Norilsk () is an industrial closed city in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, located south of the western Taymyr Peninsula, around east of the Yenisey River and north of Krasnoyarsk. Norilsk is north of the Arctic Circle and 2,400 km from the North Pole. It has a permanent population of 176,735 as of 2024, and up to 220,000 including temporary inhabitants. It is the second-largest city in Krasnoyarsk Krai, after the administrative centre, Krasnoyarsk. It is the world's northernmost city with more than 175,000 inhabitants, and the second-largest city (after Murmansk) inside the Arctic Circle. Norilsk and Yakutsk are the only large cities in the continuous permafrost zone.
Norilsk is located atop some of the largest nickel deposits on Earth. Consequently, mining and smelting ore are the major industries. Norilsk is the center of a region where nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum, palladium, and coal are mined. The presence of mineral deposits in the Siberian Craton was known for two centuries before Norilsk was founded, but large-scale industrial mining only began after the Soviet Council of People's Commissars approved the construction of Norilsk Plant in 1935, which was completed by 1939. Production started with intermediary products, with the first converter matte being produced in 1942, but the Norilsk mines quickly grew to be a major source of Russia's nickel production. Prior to this, small scale coal mining existed in the region.
In 2004, two satellite cities (Talnakh and Kayerkan) became districts of the city of Norilsk, and Oganer became a suburb of Norilsk's Central District. The jurisdiction of Norilsk also extends to the settlement of Snezhnogorsk, which originated in 1963 as a settlement to accommodate the builders of the Ust-Khantai Hydroelectric Power Station. Access to Norilsk is restricted for foreign citizens, who are required to obtain special permission to visit.
Name Norilsk owes its name to its geographical location. The Norilsk river flows near the city, which is located near the Norilsk mountains. The travelers Khariton Laptev, Alexander Fyodorovich Middendorf, and Fedor Bogdanovich Schmidt mentioned the river Norilsk and the Norilsk mountains in their accounts.
According to the Soviet Arctic explorer Nikolay Urvantsev, the Norilsk river was probably given its former name, Norilka, in the 16th–17th centuries during the existence of the city Mangazeya, when the Taymyr was settled by Russian fishing people.Урванцев Н. Н. Введение // Открытие Норильска. — М.: Наука, 1981. — 174 с. — (Страницы истории нашей Родины). It is likely that the name of the river comes from the word norilo, a long thin pole that was used to stretch a string of trap nets from hole to hole under the ice.
Some argue the name derives from the Yukagir word nerile, meaning "an earthen hill, consisting of some crags, cliffs" (the mountains around Norilsk do indeed resemble neriles). Others suggest, the name of the river (Norilka) and, accordingly, the city name come from the Evenk word narus, or nioril in Yukaghir, which mean "swamps". It may also have originated from the name of an Evenk tribe, the Nyurilians; or, from the name of the nearby Lake Murilskoye.
History
People knew about the minerals in the Norilsk area as early as the Bronze Age. A site with primitive equipment for smelting and casting, as well as raw materials (balls of native copper), has been discovered near Lake Pyasino.
In the 16th–17th centuries, copper from the Norilsk deposits was used by the inhabitants of Mangazeya, a city located beyond the Arctic Circle on the Taz River, which was an important regional trading and craft center. During the excavations of Mangazeya in 1972–1975, professor Mikhail Ivanovich Belov discovered a vast foundry yard. Platinoids were found in the remains of the copper wares unearthed there.
Geologist and explorer Nikolay Urvantsev carried out further studies of the Norilsk region during expeditions between 1919 and 1926, which confirmed the presence of rich deposits of coal and polymetallic ores in the western spurs of the Putorana Plateau.
In 1921, during one of Urvantsev's expeditions, a log cabin was built at the northern foot of Mount Schmidt. This hut is considered to be the first building in Norilsk. The cabin was later moved, and is now located near Norilsk Museum. It has the status of a historical monument.
Norilsk was founded at the end of the 1920s, but the official date of the city's foundation is traditionally held to be 1935, when the Norillag system of Gulag labour camp was established and prisoners began construction work on the Norilsk Mining and Metallurgical Plant. Over the next few years Norilsk grew into a settlement for the Norilsk mining and metallurgical complex, and it was granted urban-type settlement status in 1939, and city status in 1953.
In the late 1940s, architects began to design a new city on the eastern shore of Lake Dolgoye, and Norillag prisoners started building work in 1951. In the summer of 1953, inmates from one of the Norillag camps, Gorlag, went on strike, sparking the Norilsk Uprising.
In 1947, construction began on the Salekhard–Igarka Railway, a line intended to cross northern Siberia. The railway was to have linked the Arctic coal-mining city of Vorkuta in European Russia to the Yenisei River via Salekhard and the Ob River. A spacious railway station was built in Norilsk, in the expectation that the city would eventually have a train service to Moscow, but construction of the Salekhard–Igarka Railway was halted after Joseph Stalin died in 1953.
To support the new city, the Norilsk railway to the port of Dudinka on the Yenisei River was built, first as a narrow-gauge line (winter 1935–36), later as a Russian standard gauge line (completed in the early 1950s).По рельсам истории ("Rolling on the rails of history"), Zapolyarnaya Pravda, No. 109 (July 28, 2007)
Norillag was officially closed on August 22, 1956, by order No. 0348 of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. According to the Norillag archives, 16,806 prisoners died in Norilsk as a result of forced labor, starvation and intense cold during the years the camp was operational (1935–1956). Fatalities were especially high during World War II from 1942 to 1944 when food supplies were particularly scarce. An unknown, yet significant number of prisoners continued to work and die in the mines until around 1979.
Several memorial structures have been erected in the city to commemorate Norilsk's Gulag past. Russian author Boris Ivanov wrote about the most famous one:
On July 17, 2020, a monument to the Metallurgists of Norilsk was unveiled at the site of the foundation stone. The foundation stone itself is part of the sculptural composition.
In the 1980s, the Norilsk Golgotha memorial complex was built on the slope of Mount Schmidtikh to house the mass graves of the prisoners who founded the city. Poland and the (ex-Soviet) Baltic states have erected monuments to their countrymen who died here. Icon lamps also burn in an Orthodox chapel set on the mountainside.
The discovery in 1966 of the Oktyabrskoye deposit of copper–nickel ores, located 40 kilometers northeast of Norilsk, was a milestone in the further development of the region. The mining settlement of Talnakh was founded at the same time. A new complex, the Nadezhda Metallurgical Plant, was built west of Norilsk to process the raw materials from the new deposits. Work began in 1971 and the complex was finished in 1981.
A number of Finnish companies assisted in the construction and automation of Norilsk's No. 2 copper and nickel smelters (in the Nadezhda complex), which led to substantial numbers of Finnish metallurgical and automation experts and their families coming to Norilsk from 1978 onward, creating a Finnish expat community of some hundreds of people for a couple of years.Minerals Yearbook 1978–79 Volume III Area Reports: International, United States Department of Mines, page 985, 1979.
Today Talnakh is the area's major mining and ore enrichment site. Enriched ore emulsion is pumped from here to Norilsk's metallurgy plants.
Enriched nickel and copper are transported from Dudinka to Murmansk by sea, and from there to the Monchegorsk enrichment and smelting plant on the Kola Peninsula, while more precious content goes upriver to Krasnoyarsk. This transportation takes place only during the summer. The port of Dudinka is closed and dismantled during spring flooding in late May, when waters can rise by up to (a typical spring occurrence on all Siberian rivers, caused by winter ice obstructing meltwater from upstream).
Norilsk-Talnakh continues to be a dangerous mine to work in. According to the mining company, there were 2.4 accidents per 1,000 workers in 2005. In 2017, Norilsk Nickel claimed that it had reduced its overall lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) by almost 60% since 2013.
In June 2020, 20,000 tons of diesel fuel spilled from the tank of an NTEK power plant, polluting hundreds of square kilometers and causing serious damage to the local ecosystem.
Norilsk remains a closed city, and foreign citizens require special permission to visit the area.
Administrative and municipal status Within the Russian system of administrative divisions, it is, together with the urban-type settlement of Snezhnogorsk, Krasnoyarsk Territory, incorporated as the district city of Norilsk—an administrative unit with a status equal to that of the districts.Law #10-4765 As a municipal division, the district city of Norilsk is incorporated as the Norilsk Urban Okrug.Law #12-2697
Since 2005, the city of Norilsk has been divided into three geographically disparate administrative districts:
Tsentralny District (including Oganer), with a population of 107,351 Talnakh, with a population of 48,502 Kayerkan, with a population of 20,882
Government
Norilsk City Council of Deputies The Norilsk City Council of Deputies was elected on September 11, 2022, with a five-year mandate. Its chairman is Aleksandr Pestryakov. FactionNumber of deputiesUnited Russia28Liberal Democratic Party of Russia3Communist Party of the Russian Federation3A Just Russia1Russian Ecological Party "The Greens"1New People1
Mayor of Norilsk The mayor of Norilsk has been Dmitry Karasyov since January 27, 2021. Following his first five-year term, he was re-elected on January 27, 2026. His term of office will expire in January 2031.
Legislative Assembly of the Krasnoyarsk Territory In September 2021, the composition of the Legislative Assembly of the Krasnoyarsk Territory was updated. Sergey Sizonenko was elected deputy for Taymyr constituency No. 23.
Demographics Population The population of Norilsk as of 2021 is 174,453. After the fall of the USSR the population dropped by 40,000, but this was offset by the subsequent merger of the towns of Kayerkan and Talnakh into Norilsk, maintaining a permanent population of 175,000. Including temporary residents, the population can reach up to 220,000.
Life expectancy for local residents is about 10 years less than average Russian life expectancy, which as of 2013 was around 69 years.
Ethnic composition
The city has an ethnically diverse population. As of 2021, the predominant ethnic and cultural groups were Russians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians, Tatars, Bashkirs, Nogais, Lezgins, Kazakhs, Ossetians, Chuvash and Kyrgyz. The population of Norilsk consists almost entirely of people who moved to the city in the second half of the 20th century and their descendants, but many of the descendants of prisoners who were amnestied in 1953 still live in the city. There are very few representatives of indigenous ethnicities—Nenets, Enets, Nganasans and Dolgans—in the city.
There were 77 recognized ethnic groups in Norilsk as of 2021. EthnicityPopulation Percentage Russians107,189 81.7% Azerbaijanis4,694 3.6% Ukrainians2,683 2.0% Tatars1,792 1.4% Bashkirs1,769 1.3% Nogais1,748 1.3% Lezgins1,588 1.2% Others9,806 7.5%