BLPK — Bratsk Timber-Industrial Complex.

BLPK: a town inside the industrial city

For generations of residents, BLPK has meant more than an industrial abbreviation. It evokes a family workplace, the journey to a shift, a factory newspaper, a cultural palace and occupations ranging from pulp cooking to timber rafting. The complex became one of the foundations of modern Bratsk alongside the dam and aluminium smelter.

Today's pulp and board operation is Ilim Group's Bratsk branch. Its official profile lists bleached softwood and hardwood pulp, board and forest-chemical products, with an overall annual volume of 1.3 million tonnes. That is a company profile figure, not a separate statement of actual 2026 output. The historical BLPK encompassed more than today's branch: its constituent enterprises and organisational boundaries changed over time.

Forest, water, energy and railway

BLPK's conception relied on a combination of resources in the Angara region. Forest supplied feedstock, the Angara and its tributaries offered water and transport possibilities, and expanding energy infrastructure supported large-scale industry. The railway linked the future complex to equipment suppliers and customers far beyond the city.

A timber-industrial complex was more ambitious than a sawmill. The plan connected mechanical wood processing with chemical processing and directed different parts of the raw material towards different products. Timber storage, chip preparation, pulp and board production, energy and maintenance services had to work together. Its scale lay in those connections: an output or side stream from one operation could become a resource for another.

Putting the project on the map

City and company chronologies date the beginning of BLPK construction to 1958. The design assignment was approved in April 1960. Years of design, site preparation and coordination lay between the initial decision and the first pulp.

The anniversary chronicle connects the initiative with Georgy Mikhailovich Orlov, a leading figure in the forest and paper industry. The Giprobumm design organisation had a separate role. The originator of an industrial proposal, its designers, the directorate of an enterprise under construction and the building organisations were distinct participants. BLPK emerged through a succession of decisions that gradually turned a regional development ambition into specific buildings and production lines.

Before Olontsev: Khaim Kuznetsov’s directorate

Accounts of management often begin with Mikhail Olontsev, who led the mill through start-up. Yet BLPK had an earlier construction directorate. The anniversary chronicle names Khaim Abramovich Kuznetsov as its head and includes his recollections of work beginning in 1959. That preparatory stage deserves its own place.

The directorate had to do more than plan future output. It assembled specialists, worked through the design and coordinated equipment and construction sequences. Kuznetsov's recollections introduce engineers, technologists and installers arriving in a workforce still taking shape. Distinguishing the construction directorate from management of the operating mill explains why different accounts can use “first director” for people with different responsibilities.

Building the chain before the first cook

The main building campaign gathered pace in the early 1960s. Bratskgesstroy organisations and specialist installation teams worked on the complex. A 1964 photograph in the history of the local electrical installation enterprise shows an extensive site, with buildings connected by routes, utilities and construction traffic.

A pulp complex cannot operate simply because one impressive hall is ready. Cooking depends on wood, steam and chemicals; later stages require washing, bleaching, drying and chemical recovery. A missing link restricts the entire chain. The building programme was therefore also a technological sequence: equipment was useful only when the systems feeding it, receiving its output and servicing the process were ready.

Mikhail Olontsev: leading the first start-up

Mikhail Ivanovich Olontsev took charge of BLPK in 1963. Before coming to Bratsk he had headed the Arkhangelsk pulp and paper mill, bringing experience of organising a major industrial operation. His new task combined completion of construction with mastering equipment and developing a trained workforce.

In 1971 he received the title Hero of Socialist Labour. He later headed the Siberian Research Institute of Pulp and Board. Production and research thus form connected stages of his career: the operating mill needed new technical solutions as well as management. Memorials in Bratsk, including a monument unveiled for BLPK's fiftieth anniversary, preserve his place in the city's history.

Swedish equipment and a new industrial school

BLPK purchased Swedish equipment that installers and future operators had to master. The library's historical account records two groups of specialists visiting Sweden, including Olontsev himself. A dedicated training effort prepared staff for pulp production at the new complex.

Technology transfer involved more than delivering machinery. Teams had to learn operating sequences, recognise equipment behaviour and coordinate different services. The director's recollections place technologists alongside mechanics, power engineers, automation and instrumentation specialists. International connections were therefore part of Soviet Bratsk's story: behind the image of a forest construction campaign stood imported machinery, professional visits and daily learning on site.

Semyon Dzhelyuk: the chief technologist

Semyon Pavlovich Dzhelyuk was a central figure in BLPK's technological development. He came to Bratsk during the preparatory period and became chief technologist. The anniversary chronicle preserves recollections by colleagues and family linking him to specialised pulp grades and inventive work.

His profession stood between the design and everyday production. Equipment had to do more than move and heat up: it had to deliver a material with specified properties. At a new complex, that required coordination between feedstock, operating conditions and customer requirements. Dzhelyuk's biography restores an individual engineer to the story—the person who helps turn a collection of machines into a dependable manufacturing process.

First pulp: the beginning of a long start-up

The city chronicle and Ilim's history date the first Bratsk pulp to 5 September 1965. It became the main symbol of BLPK's foundation. A successful first cook did not mean that the entire complex was finished, accepted and operating at design output.

Industrial commissioning includes trials, equipment testing, first product and the subsequent establishment of stable operation. Alongside celebratory announcements, the anniversary chronicle preserves reports of unfinished facilities and difficulties reaching operating conditions. September 1965 should therefore be read as the opening of a new stage. Builders were still on site, while the production team had to learn to achieve the required result consistently rather than just once.

The chronicle also preserves start-up participant Yury Safronov’s recollection of preparing water for the digester, establishing circulation and waiting for the result. It gives the founding date a human scale: a particular shift, equipment and people who could not yet know what the mill would become sixty years later.

The first wagon leaves for a customer

BLPK's chronicle describes the first dispatch on 5 November 1965: a wagon carried 38 tonnes of unbleached pulp to the Rakhiv board factory in Transcarpathia. This was a distinct milestone. Material produced during commissioning had become a commodity that left the site for use by another enterprise.

The first wagon connects production history with transport history. Bales had to be dried, packed, weighed, marked and brought to the loading point. The ceremonial dispatch rested on operations that receive little attention in accounts of a first cook. For a distant customer, Bratsk was becoming more than a famous construction site: it was now a specific supplier of industrial raw material.

Why commissioning has several dates

The city chronicle calls 30 December 1965 BLPK's commissioning day. An anniversary publication dates the state commission's acceptance document for the first stage to 31 December. The account of subsequent development separately records acceptance of initial capacity into permanent operation in June 1967.

These records should not be forced into one day of “complete opening”. They describe different milestones: obtaining product, documenting start-up readiness and entering permanent operation. Such a layered chronology is natural for a large construction project. Keeping each source's wording makes clear why building and process adjustments continued after the year now associated with the complex's foundation.

Cord pulp: Bratsk supplies another industry

According to the city chronicle, Bratsk's cord-pulp workers obtained their first trial batch of upgraded bleached pulp on 29 April 1967. It was intended for further manufacture of chemical fibres, including high-strength tyre cord. BLPK did not itself manufacture finished tyres; it stood at the beginning of another production chain.

Cord pulp had specialised requirements that differed from ordinary papermaking pulp. Mastering it became a separate technical achievement recognised within the industry. “Pulp” therefore covered different materials with different applications. The cord-pulp streams were subsequently closed after the new production line started in 2013, making this an important historical chapter rather than a description of the present product range.

Tall-oil rosin: chemistry in the side streams

In February 1967 BLPK produced its first tonnes of tall-oil rosin. This forest-chemical product arose from processing substances recovered during kraft cooking. The complex was intended to obtain useful products from more than the cellulose fibre alone.

This illustrates the original integrated concept: wood contains different components, and processing can direct them towards different products. Tall-oil rosin and rosin extracted from woody raw material nevertheless belong to different technological routes. Both appear in BLPK's history. Describing all of them simply as waste recycling obscures the actual processes and the reasons for establishing separate chemical operations.

Feed yeast and forest biochemistry

The city chronicle records BLPK's first trial batches of feed yeast in mid-May 1967. This is another indication of the breadth of the complex being built in Bratsk. Its history includes biochemical production as well as papermaking fibre and packaging materials.

These products served industrial and agricultural uses. They should not be taken as a description of the present Ilim branch's range: the complex's composition, technologies and enterprise boundaries changed. In this historical account, feed yeast illustrates the ambition to use wood-derived raw material in several industries. Today's products need to be checked against the current profile, while former operations retain their own chronology.

The rosin-extraction plant

The early 1970s brought commissioning work on a rosin-extraction plant within the complex. The anniversary chronicle records integrated testing in 1971. This expanded BLPK's forest-chemical operations, with their own feed preparation, apparatus and specialist workforce.

Testing, start-up and stable output remained distinct stages, just as they were in pulp production. The names of individual plants recall that BLPK was a combination of connected operations rather than a single line making one product. That structure explains the diversity of professions and records in its archives: extraction chemistry, pulp, board and mechanical wood processing developed alongside one another without sharing identical timetables.

The first fibreboard

In 1972 Zinaida Nikolayevna Zvezda's shift produced the first fibreboard at BLPK's board plant. The city chronicle preserves the worker's name as well as the product milestone, allowing an industrial event to be seen through the people who carried it out.

Fibreboard is a panel material, not market pulp. It expanded the complex's ways of using wood fibre and supplying other industries. Historical membership of BLPK does not mean that every later enterprise on the site belongs to the same legal entity today. The origin of a production operation and its current organisational ownership should be identified separately.

Bleached pulp and a new research centre

In 1974 the state commission accepted a bleached papermaking-pulp stream designed for 250,000 tonnes a year. The Siberian Research Institute of Pulp and Board, SibNIITsK, was established in the same year. Production expansion thus accompanied the development of a research environment in Bratsk.

Research addressed practical questions involving feedstock, cooking, bleaching and material properties. It changed the city's role within the industry: Bratsk became a place where technological knowledge was accumulated, rather than only where purchased equipment was operated. The stream's original design capacity remains a historical figure and should not be presented as the present mill's total output.

Plywood: another branch of the complex

In 1977 the Bratsk complex's plywood plant produced its first large-format, enhanced-water-resistance plywood. Its mechanical and bonding processes differed substantially from pulp cooking. Very different industrial operations sat beneath the shared historical name BLPK.

The modern plywood operation is associated with Ilim Timber. Its official history describes a 2012 reconstruction raising capacity to 230,000 cubic metres a year, and a 2017 report marked the five-millionth cubic metre of plywood. Ilim Group and Ilim Timber are different companies. Similar names and a shared industrial past do not justify assigning every former BLPK product to today's pulp branch.

Bratsky Tsellyuloznik: the mill records itself

The first issue of the mill newspaper Bratsky Tsellyuloznik appeared on 18 February 1967. It expanded to four pages in 1979. Production events, shift results, notices, employee portraits and cultural activities made factory journalism a major record of everyday BLPK history.

Its genre matters. Such papers preserve names and dates in detail while also expressing the enterprise's official perspective at the time. A record announcement, a critical report and a participant's recollection can reveal different aspects of the same event. Comparing the factory press with the city chronicle and private archives offers a fuller picture than a single celebratory anniversary account.

A technical college grows with BLPK

The Bratsk evening technical school for the pulp, paper and woodworking industries was established on 7 February 1963. Initial teaching took place in the Stroitel settlement. In 1972 it began using a new building on Lenin Avenue; by the end of the decade it had extensive classrooms, laboratories and workshops.

It trained future technologists, mechanics and industry specialists. Evening study connected education with employment, a particularly valuable relationship for an expanding mill. Practical experience needed theoretical explanation, while teaching had access to a real industrial setting. In 1993 the school was reorganised as a pulp and paper college, continuing the educational strand of BLPK's history.

A trolleybus route to the mill

In 1975 Bratsk opened trolleybus service from the market to BLPK. An industrial commute became a milestone in the city's public transport history, connecting residential streets with a workplace attracting large daily flows of people.

The journey to a shift affects access to jobs, family schedules and the organisation of the urban day. The trolleybus made the link between centre and industrial site visible: the route served lives around the enterprise as well as the enterprise itself. This historic route is not a present-day transport guide; current services require separate checking. Its significance here is the moment when the mill's needs helped create new city infrastructure.

The forest-chemists’ palace and city culture

The forest-chemists' cultural palace opened in central Bratsk on 30 December 1967. In 1968 it hosted the first exhibition of the Bratsk photographic club. “Factory” culture here meant an institution participating in the life of the whole city, with exhibitions, concerts, clubs, meetings and public events extending beyond production themes.

Today the Bratsk-ART theatre and concert centre operates at 28 Lenin Avenue. It provides a place where a city walk encounters industrial history through public space. BLPK's story connects to performance, photography, amateur creativity and family life. The complex generated not only products but also demand for a cultural environment of its own.

Healthcare, recreation and everyday mill life

The BLPK production association's medical unit received its first patients in 1979. In 1985 builders handed over the 250-place Solnechny preventive-health resort. These dates show the enterprise's involvement in life beyond the immediate workplace.

A large workforce needed treatment, recovery, recreation and family services. Under the Soviet system, industrial enterprises provided some of these functions. Recollections of BLPK therefore include holidays, sport, children's camps and healthcare alongside events in the workshops. Historical attachment to the complex should not be mistaken for present ownership or current access conditions: those arrangements changed with the city's economy.

The ten-millionth tonne: a cumulative milestone

On 28 June 1984 BLPK cooked its ten-millionth tonne of pulp. This was cumulative output since production began, not annual capacity. It conveys the duration of industrial history: years of shifts, maintenance, learning and gradual mastery of equipment lay behind the milestone.

Anniversary accounts contain different kinds of number—one stream's capacity, output in a calendar year or production accumulated over decades. They answer different questions. The 1984 milestone records a cumulative total; today's profile concerns a different period and production structure. Keeping those boundaries makes growth understandable without combining unlike indicators into an attractive but misleading comparison.

One complex, several organisations

By the late 1980s BLPK's structure was changing. Accounts introduce the territorial production association and the names Bratsktsellyuloza, Bratskdrev and Bratskles. The production chain remained, while its management arrangements developed into a different form.

This matters when reading records. The familiar name “LPK” could refer to the site, a collection of enterprises or a specific organisation at a particular time. Someone could keep the same trade and factory entrance while the employer's name changed on their paperwork. The complex's history is consequently broader than the biography of one unchanging legal entity. Its industrial continuity extends across organisational transformations.

Environmental conflict as the USSR ended

By 1991 environmental issues had become part of Bratsk's public history. The city chronicle describes an aerial investigation of industrial pollution. BLPK's chronicle preserves debate over the future of production and the tension between environmental demands and concerns about employment.

This debate long predates social media. The industrial city was already trying to reconcile jobs, output and living conditions. Residents' and workers' perspectives belong beside official production announcements. Observations from the early 1990s nevertheless cannot substitute for current measurements. Each period's environmental situation needs its own documents and methods, rather than a timeless image of a city with chimneys.

The killing of Eduard Yevtushenko

On 16 July 1993, BLPK general director Eduard Georgiyevich Yevtushenko was killed in the Moscow region. The mill's own anniversary chronicle records his death and the subsequent farewell. This tragedy belongs in the enterprise's history alongside its celebrations and production milestones.

The established fact of a killing does not justify assigning responsibility or repeating theories about those behind it without verified investigation and court records. This account records the event and its place in the workforce's history. The early 1990s brought organisational changes, economic difficulties and uncertainty. The director's death was part of that period, but it does not automatically explain every business development or subsequent ownership change.

Ilim Pulp and the recovery of production

The company history dates Ilim Pulp's acquisition of BLPK to 1997 and describes 1998 as a period of recovery. Railway shipments of Bratsk pulp and board to China began in 2000. A new framework for supplies, management and sales was taking shape.

The Soviet complex was becoming an operation integrated into market and export networks. Customer relationships extended beyond familiar inter-enterprise arrangements, making batch quality, delivery terms and long-distance logistics increasingly important. For employees, these changes affected work organisation and prospects for equipment utilisation. Ownership and production history need to be read together, without one substituting for the other.

From a holding structure to Ilim Group

In 2007 Ilim Pulp enterprises were consolidated within Ilim Group. Partnership with International Paper played a substantial role during this period. The official company chronology records International Paper's exit in 2023, when its stake was sold to Russian partners.

A present-day profile should not retain an obsolete ownership formula simply because it appears in a 2015 book or an old press release. Corporate changes do not erase the site's accumulated experience. BLPK's continuity also resides in equipment, professional knowledge and people, even as organisational forms and shareholder relationships change.

Big Bratsk: a new mill on the established site

Big Bratsk became one of the site's largest reconstructions. Metso's 2010 supply announcement listed cooking, screening, oxygen delignification, washing, bleaching, drying, baling, a recovery boiler and evaporation upgrades. It was an interconnected production system, rather than the purchase of one machine.

On 24 April 2013 the company announced the new line's first market pulp. A ceremonial inauguration followed in June. These events were distinct from the later achievement of design output. The historical complex acquired a new technological centre of gravity, built on an operating site where existing services still had to function throughout the transition.

720,000 tonnes: the figure for a specific line

The new softwood line was designed for 720,000 tonnes of bleached market pulp a year. This was the specification of the Big Bratsk project in documents from its construction period. It is neither the mill's entire output nor a separate statistic for the current year.

The line also changed the enterprise's structure: both cord-pulp streams closed after its start-up. Modernisation therefore involved the end of an earlier technological chapter as well as the addition of equipment. A product celebrated in 1967 eventually gave way to different specialisation and market requirements. These transitions, rather than uninterrupted expansion alone, shape the production story.

The reconstructed board line

The board stream's modernisation was completed in autumn 2019. Ilim's December announcement described capacity rising to 300,000 tonnes a year. Russian and international customers visited the operation, interested in material properties as well as volume.

Board production forms a distinct strand of BLPK's history. Its development concerns packaging, strength requirements and a range of basis weights. Modernisation affects stock preparation and web formation across the process. The 300,000-tonne figure belongs to the reported 2019 project outcome; it should not be confused with annual market-pulp capacity on the new softwood line.

Commissioning across closed borders

In summer 2020 a new evaporation line was commissioned at Bratsk. Pandemic restrictions prevented the usual travel by overseas specialists. Valmet describes a team working in Gothenburg while mill staff carried out tasks on site and shared data, photographs and video. Start-up took place in early July.

This episode reveals modern industrial cooperation in practical detail. Remote communication connected the people beside the equipment with engineers elsewhere; it did not remove the need for a skilled local team. The supplier rated evaporation line No. 8 at 980 tonnes of evaporated water per hour. That measures evaporation, not pulp output—an essential distinction when interpreting technical records.

From roundwood to prepared chips

The first stage resembles familiar timber handling: incoming wood must be measured, sorted and prepared. For chemical processing it is converted into chips, with bark and unsuitable fractions separated. Cooking requires reasonably consistent feedstock.

Chip dimensions and composition affect how evenly the material is processed. Large timber stacks are consequently more than a reserve of wood: they form the beginning of a controlled production flow. Feed preparation connects the mill to forestry enterprises, transport and measurement systems. This describes the general pulp-industry sequence; the equipment and operating conditions of a particular Bratsk stream depend on its design.

Cooking: separating fibre from wood

Wood contains more than papermaking fibre. Lignin binds its structure, and chemical cooking transfers much of that material into solution. Kraft, or sulphate, pulping uses cooking liquor and produces both fibrous pulp and spent liquor containing dissolved wood substances.

The aim is to preserve useful fibre properties while removing material that interferes with later processing. Two important streams leave the cooking stage: pulp moves towards cleaning and subsequent treatment, while spent liquor goes to recovery. Understanding the separation and reuse of these streams explains much of the mill's layout. This is a general description of the process, rather than a specification for an individual Bratsk digester.

Softwood and hardwood pulp

The Bratsk branch's present range includes both bleached softwood and hardwood pulp. These are different materials, rather than two marketing names for the same thing. Differences in the wood are reflected in fibre properties and downstream use.

Customers choose raw material for their own furnish and final product, sometimes combining several fibre components in one paper or board grade. The mill therefore needs to supply repeatable characteristics, not merely a dry white substance. Bratsk's product list should also remain distinct from Ilim Group's entire catalogue: office paper and other company products may be manufactured at different sites.

Bleaching and the meaning of ECF

After cooking, pulp undergoes further treatment to remove residual lignin and achieve required properties. Bleaching technology matters for bleached grades. The industry distinguishes ECF, which avoids elemental chlorine, from TCF, which avoids chlorine-containing bleaching reagents.

These terms are not interchangeable. ECF can use chlorine dioxide; it does not mean that every chlorine compound is absent. Environmental assessment depends on the actual treatment sequence and effluent characteristics. Bratsk's modernisation programmes named ECF conversion as a task, but a plan alone does not establish completion across every stream. This chapter explains the terminology, with project status considered separately.

Black liquor: a side stream becomes a resource

Cooking leaves a solution containing dissolved wood substances and cooking chemicals: black liquor. It should not be confused with ordinary wastewater discharged directly to a river. Kraft production sends it through a separate concentration and recovery cycle.

Evaporation removes much of the water before the concentrated stream reaches recovery operations. Its organic content supplies energy, while chemical components return to the process through subsequent stages. Recovery does not make the mill entirely closed or waste-free: losses, make-up inputs and other impacts remain. It nevertheless explains why a pulp mill needs extensive evaporators and recovery boilers.

Causticising and lime: an essential inner cycle

Recovered chemicals pass through several transformations before returning to cooking. Causticising and lime regeneration help restore the required cooking-liquor composition. This explains recurring terms in Bratsk industrial news: the causticising and lime-recovery department, lime kiln and electrostatic precipitator.

A lime kiln is neither a wood digester nor a board machine. It serves the chemical cycle on which sustained production depends. Replacing one may address capacity, reliability, resource consumption and specific emissions together. Assessment requires more than seeing a new installation: commissioning, operating conditions and measured performance establish what it achieves.

Why electricity alone is not enough

BLPK is often discussed alongside the Bratsk dam, but pulp production needs more than electricity. Process steam supplies heat for cooking, evaporation and drying. The complex's history therefore includes energy installations, boilers and connections between production processes.

Recovery operations return chemicals while contributing to the energy system. Bark and wood residues can also be used in industry energy schemes, although a general principle should not be assigned to a particular Bratsk boiler without its specifications. The central point is that mill energy involves several flows and purposes. Hydropower explains part of the industrial concept, but it does not replace the story of steam and heat.

Drying and the market-pulp bale

Pulp leaves chemical processing as a water-containing stock. To supply other manufacturers it must be formed, dewatered, dried and packed for transport. Wet-lap and drying lines therefore feature prominently in mill occupations and recollections.

The pale bales in a modern production photograph are a marketable form of fibre raw material. They are not finished office paper, even if the material resembles thick sheets. A downstream mill prepares it again for its own process. Packaging, marking and protection determine its condition on arrival. BLPK's production chain thus extends beyond the digester to a product ready for the next journey.

Kraftliner: where a future box begins

Kraftliner forms the flat facing layers of corrugated board. It contributes to packaging performance, but a roll is not yet a finished box. Downstream manufacturers combine it with other layers, form blanks and make packaging for particular goods.

Expanding Bratsk's range of board basis weights allowed the mill to meet different customer requirements. Grams per square metre describe mass per unit area, not thickness in millimetres. Basis weight alone does not capture every property: strength and other characteristics also matter. The 2019 modernisation was therefore discussed with customers in terms of product capabilities as well as increased tonnage.

Forest-chemical products today

Forest-chemical products remain a separate part of the Bratsk branch's official range. They recall the integrated use of feedstock: cellulose fibre is not its only commercially valuable component. Separating and processing associated substances requires dedicated operations.

This is a particularly easy place to confuse today's mill with historical BLPK. References to feed yeast, the rosin-extraction plant or former panel production do not establish that every such product is now made by Ilim's branch. A current profile needs a current list; a historical account needs period records. Keeping them distinct reveals the complex's diversity without inventing a present-day catalogue.

Rails, containers and the route east

Railway operations accompanied BLPK before large-scale output began. The organisation now known as the Bratsk branch of Fintrans GL traces its history to the complex's early units. Its tasks include positioning and removing wagons, assembling trains, loading and transport maintenance.

China became an important export destination. The 2022 company chronology records container loading of pulp and dispatches through Tayshet using a dry-port arrangement. Modernisation thus continues beyond the workshop: making a material is insufficient without a dependable route to its customer. Routing, packaging and network capacity influence the site's work alongside cooking technology.

The forestry branch: another part of the system

The city mill and the forestry branch in Bratsk District are not the same unit. Ilim's official page describes wood supply separately: Forest-Siberia operations supply both Bratsk and Ust-Ilimsk. Their work includes harvesting, roads, forest tending, fire-prevention infrastructure and regeneration.

This boundary matters for statistics. Leased forest area, timber deliveries and forestry headcount should not be assigned to the urban pulp branch. Planting and finished pulp are also measured differently and concern different periods. Environmental assessment requires attention to feedstock origin, harvesting arrangements and actual regeneration results alongside product volume.

Why a pulp mill has an odour

The mill's characteristic smell forms part of residents' experience of Bratsk. Kraft processes can emit reduced sulphur compounds at several stages. Addressing odour therefore requires collecting gases from multiple process points rather than adding one universal filter.

Documents distinguish concentrated and dilute odorous gas streams. Their different properties affect collection and treatment. Smell itself is not a precise concentration measurement or a medical conclusion; equally, the absence of a strong smell does not establish the absence of every pollutant. Environmental assessment needs instrument observations, while project assessment requires information about the sources covered and actual operating conditions.

The Vikhoreva: a river in the mill’s story

Roshydromet's 2025 review classifies Vikhoreva water as polluted at Chekanovsky and dirty at Koblyakovo. Those results concern specific monitoring cross-sections. The government review records river conditions; it does not automatically allocate each measured substance among individual sources.

The river is central to BLPK's environmental history because company programmes explicitly seek to reduce pressure on it. A river observation and an enterprise discharge measurement nevertheless have different sampling points, coverage and purposes. Understanding treatment outcomes requires comparison between discharge records and watercourse conditions, without substituting one for the other or declaring an entire basin clean on the basis of one project.

Several industries share one city’s air

Roshydromet's annual review for 2025 includes Bratsk among cities with a composite atmospheric pollution index of at least 14. This describes urban air affected by multiple sources. Assigning the whole index to BLPK alone, or treating it as one pollutant's result, would be incorrect.

An enterprise has its own emission indicators; a city has environmental observations. Lower emission tonnage, a reduction in a particular gas stream and concentrations beside a home are different measures. Period, pollutant coverage and sampling location matter. Government monitoring is therefore presented alongside mill programmes to retain an independent account of the environment in which people live.

Environmental programmes: spending, projects and commitments

In May 2022 Ilim announced a programme exceeding 18 billion roubles for 2022–2026, covering air-related measures and reduced pressure on the Vikhoreva. In April 2024 it described further dilute-gas collection, gas-cleaning and chemical-recovery reconstruction work.

These publications are retained as dated statements of programme scope and objectives. Investment spending is not a direct measurement of air or water quality. Assessment needs commissioning records, evidence of operation and changes in indicators. Deadlines require particular care: an old plan does not become proof of completion simply because its target year has arrived.

The 2026 update: deadlines proved difficult

A report from the deputy commission meeting on 12 May 2026 records chief environmental specialist Galina Bystrova acknowledging delays on odorous-gas targets. Instead of the earlier 44-tonne annual goal, she described an expected 46–48 tonnes after the board-stream project. Uncertainty about meeting nitrogen-oxide quotas was also discussed.

These are a company representative's public statements as reported by a local publication, not verification of a completed final outcome. They change how earlier releases should be read: the modernisation story cannot end with a 2022 or 2024 plan. At this section's check on 19 October 2026, the full reporting year is still unfinished, so achievement of every annual target is not claimed here.

Vyacheslav Mikheyenko: from dryer operator to director

An announcement published on 27 June 2025 named Vyacheslav Valentinovich Mikheyenko as director of the Bratsk branch. His career began as a wet-lap dryer operator. He trained at the Bratsk pulp and paper technical school, continued his education and held production-management roles.

The official branch page also identifies him as director at this section's check date. A current account should not reuse a manager's name from a 2013 or 2024 publication without checking it. Mikheyenko's career connects present management with a specific mill occupation: drying may appear as one box in a process diagram, yet for an individual it can be the beginning of a working life at the enterprise.

Sixty years of BLPK

The Bratsk mill marked its sixtieth anniversary in 2025. Intergenerational meetings, recollections and workforce events formed part of the occasion. A March Ilim Cup quiz tournament, for example, was dedicated to the anniversary, showing a factory community expressed through shared activity as well as production results.

An anniversary offers a view back from today's site to the first cook, but it does not close the history. Training, technological change and environmental projects continue. Present-day records deserve preservation alongside archival photographs: future writers will use them to reconstruct the lives and work of the people who marked sixty years of BLPK.

Olontsev’s monument and the people behind the complex

A monument to Mikhail Olontsev was unveiled in Bratsk for BLPK's fiftieth anniversary in 2015. It commemorates the leader associated with the operating mill's beginnings, while the wider history belongs to technologists, process operators, cooks, dryer workers, maintenance teams, railway staff, forestry workers and builders.

Photographic captions matter particularly in such an account. A name, department, date and source turn an industrial image into a historical record. Where an exact shooting date is unknown, that is stated. Present-day views are not presented as archival evidence, and images from an anniversary volume retain a link to their provenance.

Further reading and places to continue the story

The most extensive open source used here is the anniversary chronicle Historical Has Become Our Portrait on Ilim's website, combining factory reporting, recollections and photographs across fifty years. Read it alongside the libraries' city chronology, the college history and contemporary technical announcements: each has its own period and perspective.

In Bratsk, continue the story at Bratsk-ART, through former factory transport routes and in museum and library materials. The mill itself remains an operating industrial site with controlled access. Organised visits require arrangements with the enterprise; this section does not imply unrestricted public entry. Related site sections cover BrAZ, the dam, districts and the city's cultural life.