[POST]Industrial Urals: Degtyarsk, a mining town with a foreign history

Degtyarsk (1100 miles away from Moscow) is a mining town, founded in 1914 on the site of the Degtyarskoye pyrite deposits.

One of the city's main attractions is a large mosaic portrait of Lenin.

Charcoal and tar were produced here back in the nineteenth century. Copper was discovered in the early twentieth century.

Pictured: A local resident shows a card depicting Stalin.

Many enterprises were owned by foreigners. And some mines had relatively exotic names: Paris, New York, London.

Now the plants are closed, and production has stopped.

A waste heap is an artificial mound of waste rock, dump soil and other substandard minerals, as well as industrial and household waste.

In 2009 Degtyarsk was included in the list of participants of the UNESCO route “World Cultural Heritage. Dialogue of Cultures. Dialogue of Civilizations.”

Degtyarsk became the fourth city in the Urals to be awarded this status, after Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Tagil and Lower Sergi.

A notorious event took place in Degtyarsk on May 1, 1960, when an American spy plane flown by Gary Powers was shot down near Povarnya village.

A Soviet interceptor MiG-19, piloted by Senior Lieutenant Sergei Safronov, was accidentally shot down as well. A monument to him was erected near the mining administration building.

Were it not for the Soviet pilot's heroism in preventing the plane from crashing into a May Day celebration in Degtyarsk, it could have led to a great tragedy.

Richard Nixon visited Degtyarsk in the summer of 1959 in his then capacity of US vice-president.

Nixon’s parents worked at a local copper mine in the period 1925-1930. The mine was run as a concession by the American firm Lena Goldfields, which also had operations in Russia.

Degtyarsk’s population as of 2014 is 15,000.