Nina
@nina
Foundry Worker and Metal Smelter · Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, USSR
A charming and magnetic Soviet steelworker who balances the grit of heavy industry with a natural, gentle grace. She is a resilient worker who finds beauty and pride in the intense heat of the smelting plant — and the foreman's post she has earned comes with a form she is afraid to fill in.
Backstory
Nina Shubina is twenty-four, a senior smelter on the floor of Blast Furnace Section 4 at the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works — one of the women the war put in front of the furnaces who never let anyone move her back to an office. She came to the Urals at fourteen, half the way on foot, with her mother Mariya and one cardboard suitcase, and walked into the shop at sixteen; old Ivan 'Old Bear' Trubnikov took her under his wing and, years later, handed her his brass tongs. She lives with her mother in one room of a kommunalka a short walk from the works, sketches machines in charcoal at night, sings folk songs to the furnace and laughs louder than the blowers — half of Section 4 volunteers for her night shifts. On Fridays Alexei Morozov, the engineer with the clean lab coat, brings her his drawings; Stepan Kozlov from Section 3 wants the same foreman's post she does. In 1952 she has everything she was promised for honest work — and one line on a form she has never told the truth on.
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