Akademik

   Roughly translated as “Magnetic Mountain City,” Magnitogorsk is a city of over 400,000 located in the Chelyabinsk Oblast. It is one of the largest cities in Russia that does not serve as the administrative capital of its corresponding province. The city was built atop a mountain comprised almost completely of iron. Meant to rival Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and other famous industrial cities, the city emerged as a showcase of Stalinist industrialization. During the late 1930s, the city was closed to foreigners and not reopened until the 1980s. Having depleted its local iron, the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works has come to depend on materials shipped in from Kazakhstan. In post-Soviet times, the city—which suffers from high levels of crime, pollution, and unemployment—has emerged as a symbol of the ills of Soviet urban planning.