Magnitnaya was founded in 1743 as part of the Orenburg Line of forts. It remained insignificant until about 1929.
As a part of preparation for the Soviet Five-Year Plans in 1928 a Soviet delegation arrived in Cleveland to discuss with American consulting company Arthur G. McKee a plan to set up in Magnitogorsk a copy of the US Steel steel mill in Gary, Indiana. The contract was four times increased and eventually the new plant had a capacity of over 4 million tons yearly. The American company was responsible for delivering of the investment.
The rapid development of Magnitogorsk stood at the forefront of Joseph Stalin's Five-Year Plans in the 1930s. It was a showpiece of Soviet achievement. Huge reserves of iron ore in the area made it a prime location to build a steel plant capable of challenging its Western rivals. However, a large proportion of the workforce, as ex-peasants, typically had few industrial skills and little industrial experience. To solve these issues, several hundred foreign specialists arrived to direct the work, including a team of architects headed by the German Ernst May.
A steel production facility in Magnitogorsk in the 1930s
According to original plans Magnitogorsk was to be inspired by Gary, Indiana and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the time the most prominent centers of steel production in the United States. It was to have followed the linear city design, with rows of similar super block neighborhoods running parallel to the factory, with a strip of greenery, or greenbelt, separating them. Planners would align living and production spheres so as to minimize necessary travel time: workers would generally live in a sector of the residential band closest to the sector of the industrial band in which they worked.
However, by the time that May completed his plans for Magnitogorsk construction of both factory and housing had already started. The sprawling factory and enormous cleansing lakes had left little
