[Translation prepared by Business & Human Rights Resource Centre]

Rust. How Norilsk Nickel processes Taimyr into net profit. Special report by Elena Kostyuchenko and Yuri Kozyrev / Novaya Gazeta, 16 July 2020

...What is Norilsk? This is almost the northernmost city in Russia. You can’t get here except by plane, there are no roads, the only railway line goes to Dudinka... Under the tundra lie non-ferrous ores. Metals are mined here: copper, nickel, cobalt, palladium, osmium, platinum, gold, silver, iridium, rhodium, ruthenium; industrial sulfur, metal selenium and tellurium, and sulfuric acid are also mined along the way. Norilsk Nickel produces 35% of the world's palladium, 25% of platinum, 20% of nickel, 20% of rhodium, 10% of cobalt. In Russia it is almost all nickel, almost all cobalt and half copper...

180 thousand people live here, a third of them work at the plant. The rest serve the plant or those who work for the plant...

Second day in Norilsk. We are going to Dudinka, a port through which metals are exported to the mainland. We meet with indigenous leaders. There are five of them here - Nganasans, Dolgans, Nenets, Enets, Evenks. They still consider Dudinka the capital.

We meet with them at the education department. One goes out to smoke, comes back and asks: are you having problems with the police? On the way out they call us by name. The young policeman, embarrassed, insists that we give an explanation - who we are and why we are in Dudinka. In two hours he will call me on my mobile...

We call people, arrange meetings - and they disappear. This happens again and again. The phones are silent, the doors are closed...

Ruslan Abdullaev, a lawyer and leader of the My Home movement, speaks carefully. But he says. We meet in his office. Norilsk residents believe that it was his letter about the fuel spill that landed on the president’s desk.

For a very long time he was alone in the field as a warrior. For seven years he has been writing complaints and defending them in courts. He explains simply: I am a lawyer, I want to return Norilsk to the legal field...

— Norilsk is a reserve of corruption. What is happening here - well, in no other region, probably, is happening in such a sophisticated way...

They show me the threats they receive and are forbidden to quote them. The threats are written very similarly, in correct Russian, and contain philosophical reflections. I think that, apparently, there is a person who receives a salary for these words...

Gas from the Copper Plant covers the city, and I inhale it. It's really hard to describe. A flat sweet taste envelops the throat and remains deep inside. You start coughing, but the cough does not bring relief - sulfur dioxide is already in the lungs. It starts to rain, and they drive me under the roof: the water, touching the gas, turns into weakly concentrated sulfuric acid...

A worker from Nadezhda says:

- It doesn’t matter where you work, in fact... Workplaces... There are standards for exceeding maximum permissible concentrations. By noise, by gas pollution, by vibration. All this exists, as if all these standards exist. But when inspections are carried out, for example, for dust in workplaces, the workshops do not work! They come, naturally, in the morning shifts. And what will they measure? Fresh air? I have never seen monitoring of vibrations. And everything seems to be fine, but people come out of their shift with back pain. Your job is to sit and control some processes. And you have such a vibration that you get up at the end of your shift and just feel every vertebra. And if someone tries to raise any questions, it usually ends up inside the plant’s workshop or fence. And it rarely comes out.

Photography and video shooting is prohibited, it is harsh and in the format of dismissal. Even for some kind of everyday photographs, that people were simply photographed as a group at work, and they may face some kind of sanctions. Up to the deprivation of the bonus, this is normal. There were cases in neighboring groups - the guys simply took pictures and posted them on a social network, on their personal pages. Moreover, the photograph did not reflect any problems, they were simply photographed at their workplace - that’s all, they are sitting without a bonus...

Repairs of buildings and structures at the Plant are a different story. Everything is falling into disrepair. That container that burst is simply the personification of the entire Combine. Everything stays that way. A striking example is, for example, NOF (Norilsk Enrichment Plant...), there are some pretty scary places there...

Over the past year, 2019 was a pure squeeze. The entire Combine showed crazy indicators, “Nadezhda” gave the maximum indicators in the entire history of its existence! A terrible number of experiments on smelting were carried out, various materials were brought in, and imported for smelting. But at the same time, all the equipment simply rang and rumbled...

Here, in any situation, if something goes wrong, you will be to blame. There are all different regulations, something like dynamic risk assessment. You didn't appreciate the danger. That's it, it's your problem. You shouldn't have done this...

There seems to be a trade union. Nobody ever communicated with him. Well, that is, this is a structure affiliated with the Combine, made up of employees of the Combine, about whom few people know. They do not participate in the life of the enterprise in any way at all...