Authors

Irina Redkina¹;  ¹ Universität Hamburg, Germany

Discussion

This paper explores a history of a single-industrial city of Mezhdurechensk (South-Western Siberia) from its foundation in the 1950s to the mid-2010. A home for the Russian biggest underground mine Raspadskaya, Mezhdurechensk is famous for being a site of the pioneer coal miner strikes in 1989. A modern(ist) Soviet city as many other monotowns, Mezhdurechensk was built on the ideological set of urban space, welfare, and industry –a triad for an egalitarian socialist society which was supposed to serve as an anchor of a “classless society”. Building my research on ideological meanings of such concepts as monotown (monogorod) and micro-district (mikrorajon), I aim to shed light on socio-politico-ideological context, to which these cities were designed. I argue that from the prespective of socialist modernity - and in a broader context of the 20th century's modernity - monotowns were planned as “cities for future”. Although almost the total process of deindustrialization was expected after the dissolution of the USSR, industrial cities still play an important (if not central) role in many national economies as well as in the system of global resource-extraction capitalism. This paper investigates the transformation of post-socialist Mezhdurechensk, and the role the built infrastructure of the monotown  plays in it.