Without a Past

Kirovsk has appeared on the maps in 1929, because an apatite deposit was discovered in Khibiny Mountains. Development of deposits needed workers. So simultaneously with the development of the mine, the construction of a settlement for workers began. This place in the middle of  Khibiny Mountains wasn't comfortable for living. There is very unstable weather, heavy winds, storms, avalanches. Kirovsk has been built by "special settles" and prisoners of the Gulag. "Special settles" were the people whose past was declared as something wrong, who were evicted from their previous homes to another place. Maybe for this reason, Kirovsk was conceived as a town which wouldn't have religions and a past. It considered that only the present and the future would be in this town. The denial of the past can be called some kind of absence, amnesia, white paper.

Now, almost 100 years later, only one highway leads into this town. The railway station doesn't serve traffic. Trains from the mine, loaded with apatite, pass through the town. There are wide industrial zones in the town which coexist with multi-apartment buildings and two-story houses. Snow, which dominates during 7-8 months in the year, falls down and forms huge snow drifts like mountains. For some time during the winter the snowdrifts also acquire the color of the mountains that are covered with snow. White, gray and black and yellow. Many houses have similar colors. Building, which looks as empty brick blocks, are jammed between the mountains and snow drifts. It seems that houses simply pasted into free space, that along with the decision to abandon the past, the city has lost its third dimension. It is the very same town, in which there is only eternal, preserved, frozen present.

Kirovsk is one of those one-industry towns which has the most difficult socioeconomic situation. It belongs to the so-called red zone one-industry towns.