Leninogorsk

(Ridder until 1941), a city in Vostochnyi Kazakhstan Oblast, Kazakh SSR. Located in the Rudnyi Altai, near the foothills of the Ivanovskii Range, on the upper course of the Ul’ba River (a tributary of the Irtysh). The terminus of a railroad branch from the Lokot’-Ust’-Kamenogorsk line. Population, 71,000 (1972; 50,000 in 1939).

The city of Leninogorsk arose around a small mine discovered in 1786 by the mining officer F. Ridder; mining began in 1791. Between 1914 and 1917 the Ridder mines were owned by the British concessionaire L. Urquhart. By the Oct. 7, 1922, decree of the Council of People’s Commissars, which was signed by V. I. Lenin, the British attempt to renew the concession was rejected. In the period of Soviet power the city has developed into a major center of the polymetals industry. A polymetals combine that produces zinc, lead, and sulfuric acid has been built. There is also a knitwear factory in the city.

Leninogorsk’s cultural institutions include a general technology department of the Kazakh Polytechnic Institute, miningmetallurgical and forestry technicums, a medical school, and a museum of local lore.

(until 1955, the settlement of Novaia Pis’mianka), a city in the Tatar ASSR, located in the Bugul’maBelebei upland; a railroad station 29 km west of Bugul’ma. Population, 47,000 (1970).

Leninogorsk is an oil and gas extraction center and a buildingmaterials production site. It has a machine repair plant, and it is the site of an evening general-engineering department of the Moscow Institute of the Petrochemical and Gas Industry, a petroleum technicum, and a teachers’ training school.