Magnitogorsk – ‘the city by the magnetic mountain’ was built at the foot of Mount Magnita, a geological anomaly composed almost entirely of very pure iron ore, which fed a mill until the early 1970s. Here a battered ore shovel sits atop a monument to the mountain that was sacrificed to build a city

The Ural river divides the east and west of the city. The original ‘socialist city’ and the steel mill complex are in the east, districts built after the second world war to the west. In the background here are the domes of the Cathedral of the Holy Ascension

The planning principles for the socialist city (Sotsgorod) were similar to those animating European modernist architecture of the 1930s: cities were to be organised by functional separations between housing, industrial work and recreation, all connected by fast, efficient transport

To free working women from housework and reproductive labour, many apartments were planned without kitchens or living rooms. The aim of the Sotsgorod’s laundries, canteens and kindergartens was to advance the emancipation of women by freeing their time

In the 1930s, with the Sotsgorod still under construction, the official opinion of the emerging Stalinist regime turned against modernist architecture. After the war, new construction would be in the heroically scaled style of socialist realism

While life on the west of the river – with its city hall, university, opera houses, theatres and shopping malls – has proceeded apace with the times, on the eastern side time seems to stand still

With little retail space in Magnitogorsk’s eastern districts, everyday commodities are sold in little shops in the ground floors of apartment buildings and in a few market stalls at a big tram intersection

Now privatised, the steel mill still operates around the clock. When the Soviet Union ended, the polluted Magnitogorsk was placed on the United Nations’ list of the world’s ‘most altered environments’. Today the air and water are still contaminated with lead, sulphur dioxide and heavy metals

One of the blast furnaces at the steel mill. According to the company’s 2015 annual report, it has 18,500 employees – less than a third of the number that worked there in 1990

Older women, many of whom are retired from jobs in the mill and its supporting industries, sell produce grown in their gardens, in rows of market stalls in squares and on sidewalks

Where Lenin once greeted the workers at the factory gates, a new statue made of plastic containers now points the way to a car-repair shop

The local sauna village. The Russian word banya has expanded from its original meaning of ‘public bathhouse’ to include these saunas, which are a popular luxury

This chicken coop by the fence of the sauna village – it’s decorations displaying locals’ nostalgia for a folkloric past

A wedding party in front of the cathedral, one of the biggest new churches in Russia and a monument to the resurgence of the Orthodox church after the end of the Soviet Union. Its construction was funded to a large degree by donations from the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works

The city’s recent history can be read in Magnitogorsk’s two north-south axes. Stalin gave the city ‘workers’ palaces’ ornamented with neoclassical stucco work; Chruschev built low-cost low-rise apartments; Brezhnev added prefab concrete slab buildings; Gorbachev brought high-rises surrounded by spacious parks. Under Putin, shopping malls have arrived