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The Soviet-era factory
Konstantin Salomatin
Published on 05/08/11
In the Urals, there is a small settlement called Arti in which a small factory has been making scythes and sowing needles in an almost primeval manner since the Soviet period. The technology used in production has not changed for at least 70 years, everything is made by hand, or by hand-worked dinosaur-machines that have by some miracle remained in one piece, ghosts of the communist times, on the walls there are banners with images of Lenin and slogans about highly-efficient work and 5-year plans and faces of workers who I saw a long time ago in the magazines Ogonek and Soviet Foto of the 60’s and 70’s. In the factories there are tables of honours, on which photographs of the best workers of the profession and in some factories milk is given out to combat the effects of the harmful working conditions.
And professions whose exotic names you would be pushed to come by even nowadays — Needle eye polisher, Heat-treater, Scythe –cutter, Scythe –counter, Technician for rotational extraction blades of needles etc. But what is even more striking, is that the factory did not die in the crisis and a large part of production goes to export — including to countries of the European Union.