Magnitogorsk is a city built around a mountain that has been eaten. Magnitnaya Gora, the Magnetic Mountain, was a single hill of almost pure iron ore, so rich that compasses misbehaved nearby, and in 1929 the Soviet government decided to build a giant steelworks beside it as the centrepiece of the first Five-Year Plan. Thousands of workers poured in, living in tents and barracks, while American engineers from the firm of Arthur G. McKee of Cleveland designed the plant on the model of the one at Gary, Indiana. The first blast furnace was lit in 1931, and the city became a symbol of Soviet industrialisation. The American Communist John Scott worked here as a welder and later wrote Behind the Urals, a classic first-hand account.
The steelworks, now one of the largest in the world, still dominates the left bank of the Ural River, and the air can taste of sulphur and metal when the wind is wrong. The city has about four hundred thousand people, in a long strip of wide avenues, with monuments such as the Rear to Front statue, a woman handing a sword to a soldier, commemorating the steel that went into the tanks of the Second World War. The mountain itself is nearly gone, quarried out, and the huge pit is a sight in itself.
Geographically, Magnitogorsk lies right on the boundary between Europe and Asia. The Ural River, which forms the traditional border here, cuts through the city, and the right bank is Europe, the left Asia, so you can cross a continent on a bridge. A small monument marks the line.
As a ride, it is a place for fuel, food and a bed, not for scenery. The roads in and out are wide, flat, and busy with lorries, and the surrounding steppe is open and windy. The surface is generally good on the main roads, with industrial wear. Weather can be harsh, with fierce winters and hot, dusty summers. The best months are May, June and September. Beloretsk and the Urals proper are a short way west, and the landscape changes quickly into forest and hills.
Fuel is easy, with stations all over the city, and so are food and lodging. Eat a proper meal, and look at the river, steel-grey and slow. Behind the factory chimneys, the old Ural steppe rolls away, windy and wide.