zbk1.r52.ru was the website of the Nizhny Novgorod open joint-stock company "Factory of Reinforced Concrete Structures No. 1" (Zavod zhelezobetonnykh konstruktsiy No. 1), which existed in the early 2000s in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru. The home page presented the enterprise as "the most experienced manufacturer of prestressed reinforced concrete products in N. Novgorod," involved "in supplying products for industrial and residential construction," as the home page stated[1]. Three snapshots of the site were preserved in the web archive, taken between December 4, 2001, and April 2, 2002[1][3].
What the site looked like
The site was organized as a small corporate business card. The header repeated the full name — "Open Joint-Stock Company Factory of Reinforced Concrete Structures No. 1," below which was a menu of seven items: "About the Company," "News," "Our Products," "Our Services," "We Are Hiring," "We Invite Cooperation," "How to Find Us"[1]. The home page itself displayed the "About the Company" section; the texts of the other sections are not present in the surviving snapshots — only the front page made it into the web archive[1].
The lower part of the home page was occupied by a table of the factory's management: position, surname with first name and patronymic, direct phone number. It listed General Director Sergei Anatolyevich Burganov (phone 53-07-05), the chief engineer, deputy directors for production and for commercial affairs, the chief accountant, and the head of the personnel department — six lines in all, with six-digit city numbers given without an area code[1]. There is no postal address in the preserved text of the home page: judging by the menu, it was located in a separate "How to Find Us" section[1]. No traces of visitor counters remain in the text snapshot of the page[1].
What the factory said about itself
The only substantive text on the site was a short profile of the enterprise. It called the factory "the firstborn of the construction industry," created "as the lead specialized enterprise for the construction of the automobile plant," and, as the home page stated, throughout its seventy-year history it had remained "the flagship of the industry"[1].
Next came lists of what had been built. Among the Nizhny Novgorod landmarks erected "with the help and participation of the factory," the page named the Sports Palace, the university, the Young Spectator's Theatre (TYuZ), the airport, cinemas, the Avtozavodsky Palace of Culture, the Railway Directorate, the Semashko Regional Hospital, and the diagnostic center[1]. According to the site, residential complexes had been built from the factory's products in Nizhny Novgorod, Dzerzhinsk, Pavlovo, Arzamas, Vyksa, and other towns of the region[1]. Industrial customers were listed separately: the production buildings of the Automobile Plant (Avtozavod), the Gearbox Factory, the Dies and Molds Factory, the buildings of the "Krasnoye Sormovo" and "Gidromash" factories, the Machine Tool Factory (Stankozavod), "Dvigatel Revolyutsii," and "Teploobmennik"[1].
The text ended with the advertising formulas typical of the period: "We guarantee high quality, quality, strict control over order deadlines," "Our factory is the most reliable partner for builders!" and "WELCOME to the ZhBK-1 factory"[1]. The typo with the doubled word "quality" remained on the page in all three surviving snapshots[1][3].
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
The site belongs to the most common layer of the early Nizhny Novgorod Internet — factory and company business-card sites in the r52.ru zone, set up once and never changed afterward. The three snapshots, spread across nearly five months, contain absolutely identical text: between December 4, 2001, and April 2, 2002, not a single line changed on the home page, even though the menu included a "News" item[1][2][3].
The factory did not take a notable place in local network life. It does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating we have; no votes for it in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day are recorded in our data; it entered the census through the nn.ru catalog directory, where it was listed with a description repeating the first sentence of its own home page (see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating).
How it closed
The last snapshot of the site in the web archive is dated April 2, 2002[3]. In total, three archived copies of the home page are known, all from a single winter–spring period of 2001–2002[1]. According to a check made while compiling this census, the domain zbk1.r52.ru no longer exists — the address does not respond; exactly when the page disappeared from the network, and whether the factory maintained a presence on the internet under a different address, cannot be determined from our materials.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)