Silk Association - Bender

The Bender Silk Kombinat is one of the largest industrial complexes in the city. The sprawling enterprise occupies an entire urban district, which residents still call the Шёлковый микрорайон, the Silk Quarter, after the residential neighbourhood built alongside it to house the workforce. The kombinat was founded in 1952 as part of the postwar reconstruction of light industry across the Moldavian SSR. It specialised in silk, curtain, jacquard and cotton-blend fabrics, and at its peak in 1990 produced 50.7 million square metres of textile a year, employing around 5,000 workers. By the early 2000s that workforce had collapsed to just 280, as Soviet supply chains and planned economy demand evaporated simultaneously. The kombinat was eventually acquired by Tirotex, the Transnistrian textile conglomerate based in Tiraspol, as part of a privatisation process intended to consolidate what remained of the region's textile capacity.