Socialist Offshore Company-Towns: Extractive Urbanism in Erdenet, Mongolia

• In Event: Beyond Solidarity: Revisiting Socialist Aid in the Global South

Abstract

In March 1973, Soviet military builders arrived at Erdenet, a newly discovered copper deposit in northern Mongolia. Within a decade, thanks to massive assistance from the Soviet Union, Erdenet was transformed from a greenfield site into a mining company town with a population of 45,000, complete with railway lines and essential infrastructure. While literature has discussed social-environmental consequences of resource extraction in the Soviet bloc, it typically frames extraction in national contexts, with scarce attention given to larger continental or global perspectives. This methodological nationalism is analytically limiting as it neglects the fact that extractivism operates across borders, involving a transnational network of infrastructures. Using the case of Erdenet, this paper explores the resource-led urbanisation in the ‘global periphery’ of the Soviet bloc.

This paper argues that company towns became a Soviet exportable know-how. In the USSR, single-industry mining towns (gornodobyvaushie monogoroda) were established as a distinct unit of urban planning. After perfecting the development of such company towns domestically, socialist planners began exporting their expertise abroad, offshoring resource-driven development to the Global South. The construction of a fully-fledged company town on a greenfield site was a massive undertaking, requiring coordinated efforts from dozens of actors across various republics and countries within the Soviet bloc. With so many actors involved, it was a highly international development. However, the ‘real-existing’ internationalism among Erdenet’s diverse population—including white-collar European specialists, contracted military personnel, and local laborers—revealed significant barriers and raised questions about racial and civilizational hierarchies within socialist development. By examining these inequalities, this paper argues that the development of Soviet offshore company towns was intertwined with both the export of socialist welfare and the production of racialized others, who were subject to dispossession and displacement within these same spaces.

Author

• Nikolay Erofeev, U of Kassel (Germany)