Location, life of prisoners. Colony "Polar Owl"

Colony "Polar Owl" - This is a special regime correctional facility. Serial killers, state criminals, dangerous recidivists are serving their sentences here. The colony is designed for 1014 places, including a settlement site for 100 places and a strict regime zone for 450 people. The correctional institution is considered one of the most remote places of deprivation of liberty, it is surrounded by countless hills and the river Sob.

Colony "Polar Owl"

Where is the correctional facility located? The colony is located in the village of Kharp, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. The penitentiary is located beyond the Arctic Circle on the border Northern Urals and tundra, surrounded by hills, near the banks of the Sob River. The nearest city to the colony is located 1920 kilometers from Labytnangi.

The village of Kharp was formed in 1961. This was originally a prison camp. The convicts were engaged in the construction of the railway. Later, the camp was transformed into a camp for especially dangerous repeat offenders. Starting from the 70s of the twentieth century, it received the code name YaTs-34/18. Since 1981, the institution was renamed and from that time began to function as Correctional Colony No. 18. Convicted for serious crimes continued to arrive here. Since 2005, the institution has been called "FKU IK-18 UFSIN of Russia in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug". Now it is a special regime penal colony for "Polar Owl" - this is an unofficial name that was given in honor of the bird monument located on the territory.

How to get to the correctional facility

Prisoners from Moscow are transported in two ways - by train and by plane. The first is long, takes two days. By plane, you need to fly only three hours to the airport in Salekhard. Then, on a passing vehicle, you need to get to the ferry crossing. The ferry will transport you to the city of Labytnangi, from where you can take a transport to the village of Kharp.

Life within the walls of the institution

The Polar Owl colony is a subdivision that can function autonomously at the expense of its own communal facilities. The correctional facility has a boiler house, a bakery, a diesel power plant, a canteen, an auto repair shop, and production departments for crushed stone. There are also marble, sewing, turning, carpentry workshops, a workshop for sewing boots. Prisoners working at these facilities not only provide for themselves necessary items but also fulfill the orders of the population and enterprises. The institution breeds birds and pigs. There is a chapel on the territory, which was consecrated by the archbishop of the Tobolsk-Tyumen diocese Dimitry.

Convicts are allowed to receive a parcel once a year. You can go for a walk once a day for 1.5 hours. Prisoners walk in a small cage. A visit to the bathhouse is limited to ten-minute showers once a week. The radio is on throughout the day. The cells contain a bed, a table, a bedside table, a closed shelf where food is stored, a shelf for toiletries, as well as a water tank and a coat rack, and a toilet.

Rules for staying in the institution

The colony of the special regime "Polar Owl" includes single and double cells. Relatives of prisoners write that they are not allowed to lie down on the bed during the day, and that they can only whisper to their cellmates. When leaving the cell, the convicts are searched. To all commands of employees, prisoners must answer: “Yes, citizen chief.” All movements around the territory of the institution are carried out only in handcuffs, in a bent position. Convicts are not allowed to communicate during walks, when visiting the bathhouse and toilet. Visits with relatives are allowed (no longer than 2 hours), but the possibility of personal meetings is excluded. Sports events, watching movies are prohibited, as well as the opportunity to improve your education.

General information about the institution

The Polar Owl colony accepts prisoners who have committed particularly serious crimes. Pichushkin Alexander (Bitsevsky maniac), (former police major), guilty of the mass execution of Pomazun Sergey, is serving his term in this institution. There are many convicted Muslims in IK who were accused of terrorism. Thus, the colony "Polar Owl" took in Nikolai Korolev, the head of the neo-Nazi terrorist organization "Spas", and the former terrorist Kulaev Nur-Pasha.

The penitentiary is located beyond the Arctic Circle, where the climate is harsh, full-fledged summer lasts only one month. The Polar Owl colony, whose photos are rarely seen in the media, is a hard-to-reach place of detention. The curator is the Federal Security Service of Russia. FSB officers often come to the correctional facility, carry out checks, and study the life of convicts. Prisoners can write complaints about the misbehavior of employees and requests for a reduction in the sentence.

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A new raw material base for ferrous metallurgy is being formed in the Polar Urals

C.V. ROGACHEV

Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. Priuralsky district. Harp village. Symbolic sign at the railroad. Above - "flashes", "northern lights", meaning the name of the village. Below them are images of an excavator (extraction of mineral raw materials: in the past - mainly crushed stone, now also chromites) and a reinforced concrete slab (the Yamalzhelezobeton enterprise, which produced structures for gas workers in the YNAO). On the left (on the shadow side) below - the earth's hemisphere and the inscription "67th parallel".

Was it Harp?

Was. Harp arose long before chromium was mined on Rayiz, and even before the discovery of chromites here. The village began in the 1950s, when Pechora highway a railway line was laid to Labytnangi (it was to become the first section of the great transpolar route Salekhard-Igarka). It started from Podgornaya station. The title clearly conveys geographical position: at the eastern slope, at the foot Ural mountains, under Rayiz. Later, perhaps not wanting to humiliate the settlement with the prefix "sub-", the stations gave the opposite in vertical coordinates, high, the name is Northern Lights, or, in Nenets, Kharp. After all, although Kharp is a Russian settlement, it still lies in the Yamalo-Nenets district (then the autonomous ones were still called national).

The population of the village is 7 thousand people.

Harp in the Sever area

Despite the Yamalo-Nenets and, accordingly, Tyumen affiliation, Kharp, hanging on an iron branch growing from the Komi ASSR, was essentially a continuation of the Komi. The continuation of the system of corrective labor institutions, which had long been based in the Komi, also stretched here. In 1961, a corrective labor colony number 3 (ITK-3) was founded near the Kharp station.

The main enterprises of the settlement were laid down in 1969 a crushed stone quarry, a crushing and screening factory and a non-metallic materials plant. Subsequently, they were merged into the Yamalneftegazzhelezobeton company. They made reinforced concrete sleepers for gas pipelines, piles for building houses on permafrost, slabs for roads. And all this - through Labytnangi - went beyond the Ob: to geologists and gas workers. They did what was necessary to master the energy resources of the West Siberian North.

Harp. Church on the territory of a correctional labor colony.
Photo by O. Gusarov. 2007 Sobory.ru (People's catalog of Orthodox architecture)

Relying on the Cis-Ural North, Kharp served as one of the base points for the development of the gas Trans-Urals. In the late 1970s, when the activities of gas workers in the Yamalo-Nenets District sharply intensified, the need for precast concrete increased. The forces of ITK-3 were not enough, and in Kharp in 1981 another colony was placed - ITK-18. She became the main reservoir of labor for production. The convicts built the North microdistrict of Kharpa; they erected a kindergarten "Smile".

The 18th is a very remarkable place in the penitentiary system. This is one of the five colonies intended for the maintenance of prisoners for life, or, as they are called, "death row".

The 3rd colony of Kharp (ITK-3, or "troika") also recently received special fame: in 2005-2006. P.L., the co-founder of Menatep Bank, was imprisoned here. Lebedev, convicted in the same case with the co-owner of the Yukos oil company, the former Deputy Minister of Energy of the Russian Federation (in the Yeltsin era) M.B. Khodorkovsky. Then Harp became a salon celebrity - he was visited by correspondents of almost all the vainglorious Moscow publications.

This is how the Izvestia correspondent described these places in 2005: “Two mountains seem to hang over the zone. When Lebedev was taken to Kharp, one of them, the one that is now covered with snow, was still completely red, because of the autumn foliage on the trees, but the second one, then and now, is completely black. It's the chromites coming to the surface. There is so much ore in the mountain that for many years it has been mined here on an industrial scale and sent in railway cars for processing to Chelyabinsk. And these spurs of the Polar Urals are rich in jasper, jade, serpentine, volcanic tuff. They are bread for the prisoners from the “troika”, colony OG No. 98/3, where Platon Lebedev is now imprisoned. Candlesticks, caskets, coffee table tops made of stone - a significant component of the income of the colony.

Change of milestones: Harp in the Ural area

And indeed, stone caskets - as in real Ural Bazhov's tales. Since the 90s, Kharp has lost its significance as a “construction gate” to the gas Yamal. The production of prefabricated reinforced concrete became too expensive (imported cement rose in price, railway tariffs went up sharply), and the activity of Yamalzhelezobeton almost collapsed. The colonies "closed in on themselves." Kharp lost the significance of a step on the spatial ladder Center-Komi-Polar Urals-North of Western Siberia.

And then the Ural industrialists paid attention to him. Indeed, the Urals, even if the Polar one, is not just a stone from which you can fill crushed stone - a building material for gas workers. It seems to be metal ores, and coal, and gems. That, thanks to which the Middle and Southern Urals developed, and what is already sorely lacking there. In the Kharpa region, a new wind of interest was drawn - not from the southwest, but directly from the south.

Hey, bludgeon, oop-oop!

The potential riches of the Subpolar and Polar Urals have been talked about for a long time. However, the geological knowledge of these hard-to-reach and very unfavorable territories for life is low. Many deposits have been discovered. But few of them have been studied to the extent that it is possible to speak with confidence about the volume and quality of reserves, their recoverability and suitability for use with existing processing technologies.

Nevertheless, the project for the construction of a meridional railway along the eastern slope of the Urals has already received government approval, and in 2009 it will begin to be implemented. This is part of the promoted project "Ural Industrial - Ural Polar" (it was even declared a party project of "United Russia"). The name of this project was wittily shortened by the journalists to “UP-UP”, as if imitating something like “Wow!” or "Clap, clap!" - interjections with which people encourage themselves who have started a difficult task in the heat of the moment, without having the time or intellectual potential to think it through in advance. After all, not a single really calculated, clearly economically justified and proven necessary supply from the Polar Urals to the south has yet emerged. However, not so. There is one connection, it is already quite material and we are already aware of it. This is Kharp-Chelyabinsk.

Remember the goldsmith Khryukin from Chekhov's "Chameleon"? How did he stand in the middle of the market square, raising a bloody finger, thereby testifying that he had really been bitten? The extraction of chromites for ChEMK in Kharp, elevated beyond the polar circle, serves in the justification of the project as expressive evidence, evidence of the need for UP-UP. Look, they say, how painfully the evil “Kazakhs” bit us economically, now, willy-nilly, we have to turn our eyes to the pole.

However, as we remember, the overseer Ochumelov, after listening to different versions of what happened, was not impressed in the end by the pictorial gesture of the bitten master. Whether Khryukin was right in demanding compensation for the damage caused to him, we will never know from the story, and this is not related to our subject. But whether the owner of ChEMK was right in sending millions of rubles to the Polar Urals, and, accordingly, whether those who now intend to send billions there will be right, it is worth thinking about when studying geography: after all, geographical thinking is formed in such thoughts.

About making placement decisions

It is not by chance that the topic of correctional labor institutions is included in the story about the Ural chrome. The fact is that the main owner of the Chelyabinsk Electrometallurgical Plant and the main figure in the development of Rayiz chromites, a deputy of the State Duma of the last convocation from United Russia, one of the most influential people in Southern Urals- Some Aristov in his youth, in the 80s, went to jail (he was convicted of something like fraud in construction teams or with Komsomol "raised funds" - there is no exact data). This should be mentioned not at all in order to denigrate the polar chromo-digger, but for purely scientific reasons - economic and geographical.

Twenty years ago, prominent Soviet geographers A.P. Gorkin and L.V. Smirnyagin published an article in which they presented to their colleagues a new trend that was then gaining momentum in Western economic and geographical thought - a study of the decision-making mechanism ( decision making) on the location of certain enterprises. In school textbooks for the 9th grade, the conviction is explicitly and implicitly transmitted that the choice of location of the country's enterprises is objective (only in the way that is justified, and nothing else). In reality, even in a planned, centrally controlled economy, when deciding on a specific location, someone's personal choice played an important role. And in a privately owned ...

Business owners who have been on trial and in prison in the past are no worse than other people. “Do not renounce the bag and the prison,” says folk wisdom. Meanwhile, folk wisdom has long noticed that among people who have broken the law and got caught in this, there is a higher proportion of those who are prone to impulsive decisions, who are not accustomed to calculate the development of events several moves ahead, in front of whom the desire to solve a momentary task obscures thoughts about probable consequences.

If we recall the Harp chromium history, the style of placement decisions on the development of poor polar Ural chromites (“Geography”,
No. 14/2008), an eloquent portrait is drawn decision maker"a -" decision maker. share for the fact that we are stationed in it - we will build a separate shift camp at 500 m above sea level on the ridge - on Raiza. will do without our money." "Oh, the Yamal District hopes to be present in the share capital of the chromium mine - we will re-register Kongor-Chrom from an independent enterprise to the ChEMK workshop (so what if the "shop" is 1,500 km away from the plant), we will close from everyone and stop paying taxes to the local budget.”

The slogan under which such decisions are submitted and under which state support is requested is the slogan of nothing more, nothing less. chromium security Russia.

Chrome safety of Russia

In Russia, there are few ores of chromium - chromites. And all known deposits are of low quality. Kazakh chromites are much better in all respects, they have only one drawback: after the meeting of three intellectuals in Belovezhskaya Pushcha in 1991 they are no longer ours. The only large deposit of chromites that was developed on the territory of the Russian Federation before the appearance of the mine at Raiza is Saranovskoye in the east of the Perm Territory. But the local mine "Rudnaya" (in the village of Sarany between the Perm Gornozavodsk and Sverdlovsk Kachkanar) is operetta small in comparison with both Kazakhstani production and in comparison with the needs of Russia's ferrochromium plants. In any case, this mine is not an assistant to the Chelyabinsk Combine: it is controlled by the main competitor of ChEMK - the Serov Ferroalloy Plant (in the city of Serov in the north of the Sverdlovsk Region).

So, there is practically no high-quality chrome raw material in Russia. And the capacities for processing chromites into ferrochrome are large. Ferrochrome is a necessary component in the production of stainless steels (without them, the production of many modern and strategically important engineering products is unthinkable). The conclusion that is drawn from this (those who benefit from making such a conclusion do) is "They are trying to put Russia on a raw material needle, they are encroaching on the country's chrome independence." Some very well-known figures of the current ruling group in the Russian Federation made angry speeches in this vein.

However, what is this "chrome security"? Such declarations can have two aspects - economic (so that the rise in price of imported raw materials does not make Russian ferrochrome plants uncompetitive) and strategic (so that Russia is provided with strategically important raw materials - chromites in case of war and external isolation).

The economic aspect of chromium safety

Do the developed capitalist countries of the world, which the current leaders of the Russian Federation so much want to be like, have lame “independence”? No. Almost all developed countries import chromites (or finished ferrochromium) and do not see this as a particular threat to their security. The main global supplier is South Africa. World metallurgists must buy chromites on the world market at market prices (sometimes they buy at intercompany prices if they have invested in the share capital of mines) in order to sell ferrochrome or stainless steel at market prices. This is what normal market relations are built on.

What, it would seem, is common between the products in the photo
and Harp's chromites? Common owners

The owners of Russian ferrochromium enterprises, the same ChEMK, came to control over yesterday's nationwide plants as champions of private property and the market. And indeed, very well, owning the Soviet plant that you inherited, sell produced ferrochromium at world market prices. This pleasure was anticipated by Aristov and his companion when they decided to invest their initial capital, made in Chelyabinsk on the Ariant vodka and trade network, in CHEMK. It is very good to sell at market prices, if you take raw materials at a cheap price.

However, when Kazakh suppliers of chromites, in a completely market-like way, did not agree to give raw materials cheaply, then the rhetoric about the threat to national chrome independence began. In reality, it is, of course, not about the interests of Russia, but about the fact that the Chelyabinsk Electrometallurgical Plant in the conditions of a free international market has shown itself not to be very competitive. Or, in any case, it did not bring such vodka-intoxicating profits that the owners were counting on.

Why is China here?

Kazakhstani suppliers of chromites (the Donskoy GOK in Khromtau, mentioned more than once), might not be able to raise the price of their products much: who, except Russia, will buy from them? The geographical position of the landlocked desert-steppe republic is too unfavorable: the deposit is too deep hidden in the depths of Eurasia; southern neighbors of Kazakhstan are too underdeveloped to show any serious demand for chromium; Russia is seemingly a monopoly consumer and can dictate its purchase prices. But the “Kazakhs”, to the misfortune of Russian metallurgists, were rescued by their eastern neighbor. The rapidly growing, albeit much more distant from Khromtau than the Urals, Chinese metallurgy offered the owners of the Donskoy GOK more high prices. And you had to be an enemy to yourself and the market idea in order to refuse. Kazakhstan has reoriented supplies from the north to the southeast. Having now fully understood what a free market and an open economy are on an international scale, the owners of ChEMK rushed to par de "pit 11 on Raiz, to somehow compensate for the southern loss. They rushed instead of starting, as it should be in an open market economy, a competitive price struggle for Kazakhstani resources.

so chinese economic development responded for 5 thousand km, squeezing a noticeable segment of the Russian economy into the Polar Urals, into God-forgotten Kharp. The paths of economic geography are sometimes surprising: where are the combines of Baotou and Anshan (now eating Kazakh chromium), and where are Labytnangi and Kharp, near which the Ural chromites are now hastily digging? How, it would seem, can one cause the other? And here, come on.

Of course, it was possible to stop the “Chinese expansion” by offering the “Kazakhs” an equal or slightly higher price. But is it really for this - perhaps in order to digest expensive chromites - that the owners invested their vodka money in the restoration of CHEMK furnaces? With a fair price for raw materials - a completely different level of profits, and even unprofitability.

To this is the question: “Why can the Chinese pay dearly for Kazakh chromites, transport them over a long distance and be profitable at the same time, but the close ChEMK cannot?” Is it because, within the framework of open international market relations, the old bulky Chelyabinsk plant is not competitive? At least with the current management and decision-making style. Is this combine then necessary at all, is it necessary to tear apart the Rayiz massif for its sake, and even more so to pull the UP-UP road there?

War and chrome

Of course, all market considerations about the economic efficiency or inefficiency of ChEMK could be crossed out at once if it is proved that Russia needs Chelyabinsk ferrochrome and, accordingly, Harp chromites like air, that without them - come, take it with your bare hands.

Perhaps, when the owners of ChEMK, followed by Russian politicians with honors, repeat the formula of lame security, they mean an extreme case of war?

We remember how President Roosevelt 60 years ago persuaded Turkish President İnönü not to sell chromites to Hitler. After all, each ton of chromium oxide delivered to Germany at that time meant the release of several tons of alloyed steel, meant the release of a new piece of military equipment, meant several new killed Soviet soldiers or soldiers of the second front. To be left without chrome in case of a future war for Russia, to put it mildly, is unpleasant. Each ton of chromium lost will mean a ton of unsmelted steel of the required quality, an unbuilt tank or missile, so many enemies not killed, and so many extra dead of us. In the films of the future eisensteins, our sergeant will fall on the bottom of the affected armored personnel carrier with the words “There is not enough chrome in the armor” or “Steel is not alloyed” (similar to the famous phrase from “Alexander Nevsky”: “Short chain mail”).

Of course, an excellent student with a tennis racket in Belovezhskaya Pushcha in 1991 and those who voted for this beacon of reason, an example of decency and a receptacle of geographical knowledge had to think about such a possible turn in the fate of future victims of Russian lameness. But it had to be done then. What about in modern conditions?

And in modern conditions, it is generally pointless to have any conversation about the security of Russia (both lame and in general), if we assume that in a future military conflict Kazakhstan will be on the hostile side. Between Russia and Kazakhstan is the longest border in the world, practically nowhere protected by natural boundaries. It is impossible to imagine that the current Russian Federation will be able to hold such a front in its current state. Take a compass and a ruler - measure the length of the border with Kazakhstan and the length of the Soviet-German front in the Great Patriotic War. Compare lengths. So, if the territory of Kazakhstan (and it is gradually moving towards this) becomes the base of forces hostile to us (it doesn’t matter who - the Chinese, NATO, Genghis Khan, the Taliban), it will be necessary to immediately tear off the pink and blue stripes from the tricolor faded under the South Ural sun and wave the rest. Chrome from the Polar Urals will not help here.

Even if Kazakhstan does not become a direct opposing party, but only takes a position of "enemy neutrality", Russia will have to keep huge forces along the border, and then it is not realistic to think about any victory in a major world-class armed conflict (remember the story from the same Turkey in World War II: it did not enter the war, but how many preventive forces it diverted (and that was only remote Turkey, which had a very short border with the USSR, fenced off by powerful natural boundaries). Not real - with or without chrome.

So if you really think about the security of Russia, then the first thing to do would be to bring Kazakhstan under the Russian hand. If we use market methods for this, then we will tie this territory to ourselves as tightly as possible by economic ties. And in any case - do not push away. The impulsive decision of the owner of ChEMK (“Oh, then we will go somewhere else”) and the accompanying angry rhetoric of his party comrades contributed only to one thing - further pushing the economy of Kazakhstan away from the Russian one.

Offended by the “Kazakhs”, Russian politicians and beznesmeny, who regularly celebrate the independence of Russia and sing praises of the market in June, in this situation resemble a spouse who insisted on a divorce, and the next day is innocently surprised that the ex-wife does not serve lunch at the appointed hour. And it would be fine if she didn’t cook, otherwise she cooks, but for some reason she carries it to the next apartment.

What is it about Turkey?

The Chelyabinsk plant went for cheap raw materials to the Polar Urals. Its main competitor, the second ferrochromium producer in Russia, the Serov Ferroalloy Plant (SZF), did not do so. In a difficult situation, during the confusion with deliveries from Kazakhstan, he partially switched to Turkish chromites (the very ones that Roosevelt asked the Turks not to sell to Hitler - see Geography, No. 14/2008, p. 32), partially used Permian chromites Sarana under his control, and after the “resolving” of the crisis with supplies from Kazakhstan, he again returned to raw materials from the Donskoy GOK.

The novel by Serov and Khromtau then received a further, albeit somewhat perverted continuation (see the following issues).

Topsy-turvy space

It is amazing: it turned out to be cost-effective to transport raw materials from Turkey to the North Urals Serov, but not from Kazakhstan to the South Urals Chelyabinsk!

The created configurations of ChEMK - "Kongor-Khrom" and NWF - Donskoy Mining and Processing Plant are a living geographical paradox, or rather, a geographical absurdity. The Chelyabinsk plant is the closest Russian consumer of chromites to Khromtau. From Chelyabinsk to Khromtau - only 600 km, but Chelyabinsk carries chromites from Kharp, which is 1300 km in a straight line and almost 2500 km along existing railways. Serov, located much closer to Kharp (a little more than 800 km in a straight line to the deposits of the Polar Urals, if a road is built), does not pay any attention to the Rayiz chromites and carries ore from Kazakhstan, from which it is almost twice as far away as Chelyabinsk ( from Khromtau to Serov - more than 1000 km).

Here they are, manifestations of different decision making"a. Rationality and objectivity cannot be explained. Rather, the character and analytical abilities of the people who made the relevant decisions.

After all, not Israel is Chelyabinsk, after all, Kazakhs are not Arabs

According to the normal economic and geographical logic, any processing enterprise seeks and eventually finds the nearest source of raw materials of satisfactory quality. There are deviations from this rule in the world, but they are always considered as temporary curiosities. They acquire a chronic character only in extraordinary circumstances associated with non-economic irreconcilable hatred. For example, the refineries of Israel, located next to the world's main oil production area, do not use a single barrel of close and excellent Arabian raw materials, but import oil from God knows where - from Mexico, Norway, etc. But here the situation is really breaking all the rules - the parties are in protracted insoluble conflict, the Arabian oil producers do not recognize the very "right of the State of Israel to exist. Therefore, in principle, there can be no talk of any cross-border supplies of raw materials (whatever their quality and price). But doesn't the Russian Federation recognize Kazakhstan or Kazakhstan does not recognize Russia Yes, relations between the parties are not developing in the best way - in particular, because of the inability of Russian politicians to find the right tone in communicating with our recent subalterns, who have been so incompetently dismissed from the service.

After the death of I.V. Stalin, the construction of the highway (and many had already been built) was mediocrely abandoned. Now more and more people are talking about the need to rebuild this road.

There are currently five such colonies in the Russian Federation:

1) on Ognenny Island, on Lake Novy, southwest of the city of Belozersk, Vologda Region. (where Kirillov Novoezersky monastery once was);

2) in the village. Lozvinsky, in the Ivdelsky district in the north of the Sverdlovsk region;

3) in the city of Sol-Iletsk, in the south of the Orenburg region. (the so-called "Black Dolphin"; it is called so because in the courtyard of the colony there is a sculpture of a dolphin made of black stone, made, as they say, by one of the former prisoners);

4) in Solikamsk Perm Territory(the so-called "White Swan");

5) in the village. Harp ("Harpy" as they call her in the prison language).

Recently, he transferred his shares to one of his relatives so that capital would not become an aggravating circumstance in the elections to the State Duma in 2008. True, this did not help: after their party was headed by the former president, Ural political observers explain, in the Duma faction "United Russia" found it inconvenient to recruit former criminals.

The assumption of some malicious observers that Aristov was in Kharp, and now he was drawn to attend the old places - only not as a prisoner, but as a master, does not find confirmation.

Therefore, among the well-known figures of the current Russian establishment, there is such a high proportion of people with a criminal past, present and future. Therefore, in particular, the ex-world chess champion G. Kasparov, professionally trained to calculate the development of combinations many moves ahead, cannot but demonstrate a strong rejection of the current kindermat grandmasters.

In this context, we put the word “Kazakhs” in quotation marks, because the Kazakhs themselves, by nationality, have only an indirect relation to the Don GOK in Khromtau. The enterprise was designed and built 70 years ago mainly by Russians (as well as Ukrainians, Jews, etc.). Even the district itself, in which Khromtau is located, is eloquently called Novorossiysk. Now DGOK is owned not by Kazakhs by nationality, and not even by Kazakhs by citizenship. Corporation "Eurasian Natural resources» (ENRC), which includes the Donskoy GOK, is registered in the UK. It belongs to a certain "trio" - Patokh (Fatakh) Chodiev, Alexander Mashkevich, Alizhan Ibragimov. According to the place of birth, they are all from Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan); by nationality, apparently, an Uzbek (Bukharian), a Jew (of Ukrainian origin) and either a Kyrgyz or an Uzbek (Tashkent). By citizenship - one of them seems to be a citizen of Belgium, the other - of Israel, the third - perhaps of Kyrgyzstan, but it is not really known whose. The case against all three was investigated by Belgian law enforcement agencies, but it seems that they were never investigated.

They seem to be trying to establish a small production of chromites even in Bashkiria - on the border of the Beloretsk and Burzyansk regions, as well as in the Abzelilovsky region (near the village of Khamitovo). Some attempts are being made at the old, abandoned in the middle of the 20th century, Alapaevskoye deposit in the Sverdlovsk region.

In the 90s, at the time of the most severe raw material crisis, chromites for ChEMK were mined in the Verkhny Ufaley region, but now mining seems to have been stopped due to the small reserves and the unprofitability of their development.

Some hopes were pinned on deposits in Karelia and in the Murmansk region. But the local chromites turned out to be unimportant and have not yet gone into action.

Recently, it was also reported about the future production of chromites at the Zhizhinsko-Sharomskoye deposit, 40 km from Pervouralsk in the Sverdlovsk region. (“Geography”, No. 8/2008, p. 47). This raw material, having undergone preliminary training at the Khrompik (chemical plant) in Pervouralsk, will then go to the Klyuchevskoy Ferroalloy Plant (KZF) in Dvurechensk in the south of the Sverdlovsk Region. KZF is quite small in comparison with the gigantic Chelyabinsk (ChEMK) and large Serov (NWF) plants. It does, however, have one important property. KZF is the only one in Russia that produces not only ferrochrome alloy, but also pure chromium metal. They say that this metallic chromium is used in the nuclear industry, but they don’t say what for: classified information.

"Ariant" - a combination of the first three letters of the surnames of the two owners of the company (Aristov + Antipov), popular in Chelyabinsk region vodka brand.

On this - on the urgent purchase of raw materials within the territory of the USSR at domestic low, and sometimes junk (due to general confusion) prices and sale abroad at prices close to world prices (then - an order of magnitude higher), - the accumulation of many first capitals was built in the 90s.

The tendency of Kazakhstan to sell more and more raw materials to China to the detriment of deliveries to Russia extends not only to chromites, but also to other ores. In particular, the iron ore of the famous Sokolovsko-Sarbaiskoye deposit (the city of Rudny, Kustanai, or Kostanay region) is less and less accessible to the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works. Sokolovka, by the way, is now owned by the same "British" corporation "Eurasian Natural Resources" as the Donskoy GOK.

Out of spite, out of spite ( French.). - Note. ed.

Sometimes, speaking about the potential of Chinese expansion to the northwest, they understand it too straightforward: here will come supposedly the Chinese. Maybe they won’t come: what didn’t they see in the taiga? Meanwhile, the expansion of one or another people does not necessarily manifest itself in the form of displacements. One nation can, without leaving the place, simply “eat away” the raw material base “from under” another. In the natural history of the Earth, this is how some species disappeared - not because they were eaten by another, predatory species, but because a very nice herbivorous competitor species simply ate all the vegetation that the extinct species used to feed on.

Of course, we all hope that there will never be another war. All the generations that have hitherto lived on Earth have hoped for this.

The village of Kharp is a regime settlement, formed in 1961 during the construction of the 501st Stalinist construction site.

It is located in the spurs of the mountains of the Polar Urals. The name translates as "Northern Lights". Sometimes these names are combined and pronounced together - Harp (Northern Lights).

To some extent, the village of Harp can be called a prison. It has 2 prisons for especially dangerous criminals.

One of them is called "Polar Owl". Now such criminals as Alexander Pichushkin (Bitsevsky maniac) and Nurpashi Kulaev, the only surviving terrorist from Beslan, are serving their sentences in it.

There is nothing criminal in the village - there are simply 2 prisons and that's it.

Photo taken on the platform at the railway station.

Ordinary houses, ordinary people

[My new video report from Dubai]

What I liked here is the mountains and very unusual clouds.

In the middle of the village there is a small mountain, which, as I understand it, I use as a helipad. Unfortunately, very few photos were taken, because on that day a terrible wind was blowing and it was not possible to somehow fix the camera.

And here is the prison itself - "Polar Owl". Close I did not come up, so only the zoom.

In general, people in the north are very friendly and talkative. I wanted to go to Kharp myself, but also a local resident, whom I met in Salekhard, offered me his help. He works in a chromite mine and offered to take me on trucks to the mountains, where they actually mine everything. I was already ready, but when I got into the minibus, the locals dissuaded me from climbing the mountains, because these mines are quite dangerous for the respiratory system and they have been poisoning my health for many years local residents bringing them various diseases. Very often it was seen how loaded trucks pass by, after which the dust flies like a pillar.

Here's Harp. This is the only village so far, moving through which I experienced tremors in my body. It seems that there is nothing terrible in it, but psychologically it is not very comfortable.