A former industrial powerhouse, the city of Vanadzor in Armenia’s northern Lori region has seen most of its factories shutter in the decades since independence. The local Chemical Plant, which was once the second-largest in the country, now stands derelict after suffering a slow descent into bankruptcy. Left with few job prospects, many residents have moved away. And with much of the reporting on Vanadzor focused on the decline of the Chemical Plant itself, the workers who once kept its workshops running have faded into the background. In a special report for The Beet, journalist Kushane Chobanyan sheds light on the human stories behind her hometown’s forgotten industrial giant, with the help of photographer Vaghinak Ghazaryan.

This story first appeared in The Beet, a monthly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. To get the next issued delivered directly to your inbox, sign up here.

When my friends come to Vanadzor, they often describe it as gray and boring. But I was born and raised here, and I see it differently. Nestled among mountains covered with lush greenery, Vanadzor has never been gray to me, despite the fact that the first thing you see upon entering the city is factory ruins. 

My childhood memories include places like Chemical Workers’ Park and riding the marshrutka (a shared taxi popular in post-Soviet countries) that still follows the route to the Vanadzor Chemical Plant. Almost everyone in my city had a friend or relative who once worked there. Today, the Chemical Plant stands abandoned. 

My request to visit the factory grounds for this story was denied. According to the site supervisor, no one is allowed inside. Finding former workers who were willing to sit for interviews wasn’t easy either. Some spoke cautiously, afraid of saying too much; others refused to speak at all. Many of their old colleagues are gone, and some have scattered to other countries. In the end, three former workers who had never spoken publicly before agreed to share their stories. 

‘I arrived with my diploma and a pen’

When Sergey Danielyan started his job at the Chemical Plant in 1961, the city of Vanadzor was called Kirovakan. Now 98 years old, Danielyan worked at the factory for almost 60 years, witnessing both its heyday and its decline.

Established in 1929, the Chemical Plant was the city’s first industrial enterprise. Dozens of other factories sprang up around it, and the expansion of the Kirovakan Chemical Complex was completed in 1977. In 1987, its final year working at full capacity, the plant produced more than 18,000 tons of fertilizer, 22,000 tons of ammonia, 34,660 tons of calcium carbide, and 13,570 tons of melamine, according to municipal data cited by Armenian media.

Danielyan was born in Artsvashen, an Armenian exclave in the territory of Azerbaijan. He was a tenth-grade student at Artsvashen Secondary School when a nighttime knock at the door changed his life. The Soviet authorities told Danielyan’s father they had half an hour to get ready — their family was being sent into exile. 

As a child, Danielyan never imagined working in a major factory. “I had grown up in a very limited rural environment. And in a village environment, the smallness of the surroundings makes your horizon narrow. You look at the mountains and realize you are enclosed within them. You don’t see that far away. There is a vast, boundless world. It’s a sad thing,” Danielyan recounted. “When you see the world, your dreams travel far away: your mind expands and becomes limitless.”

Danielyan’s family ended up spending two years in exile in Alekseyevka, a village in western Siberia. When he finally returned to Armenia, Danielyan enrolled in the Yerevan Polytechnic Institute. He moved to Vanadzor after he graduated in 1957. “I can’t really say how I decided to move to Kirovakan. I was simply invited to a city I had never been to before,” he recalled. “I arrived with my diploma, a pen, and only the clothes on my back.”

Danielyan started his first job at the Kirovakan Chemical Plant in 1961. He was assigned to the production unit responsible for producing heavy water (D₂O), a neutron moderator used in certain nuclear reactors, including those used to develop nuclear weapons. For the first month, he simply observed the factory environment, knowing that he was being observed too. He was only cleared to work after his documents had been screened in Moscow. 

In the years that followed, Danielyan rose through the factory’s ranks. “At first, I was a shift supervisor, then a technician, then a shop manager, and later a facility manager,” he said. “I was a facility manager for 40 years.” 

When Danielyan first started at the plant, he worked 8–10 hours a day. However, once he became a facility manager, overseeing 200 people, his workday stretched to 24 hours. Even when he was at home, he always kept the special telephone the factory had given him within arm’s reach. Should something happen, he would need to respond within seconds — even a small mistake could cause massive damage.

Much like Danielyan’s life, the city of Kirovakan itself centered around the Chemical Plant. The popular artificial lake — where I was forbidden to swim as a child — was originally built as the plant’s reservoir, he explained. The Chemical Plant also had its own orchard, club, stadium, recreation area, and sanatorium. “Kirovakan was extremely clean and beautiful,” Danielyan recalled. 

And yet, the city’s industrial development had its drawbacks. “Of course, working at the Chemical Plant harmed our health,” Danielyan said, recalling that workers often had dental problems and faced exposure to high levels of mercury vapors, despite taking protective measures. “But the state took measures; it built sanatorium cabins and sent workers for vacations,” he added.

The plant’s operations also generated severe air pollution, which caused respiratory disorders and other health issues among residents. To this day, Danielyan remains conflicted about the factory’s impact. “Yes, we can talk about environmental damage, but denying the Chemical Plant’s role in every sphere of the city’s life would be ungrateful. Yellow smoke would rise over the city — of course, that couldn’t be harmless,” Danielyan sighed. “This is a long discussion.”

The Chemical Plant temporarily stopped operations after a devastating earthquake struck northern Armenia in 1988. And though production later resumed, this marked the beginning of Kirovakan’s industrial decline. Armenia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and in the turbulent years that followed, the city was renamed Vanadzor (after the river that flows through it) and its industry was privatized.

Danielyan remained a facility manager at the plant up until it finally shut down in 2018. “I would wake up in the morning, get dressed, and go to work. I often walked there,” he said, recalling his last year at the plant, when he was 90 years old. “My daughter sometimes didn’t want me to go, but I always went, and I was always neatly dressed.”

Though he’s retired now, Danielyan has no problem filling his days. “I can’t stop learning. I write. Look, I have notebooks,” he said. “I use the Internet a lot, as much as possible. And I learn different poems by heart.”

Danielyan wanted to show me around the Chemical Plant, and was deeply disappointed that we were denied access to the grounds. The day after we spoke, he called to say he had struggled to sleep that night. “It weighed heavily on my heart that the only workplace I’d ever served is now closed to me,” he said. 

‘There was chemistry between me and the plant’

Zoya Galoyan, 83, was born in Armenia’s northern Lori region but spent much of her childhood in Tajikistan. Her family moved to Kirovakan just after she finished the sixth grade. She was 18 years old when she applied for a job at the Chemical Plant, and she ended up working there for 42 years. 

“There were many places to work, but because my father worked at the Chemical Plant, I went there too. I started working in the central laboratory as a lab assistant,” she explained. 

The application process involved presenting her documents and medical records, and then waiting for an invitation to write a departmental exam. When she got the call, Galoyan wasn’t sure what to expect. “I was ready for complicated questions, especially in chemistry, which I knew well,” she said. “But the test was just simple arithmetic and basic chemistry questions, which I answered easily. They were impressed and said, ‘Alright, she passed.’”

Each workshop had its own laboratory, and Galoyan was soon moved to the department that produced melamine, a synthetic chemical used to make durable plastics (like reusable tableware) and laminates. She remembers her starting salary was 80 rubles a month — about average for Soviet workers at the time. But because her parents had passed away and her eldest sister had married, Galoyan’s entire salary went toward caring for her younger siblings. 

“I started as a lab assistant, then became an engineer. I worked in the standardization department, then in another department, and stayed there until the end. Half of my life was spent there,” Galoyan said with a smile. 

With each promotion, her salary also increased. “It became 100 rubles, or maybe 120, I don’t remember exactly,” she said. “Later, when I became an engineer, I was earning 150. Then it went up to 210. Those were high salaries for that time.” (In the 1970s, the minimum wage in the Soviet Union was 70 rubles per month; those making around 200 rubles monthly were considered “middle-wage” workers.)

Around 30,000 of Kirovakan’s 170,000 residents worked in the local industries during the Soviet period. Within Soviet Armenia, the city’s industrial capacity was second only to the capital, Yerevan. According to municipal data cited by Armenian media, products labeled “Made in Kirovakan” were exported to dozens of countries. In the 1980s, Kirovakan’s 32 industrial enterprises produced goods worth 620 million rubles annually. 

But by the time Galoyan left the Chemical Plant in the early 2000s, Vanadzor had long passed its industrial peak. In 2008, the global financial crisis dealt the plant a serious blow as international prices of its main product, calcium carbide, plummeted. Plagued with debt, the factory stopped manufacturing calcium carbide altogether and sent most of its workforce on indefinite leave. 

Though it partially resumed production in 2010, the Chemical Plant ultimately succumbed to its financial woes. In its final years, the plant was embroiled in drawn-out bankruptcy proceedings and workers repeatedly held protests demanding months’ worth of back pay. 

By 2019, Vanadzor’s remaining factories employed just 3,000 people, and the Chemical Plant itself had just a few hundred remaining workers, who were mainly tasked with guarding the property, according to media reports. With few job prospects left in the city, many residents moved away.

Galoyan says she never imagined she would spend 42 years working at the Chemical Plant. At one point, she went to work at the local Automation Factory for a while, but she didn’t like it and went back to her old job. “There was a chemistry between me and the Chemical Plant,” she laughed. 

‘You had to walk that path yourself’

After the Chemical Plant shut down production, Anushavan Abovyan took up beekeeping as a hobby. He and some of his former colleagues also tried running their own business. They started assembling transformers and opened a window-frame workshop. But since there was little work, everyone eventually went their own way. 

“Beyond this wall, you can see the ruins,” Abovyan said, pointing to the defunct Chemical Plant.

Born in the village of Koghb in Armenia’s northern Tavush region in 1954, Abovyan graduated from the Yerevan Polytechnic Institute. He wanted to work in a bigger city, but after graduation, the authorities “forced” him to take a job at Kirovakan’s Chemical Plant. Like many people his age, he remembers the exact date he arrived: October 21, 1975. To his dismay, there was already snow on the ground.

“I was a young man then, a worker earning 90 rubles [a month], doing shifts, switching systems on and off, doing all sorts of things,” Abovyan recalled.

At the time, the Chemical Plant had 4,500 employees, Abovyan said. He started out in the electrical workshop and then worked in the central laboratory, the transport shop, the nitrate shop, the ammonia shop, and the urea shop. Then he was promoted to a position as the urea shop’s energy manager. Finally, he ended up in the carbide unit, where he worked his way up from shop manager to unit director.

“If you didn’t start from the very bottom, you wouldn’t be able to rise up, and you also wouldn’t be able to look a worker in the eyes. You had to know what path they had taken, you had to walk that path yourself, step by step,” he explained. 

In 1980, Abovyan was sent to Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union had set up various industrial facilities to support their military occupation. At just 26 years old, he became an energy specialist in the ammonia department of a Soviet chemical plant near the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. His wife later joined him in Afghanistan, leaving behind their son, who ended up living with Abovyan’s parents in Armenia for three years.

“The products we produced [in Afghanistan] were sent to the Soviet Union,” Abovyan recalled. “It was a program meant to showcase the Soviet Union’s power. I don’t think there was any other real reason to build a factory there.”

During one trip home in 1982, Abovyan used the money he had made in Afghanistan to buy a Volga GAZ-24 car. He still has the purchase voucher — a relic from the Soviet era, when buying a car meant joining a waitlist via one’s workplace and then spending years awaiting permission to make the purchase.  

By the time he returned to Kirovakan permanently in 1983, Abovyan had accumulated eight months of vacation time. Thinking he could finally enjoy a paid holiday, he got a referral to a sanatorium. But one month into his vacation, he was called back due to an emergency at the Chemical Plant. (At the time, he was an energy specialist in the nitrate shop.) “During my entire working career, I only went on vacation once — but I never really felt the need to. If someone told me to go to the Chemical Plant now, I would run there even if they didn’t pay me; I miss my work that much,” Abovyan admitted. 

Being in charge of the unit that produced calcium carbide — a chemical compound used in steelmaking — made him an unpopular figure at the height of his career, Abovyan said. Among other things, he was responsible for overseeing the disposal of production sludge, which was dumped into the Vanadzor River and polluted the surrounding environment. Sometimes, the workers at the nearby train station would spot factory workers dumping and insult Abovyan over the loudspeaker, he said. 

Nevertheless, he still remembers this period fondly. “There’s a joke: A man asks his friend, ‘Who was the best leader?’ ‘Brezhnev,’ he replies. ‘Why?’ he says. ‘Because during his time I was young.’ Thus, I say that the Chemical Plant years were the best for me,” Abovyan smiled. 

“Our home was quite close to the Chemical Plant. For two years [after it closed], I would drive towards the factory without thinking — it was such an important place for me,” he continued. “We formed friendships there and felt useful to the entire Soviet Union.”

As I stand on the long street by the Chemical Plant, I imagine how vibrant life was here long before I was born. In my memories, the Chemical Plant is just a popular landmark. But to its former employees, the factory evokes a lifetime of memories: their youth and friendships, their dreams and plans. Vanadzor is a city of contrasts; a beautiful combination of ruined factories, grayness, and green. Much depends on the beholder and which of the city’s colors they choose to see.

Hello, I’m Eilish Hart, the editor of The Beet. Thanks for taking the time to read our work! Our newsletter delivers underreported stories like this one to subscribers once a month. Like all of Meduza’s reporting, it’s free to read but relies on support from readers. Our newsroom is in trouble, and we’re hoping we can count on you. Please help us keep fighting the good fight for independent journalism.