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Советская политика освоения Крайнего Севера и критика жизненных условий арктических городов в нарративах хрущевского времени
This article considers the way in which the development policy for the Extreme North during the post-Stalin era influenced criticism of living conditions in Arctic cities. With reference to periodicals published in Vorkuta, Norilsk, and Mirny, the author analyses how the official rhetoric that claimed to improve the well-being of the local population and change the social structure of northern cities contributed to a reflection on urban issues both in the former labour camps and in new industrial cities. The abolition of the gulag and the extensive exploitation of natural resources in the USSR’s Extreme North caused more people to migrate to the region in the first half of the 1950s. In official narratives of this period, the cities of the Extreme North became symbolic of the conquest of harsh nature: they were used as proof of the homogeneity of inhabited space and the fact that a Soviet reality could be created in any natural conditions. Mass immigration to these cities (and the outflow of workers from central regions) favoured the free circulation of information and the emergence of strong criticism of the living conditions in the cities in question.