Story of cities #20: the secret history of Magnitogorsk, Russia's steel city

Designed for Stalin as the world's first completely planned city, Magnitogorsk has yet to confront its controversial past - from the forced labour that helped build it in record time, to the severe pollution that has plagued its residents

In July 1931, Ibragim Akhmetzyanov arrived in Magnitogorsk in a wooden boxcar with his wife and eight children. The sight that greeted them was bleak.

In the middle of the frigid, windswept steppe, a cluster of tents and ramshackle barracks stood at the foot of the ominous "Magnetic Mountain", a landform so full of iron ore that compasses could not function near it and birds avoided flying over it.