Cultural evolution of the polar town: from the town-concentration camp to the ghost town (part 1)

The evolution of the cultural space of a polar town from the time of its appearance to the present day is considered. The town of Vorkuta which was based on coal mines and concentration camps, was chosen as the object of study. But the focus of research is not so much the history of the formation and development of Vorkuta as a typical socialist town of an industrial type, but the formation and development of the urban community and the cultural environment of the urban settlement. Particular attention is paid to urban identity and the changing images of the town reflected in the mental map of the town, formed in the minds of its inhabitants. The research is based on the traditions of urban anth- ropology, developed as an independent discipline within the framework of Western cultural anthropology in the 1960s-1970s. Today it is actively formed in Russia mainly in line with the traditions of domestic ethnography/ethnology and modern social anthropology.The work consists of 2 parts. The first part presents the history of emergence, formation and development of Polar Vorkuta (from the 1930s to the 1990s).