People don't think the city needs to change. What they want is more money poured into the steelworks. It governs their whole life and even young people can't imagine anything else. Alexander Alayev, the deputy-mayor in charge of economic affairs, confirms the lack of alternative. Nobody in Russia is prepared to invest in production.
Banks prefer financial transactions.
It's difficult to create an alternative in the short term. Up to 1993 it managed virtually all the city's infrastructure. But the share of MMK and its 41 subsidiaries in economic activity is falling from year to year. The management is doing all it can to hide the fact that output has dropped by half since 1989, an excellent year in which MMK produced 16 million tonnes of steel and the same amount again in cast iron and rolled steel. These figures are extremely hard to get hold of, since MMK, like most Russian enterprises, is out of bounds to journalists.