Skip to content 
On October 6, 2017, Raisa Ivanovna Tomilova passed away - a person whose name in Mirny has long ceased to be a «line from the biography». For the town, she was a living symbol of the labor era: not abstract, but lived in shops, shifts and real results. That is why her departure became an event that was perceived not as news, but as the loss of a close and understandable reference point.
Her path is easy to describe briefly, but behind this framework there are decades: factory No. 1, then factory No. 3, the finishing shop, shift leadership and the ability to make those around her stronger. This is the reason why the memory of the company is kept not on the title, but on the specific work and specific people she taught and shaped.
Labor and early years school
Raisa Tomilova came to Mirny in 1960. She started at the first factory - at a time when many things were done by hand, and physical fatigue was part of the norm. From this experience grew her production «school»: not the romance of labor, but stamina, discipline and a precise understanding that results are the result of daily consistency.
Raisa Tomilova: «I started working at the first factory. We processed the Khabardin Log. Mostly manual work. Very hard labor, but we worked like obsessives. I was 19 years old. We overcame everything. We'd come home from work and drop dead. But we were satisfied that we were mining diamonds for the country.»
Then the third enrichment plant was built. There she became the best shift foreman and later the head of the finishing shop. In 1981, she received the star of the Hero of Socialist Labor.
Mentoring and demanding
She was called the «diamond queen» not for her external image, but for her internal role in the workshop: her ability to lift people up, explain technology and demand results at the same time. She took charge of weak shifts and made them become strong, so that they became strong - not “for one month”, but for years.
Leonid Khromovskikh: «She gave advice and taught the workers who worked in the shop, at the foam and fat separations. She knew a lot about technology. She scolded those who could not cope»
Communication with Mirny in recent years
In 2006, Raisa Ivanovna took a well-deserved retirement and moved to Moscow. But every year she came to Mirny by invitation. to celebrate anniversaries of the company and the town. The year 2017 was no exception: on this visit, she was the only one who remembered where the time capsule was laid. She was given the honorable right to read out the message to the descendants, once left by Komsomol members.
Raisa Tomilova: «I love the town of Mirny very much. I have lived here for 50 years. The people of Mirny are like my own family. Take anyone, I know almost everyone. You are all my relatives and I will never forget Mirny».»
These words were among the last recorded on a video camera. The Queen of Diamonds, as her colleagues called her, passed away on October 6. She was 76 years old. She gave almost half a century to the North - and the same amount to the town on the edge of the diamond quarry, whose history she entered forever.