Development challenges of a mining single-industry town in the Russian Arctic: case of Kirovsk, Murmansk region

Arctic single-industry towns, due to the influence of specific economic and geographic, as well as natural and climatic factors, are settlements of a special type. From the socioeconomic development perspective, a specific characteristic of single-industry towns is the fact that because of the mono-profile character of their economies they have higher development risks of the “boom-bust” type and the correspondent social problems. Thus, such towns face huge challenges of their development prospects. How is the situation developing here now? What measures are taken in Russia on federal and regional levels towards single-industry towns and what local governments are doing themselves? How do local communities of single industry towns react on the measures and how do they try to cope with development challenges? This paper intends to briefly discuss the questions, taking the town of Kirovsk in the Murmansk region as an example. Single-industry towns in the Russian Arctic are quite a typical phenomenon existed as the legacy of large-scale exploitation of natural resources of the North in the Soviet period (1930s – 1980s). One of them is the town of Kirovsk, which was founded in the beginning of the 1930-s, upon the decision of the Soviet government on the development of rich deposits of apatitenepheline ores discovered in the 1920-s. “Apatit” became the town forming enterprise, which in 1929 started extracting apatite-nepheline ores and since 1931 processing it at the enrichment plant for production of apatite and nepheline concentrates. The concentrates then were delivered to central Russia for production of mineral fertilizers and other products. During all Soviet period (up to 1992) the state enterprise “Apatit” controlled not only industrial production, but almost all social sphere of the town. Most of social infrastructure organization (housing and communal services, retail trade and catering, health care, sport, and culture) functioned as subdivisions of the enterprise. In 1993 the enterprise was transformed into Joint Stock Company “Apatit”. The period of 1990s was characterized for the company by deep crises, when production fell down almost four-fold. In 2002 the company was included in the PhosAgro group of companies (holding) a Russian vertically integrated company and one of the world’s leading producers of phosphate-based fertilizers 1 . Nowadays 100% stocks of “Apatit” are owned by “PhosAgro” holding. By 2012 “Apatit” company, having four open and underground mines and two processing plants, produced more than 90% of the total town’s industrial production and employed 32% of the town’s workforce (6,4 th. out of 20 th. of the working age population). Total number of the company’s employees that time was 11.6 thousand people (Riabova & Didyk 2014), but recently situation changed considerably. The town of Kirovsk is the administrative centre of the municipality with the same name, having the legal status of an “urban district”. The territory of the urban district is 3.6 thousand