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Angarsk urban district is a modern and dynamically developing territory with a high potential. The district administrative center is the city of Angarsk, it is the third largest city in the Irkutsk region and one of the best in terms of improvement in Eastern Siberia: in 2003, the city took the second place in the contest for the most comfortable city of Russia, and in 2005 and 2008, it was the first place. In 2013, according to the results of the competition among the municipalities “The Cleanest City of Russia”, held in the framework of the all-Russian environmental project “Clean City”, Angarsk took first place in the category “Big Cities”. From the moment of its foundation, the city is unofficially called – the City, born of Victory. In the media in relation to Angarsk, the definition is often used – the city of petrochemists. And this attitude is predetermined from the moment of its foundation, or rather, the choice of location, in 1945, when the Angara and Kitoy rivers decided to build a plant for the production of artificial liquid fuels. However, the date of its creation is 1948, when the foundation of the first stone house was laid. In 1951, Angarsk received the status of a city. The economic basis of the city is large enterprises of oil refining, chemical industry and construction industry.
According to the idea of Leningrad architects, Angarsk should be a corner of Petersburg in miniature. The motives of the city on the Neva sound in patterns of cast-iron fencing parks, in ornaments and stucco, and the spire in the main square of the city is perceived as the spire of the Admiralty. Now there are 238.5 thousand people in the Angarsk urban district, and it is considered to be a multinational district, the national composition includes: Russians, Buryats, Tatars, Armenians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Germans, etc.

  • Area: 1149 square kilometers.
  • Confessional composition: Orthodoxy, Islam, Catholicism.
  • Ethnonym: Angaran, Anharchan.
  • Time zone: time difference with MSK +5 hours.

Angarsk city district is located at a distance of 5048 km from Moscow, 40 km from the center of Irkutsk, 50 km from Irkutsk airport, 120 km from Baikal Lake.

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INTERESTING FACTS

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Polytechnic is one of the longest buildings in Angarsk. Polytechnic is located at the crossroads of Kirov Street and Karl Marx Avenue. The street of Kirov at one time was the boundary of the building of the city. Until 1951, when Angarsk was given the status of a city, the construction was only on one side of it, and then there was the taiga. In 1951, the “Victory” club and polytechnic school were built, and the construction went on.
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The central entrance of the “Sovremennik” was supposed to be here, in front of the forest.  Palace of Culture “Sovremennik” was built back to front. Its current porch for the project was supposed to look into the park. The “facade” was to be the rear façade, where on the third floor there is a balcony, so that the plant managers would take parades. In the taiga, the builders, apparently, did not orient themselves and laid the foundation incorrectly. Therefore, they came up with the first and second floor with a porch glass and attach a modern visor. For this architectural thought in the late 1960’s “Sovremennik” took the third place in the All-Union competition for the best building of the Palace of Culture of the USSR (Moscow and Leningrad took the first and the second places). The glass walls led the AECC to the idea of arranging a winter garden in the palace. Exotic plants were brought from the Sukhumi Botanical Garden by train. Since then, for 40 years, they are courted by Nina Mitrofanovna Golovachenko, a dendrologist of the cultural center “Sovremennik”.
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Today it is the only residential building on the street. Lebedeva (formerly the Forest Str.) in Maysk. The first school in the city was located in this House. It was a school in the apartment. School № 25, which is now located on Quarter, 219 str. one time worked in a regular two-room apartment. It was in 1957 in Quarter A, in the House No. 10. Then, a lot of new people came to the construction site, and schools were in demand. By the way, the very first school in Angarsk had no number. It was a wooden house No. 2 along the Forest Street in Maysk, near the inspection site. Antonina Ivanovna Kravchenko worked as the teacher, gatekeeper, cleaning lady and director of this school, today she is an honorary citizen of Angarsk. And this House has long ago become residential.

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Naberejnaya Street, 1-St Quarter str., on the left – watchtowers for protection. Everyone knows that our city was built by convicts from colonies, there were a whole lot more of them in the district then than now. But not everyone knows that we also owe them the numbering of quarters. The houses were surrounded by barbed wire and there were towers with guards everywhere. Not a city, but a big penitentiary. When the object was ready, it was locked out, the barbed wire was removed and transferred to the next building. The object number automatically became the quarter number.

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In Russian and in Bougie. House on Karl Marx Street, near the stop “Technical school”. Out of almost every window sticks a pipe. Central heating in the houses did not appear immediately. In some apartments even today it is possible to see remains of furnaces. For example, the house in which Gajdar Library is located today, on Karl Marx Avenue, was heated this way. In the yards of such houses, there was a barn with firewood. And in some houses, the stoves were not provided, so cast-iron stoves were constructed. The chimneys frighteningly popped out of the windows like guns barrels. Looking at them, it was possible to understand, where rich citizens lived – in the houses of such tenants there was a pipe sticking from every window.

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Lenin without a head. When in 1955 the central square was put into operation, Ilyich was not there, and there was a flower garden. Our city was designed by the Leningrad Institute of City Construction Project, and many architects moved to Siberia from Leningrad. Therefore, we have straight streets, as in St. Petersburg, the iron rail at Petrochemical Park is the same as the railing of the Summer Garden, many columns. 1961. Lenin’s head is put in place. If you photograph our square and the Palace Square of St. Petersburg from a bird’s eye view and compare images, you’ll see that they are almost identical. The Alexandria pillar stands only in St. Petersburg, but we, on April 21, 1961, erected a monument to the leader of the world proletariat. The monument was made by the Leningrad sculptors (you can read the names on the backside of its foundation). It was taken to the city by train in disassembled form. Around that period of time, more precisely one night, the monument to Lenin disappeared, but the monument to Stalin which stood near “Victory” stayed where it was. The square was fenced, and at the beginning of April workers of AUS began to collect Lenin as a pyramid. And since the head was the last element, it turned out that some of the time the monument stood without it. There were people who photographed this historical moment.

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There were two cosmonauts in Angarsk. More precisely, two monuments to the conquerors of space. In the second half of the 1950s at the Combine-16 (today ANHK), there was a factory, which before the reconstruction produced fuel for space rockets. That’s what Angarsk citizens believed to be of direct relevance to the conquest of space. One monument to astronauts stood on the railway station square. It has not yet been forgotten. The second was “registered” on the ring of the tram № 1, at the Angarsk cement factory. At the beginning of the 1990s, at night, it suddenly disappeared in an unknown direction. The monument was removed from the railway station during the reconstruction of the railway square – it did not fit into the idea. Think of the kids. School № 10 from 1952 to 1956 was located in the building of the current Pedagogical college, which is opposite from the park of the Palace of Creativity of children and youth on Lenina Street. In December, before the new year, all students walked in columns were lined up along Lenina Street and marched to the new school building № 10 on Gorky Street.

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The 1950s. Parade on May 9th. A truck disguised as a cuckoo. At the place, where now the Gorky street is located, was laid a narrow railroad, along which a little steam train named “Cuckoo” drove the building materials to the objects. One document says that it was necessary to dismantle this way as soon as possible, because schoolchildren went, jumping over the rails, and it was dangerous for their life.

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A lot of people gathered under the clock on the opening day of the monument to Lenin To Lenin. I’ll meet you under the clock. The famous clock with chimes on the spire appeared only in 1972. Instead of them in a round aperture before there was a five-point star from ferroconcrete. And the clock hung on the lighting poles. The clock for the spire was made by the team of Engineers, and the famous founder of the only one in the country Museum of watches Pavel Vasilyevich Kurdyukov also took part.

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The boating was arranged on the basis of pontoons. First ferriage. This way they crossed the Kitoy River until they built the Bridge in 1961 (now it is called the old bridge). The photo was taken approximately in the late 1940s, presumably where the bridge later arose, which we use today.