranked magneto gorsk as the third most polluted city in russia in 2015 and that makes me really wonder what cities beat it because this place is terribly terribly polluted levels of benzopyrene a carcinogen linked to lung cancer was found to be 23 times the recommended limit while wastewater from the mmk and other industries is pumped into the ural river in vast quantities according to environmentalists millions of cubic meters of industrial waste with high levels of nitrates and other chemicals are deposited into the water each year one environmental group eco magnetica has stated that only one in every 20 children born in the city is completely free of health problems and allergies while only one percent of all children living in the city are characterized as in good health by local hospitals the official russian stance is of course rather different it claims that pollution problems are vastly exaggerated and the city has spent millions in the last decades cleaning itself up whether you want to believe the russian government on that well i'll just leave it up to you and it's not just pollution that is a major problem on the 31st of december 2018 a gas explosion rocked an apartment block in the city leading to its partial collapse in total 39 people died in the accident which has shed light on magnetogorsk's crumbling and often unsafe structures the apartment building flung together in the 1970s is sadly emblematic of a system that has prioritized industry and production over its inhabitants from day one the story of magnetogorsk this polluted city that was built from scratch has been lathered by plenty of glorious propaganda over its 90 year history russia is still a long way from confronting the atrocities that occurred during the stalin era and it isn't particularly surprising that so many still live and work in magnetogorsk in 2018 it had a population of around 416 thousand many don't want to talk about the past it's easier to focus on the glories of the second world war rather than the thousands who died building this gritty industrial city but with more and more health problems emerging magnetogorsk may have to look at itself in the mirror a lot sooner than it might like so i really hope you found the video interesting if you did you know what to do smash that like button below if you've got a suggestion i don't actually remember if this was a suggestion or what i came up with probably i saw it in the comments because most of these i make these days come from you guys suggesting things in the comments so do that below upload the ones you like and you will probably see them here at some point on megaprojects and as always thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 742,620

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Id: c3HC3TYqtoc

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020