"In Soviet times Stepnohorsk was a small populated area located about half-hour by bus from Zaporizhzhya where slightly over 1,000 people lived.
“Then it was a typical village whose inhabitants were mostly farmers,” Chair of Stepnohorsk Village Council Iryna Kondratyuk told Weekly.ua, “However, in the 1980s, deposits of high-grade mineral resources were discovered, which had no analogs in the country, I think.”
Literally within a few years, construction of two mines was in its final stage, the first processing enterprise was built and 9-story residential buildings were raised. The provincial authorities projected that by the end of the 1990s there would be around 75,000-100,000 residents, predominantly coal miners and employees at local plants and their families in the small town. The first new high-rise buildings were occupied mostly by young specialists from the north of Russia and provinces neighboring Ukraine.
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In the mid-1990s, all Stepnohorsk enterprises were shut down. Everybody here knows about the reasons why the government made such a decision, but nobody likes to recollect them. “There is a similar deposit in the neighboring oblast, which was discovered much earlier than ours,” the local residents told Weekly.ua. “Our products were greatly competitive, which why we were shut down.”
As a result, around 10 thousand people remained in the town without work or money hoping that everything was just a grave mistake. The experienced specialists who for decades were recruited from across the entire Soviet Union had to leave with their families to earn a living in neighboring big cities or abroad."
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