Professional Life
In 1959, Igor Smirnov began work at the Zlatoust Metallurgical Factory at the age of eighteen. Soon, however, he moved back to Ukraine to work on the construction of a new hydroelectric power station in the town of Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson Oblast.
Smirnov displayed a great enthusiasm for Soviet life, pursuing higher education in the evenings and weekends after work and participating in a number of athletic and cultural activities. He met and married a young engineer named Zhannetta Nikolaevna Lotnik in the early 1960s and served in the Soviet Army from 1963-1966 as a Second Lieutenant. In 1963, Smirnov joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and served as a Komsomol organizer (komsorg) after returning to civilian life.
Once back from the military, Smirnov also continued the correspondence courses he had begun in the early 1960s, receiving a degree from the Zaporizhia Machine-Building Institute in 1974. Meanwhile, he worked his way up from the shop floor to be an assistant director of one of the shops of the Novaia Kakhovska Machine-Building Factory. With his college diploma, Smirnov continued to be promoted. He soon became the shop director, then assistant to the factory’s chief industrial upgrades and new technologies engineer and finally an assistant director.
While he was not made director in 1987 when that position’s erstwhile occupant retired, he was given the directorship of the “Elektromash” Electronics Concern in the nearby Moldovan city of Tiraspol. It would be just over two years before Smirnov led the city’s municipal government as the chairman of the Tiraspol city soviet and just under three before he held the most powerful position in the embryonic — and unrecognized — Pridnestrovian Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic.
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