Introduction
In 1994, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new Russian government issued an annual handbook of the State Committee of Statistics. Intrepid readers noticed that the volume referenced an official order assigning names to 37 urban locales as ‘closed cities’. Not only had most people never heard of these places but at no time had they appeared on maps before; here suddenly were the names, populations and various other data about cities unknown to most Russians. More information followed in the ensuing years, showing that there were perhaps as many as 42 towns spread across the former Soviet Union with a total population of 1.5 million that the state had never acknowledged in open print.Footnote 1 As the Russian public soon learned (according to a previously classified 1992 law), a closed city was a
territorial entity with its own local government, within whose boundaries are located industrial enterprises for [the] development, manufacture, storage, and utilization of weapons of mass destruction, and for processing radioactive materials and other materials, [as well as] military and other installations…which require a special regime of safe functions and protection of state secrets, including special residen[tial] conditions.Footnote 2
Of the 42 cities classified as closed cities – most located in the Urals or Siberia – 10 were controlled by the Ministry for Atomic Energy while the remainder were nominally under the subordination of the Russian Ministry of Defence.Footnote 3 By some estimates one in every hundred Soviet citizens had lived and worked in such closed cities.Footnote 4
These so-called ‘secret’ or ‘closed cities’ of the Soviet Union have left a deep imprint on the social geography of the former Soviet landscape, which historians and social scientists have only recently begun to study and theorize.Footnote 5 On a very cursory level, these cities are no mystery. Consider their official designation in the post-Soviet era: Closed Administrative-Territorial Formation (Zakrytoe administrativno-territorial'noe obrazovanie or ZATO). These words all communicate a sense of boundaries, demarcations, limitations and circumscriptions on the social and political geography of the former Soviet Union. The most crucial marker of the ZATO was literally the enclosure around it, policing and controlling who and what came in and out of the city. These were tightly controlled sites, with barbed wire, gates, sentries, passes, boom barriers and a culture where most Soviet citizens, not to mention foreigners, were not entitled to enter. Those who worked in these places had special passes to live and leave, and were themselves occluded from public view. Most, in fact, were not allowed to reveal their place or purpose of employment. Because of their importance to the maintenance of Soviet military power, those who lived and worked in the closed cities enjoyed far higher standards of living than possible in ‘open’ Soviet cities: inhabitants from the Soviet era all speak of well-stocked supermarkets, luxury apartments, good schools and the best doctors, a closed world of aspiration and exclusion. Here the word ‘closed’ (zakryto) captures multitudes: the city closed to the outside; the city as a closed system in the argot of Cold War cybernetic discourse; and finally, the city as closed off from knowledge itself, for the majority of Soviet citizens (and indeed, globally) knew nothing of their existence.
Although firmly a Cold War phenomenon, the Soviet ‘closed city’ had antecedents in the inter-war years. Already in the 1930s, with the expansion of the Soviet defence industry, several major industrial towns were marked off for activity that required extra security. But in their enduring form – with their fixed fences and boundaries, their names omitted from maps and populations who had to sign non-disclosure agreements to keep secrets – the Soviet closed cities emerged directly after World War II, from the innards of the Soviet atomic weapons programme. The first closed towns were established in the late 1940s to house rank-and-file labour who worked at production and testing facilities for atomic weapons. Located in very remote areas far from large populations, these small towns grew dramatically in subsequent years and were given formal status as cities by the late 1950s. Simultaneously, beyond the dozen or so nuclear-identified towns, new closed cities emerged in other sectors of the Soviet defence industry. These included urban spaces associated with coastal naval bases (most in the Murmansk oblast above the Arctic Circle but some in eastern Siberia), missile firing ranges (such as Mirnyi and Znamensk) or missile silo bases.
The ZATOs shared some common features with other closed or regulated spaces in Soviet society, often known as ‘regime’ zones, i.e., areas where social mobility was regulated under different and often overlapping legal regimes.Footnote 6 Yet, the specific defence-natured character of their existence – as well as their omission from maps and total absence of published statistical information – distinguished ZATOs from other closed spaces in the Soviet Union. Michael Gentile has proposed a taxonomy of such regulated urban spaces in the former Soviet Union, moving from ‘the secret city’ in five further graduated stages to ‘the city which is subject to industrial expansion restrictions’.Footnote 7 Of these, the ‘science cities’ (naukogradi) – where there were concentrations of scientific and engineering activities – shared some features of the ZATOs in that they too required passes for entry and exit of people and their standards of living were the envy of those in ‘regular’ Soviet cities.Footnote 8 Yet, in terms of their peculiar form of circumscribed urbanism, ZATOs were singularly unique: they were the only towns absent from maps, not included in any statistical national data, closed off by actual fenced boundaries and noticeably isolated from other population centres.
A concern for the productive focus of the closed cities – especially their involvement in nuclear weapons and other military-themed research and production – has fundamentally shaped much of the extant literature on the ZATOs, one dominated largely by social scientists rather than historians. There has been a tendency to see this phenomenon in terms of contemporary concerns, particularly the egregious environmental damage caused by the lax operating procedures of various nuclear enterprises, or the problem of containing nuclear experts working in ZATOs within Russian borders.Footnote 9 Other works have touched on post-Soviet restrictions on human rights in the closed cities.Footnote 10 To the extent that historians have looked at the ZATOs, most studies have used the case-study approach, exploring discrete aspects of the lived experience of closed cities.Footnote 11 Some have provided useful analyses that situated the phenomenon of the closed cities as part of the development of the Soviet military-industrial complex or the Soviet atomic bomb.Footnote 12
There are, as of yet, no detailed histories of the origin of the closed cities, nor ones that show how exclusionary practices, in both the geographical and epistemological senses, shaped the urban identity of Soviet closed cities. In relation to their origin, Kate Brown has suggested that the concept of the closed city emanated from American antecedents, that, in fact, the architects of the Soviet atomic bomb programme adopted the concept of closed cities in emulation of US security protocols around the Manhattan Project. Brown argues that when Soviet atomic bomb project manager Lavrentii Beria was scouring through stolen intelligence material on the American bomb project, he ‘sought information about these Manhattan Projects [sic] in order to try to breach their security regimes [but] he was probably also looking for organizational ideas’.Footnote 13 Brown's argument rests on a series of assumptions about what Beria might have plausibly done given his interest in the security arrangements of the Manhattan Project, but lacking any clear documentary record, we must remain sceptical of such claims.
As I show here, the evidence, in fact, points much more persuasively to a deeper and more tenable connection with another Soviet space where exclusion and omission intersected, a carceral space that also shaped the urban landscape of the Soviet Union, the Stalinist Gulag camp network. The term ‘Gulag’ or Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei (the Main Administration of Camps) technically described the administrative entity under the Stalinist regime in charge of the coercive system of forced labour, but the word also denotes the massive camp system itself. The size and scope of the Gulag changed over time, but at its peak population in the early 1950s, its physical manifestations dotted the entire Soviet landscape, from the Arctic Circle to Central Asia, and from literally the heart of Moscow to the inhospitable terrain of the Soviet far east. The Gulag included nearly five hundred labour camps, surrounded often with barbed wire and discrete boundaries; hundreds of smaller labour colonies for prisoners with relatively short sentences; and many ‘special settlements’ for the victims of internal exile within the Soviet Union where inhabitants were prevented from leaving beyond a 25-kilometre radius.Footnote 14
Each Gulag camp, containing anywhere from a few hundred to many thousands of people, shared, in its paradigmatic form, the essential features of a closed city: they were both closed spaces where mobility was intensely regulated and designed to separate one population from another. They were invisible in both maps and official discourse. And they were, at least in aspiration, productive nodes of the Soviet economy. And, as I show here, Soviet Beria's simultaneous supervision over both the network of closed cities and the Gulag camp network in the late 1940s was a crucial connective enabling not only Gulag labour to build the first closed cities but also facilitated the migration of a number of features from the Gulag to the ZATOs, in particular, the specific nature of its ideology of security and isolation.
Beyond security, the Soviet closed cities also inherited the Gulag's language of obfuscation and omission. In the case of the ZATOs, the circumscription of knowledge about them – through the use of a dense system of referents designed to promote secrecy – was fundamental to shaping the urban identity of these spaces. This peculiar mapping of secrecy and urbanism, I argue, was made possible through state edicts on secrecy but relied fundamentally on a particular kind of argot to describe the city itself, language that was designed ostensibly to establish the boundaries between what was known and what was hidden. Language appears here not simply as a descriptive mode of understanding the world, but as a mediating tool to shape the urban identity of these closed cities.
The relationship between the Gulag and the ZATOs was one better characterized as genealogical rather than replicative. The significant differences between the two institutions should not be minimized. First and foremost, if the Gulag was a space to be avoided, the Soviet closed cities were citadels to aspiration. As historian Ekaterina Emeliantseva has noted, the people who lived and worked in these cities enjoyed ‘the privilege of seclusion’.Footnote 15 For Soviet intelligentsia – particularly scientists, engineers, and designers – the secret cities represented aspirational spaces where the day-to-day amenities of life were seemingly abundant and plentiful, and where professional status was never in doubt. Where in the Gulag, security and secrecy were manifested in pervasive and dehumanizing realities, in the ZATOs, security and secrecy were considered markers of privilege and status.
My central goal in this article is to reconnect the history of the ZATOs to the history of the Gulag, and in doing so, highlight a phenomenon in the evolution of socialist cities in the post-war era that I call ‘atomized urbanism’. The term here communicates multiplicities, most obviously in its allusion to the atomic industry in the post-war era that was the impetus to establish the first closed cities. But ‘atomized’ here also accurately embodies the obdurate reality of the city coming into conflict with the goal of the state to obliterate, to atomize, the reality of the city through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities, which, as I note, were cities embedded like lonely dots on a map, unable to expand beyond their barbed-wire fences, disconnected from areas beyond their boundaries, and lacking any kind of organic suburban expansion. Finally, ‘atomized’ here heuristically and aesthetically captures the original spirit of the cities, which were Cold War cities of the future, sites of atomic optimism, yet never achieving their full potential, instead leaving a fragmented and atomized version of the original.
The article is organized in two parts. In the first part, I summarize the history of the Gulag with an eye on the imperatives of the Soviet state to secure it, from both porous boundaries and from becoming public knowledge. In the second part, I describe in detail the origins of the Soviet secret cities in the Soviet atomic bomb project, and connect its evolution to the Gulag. I show that there were two ways that this connection can be rendered visible. First, the Gulag shaped the closed cities in structural ways, in that Gulag management and labour were necessary to build many of the early closed cities. Labour, both manual and intellectual, populated these spaces until they adopted some normative functions and practices of Soviet cities – a new form of urbanism. Second, the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Gulag, principally its adoption of physical isolation, its ideology of security and its use of the language of obfuscation. In highlighting the lexicon that shrouded the closed cities in secrecy, I show that that this language was an evolutionary holdover from systems in use for the Gulag. Ultimately, ‘reading’ the histories of these two regulated spaces – each in some ways representing the poles of the Soviet social order – offers insight into the ways in which the ability to enclose and occlude, both spatially and in language, has functioned as an important marker of urbanism in modern Russia.
Regulating the Gulag
Although labour camps had existed in some form or other in imperial Russia, their nature and function took on a significantly expanded role coinciding with Stalin's consolidation of power in the late 1920s. As Soviet industrialization took off with the famous First Five-Year Plan in 1928, there was a concomitant expansion of the use of forced labour for economic purposes. Most of the Soviet Gulag camp infrastructure was, in fact, built in the 1930s to support capital construction, mining, logging, forestry, agriculture, industrial production and the manufacture of consumer goods. Historians estimate that as many as 18 million people may have passed through the Gulag network between 1929 and Stalin's death in 1953 when the Communist party began the lengthy process of dismantling the entire system. At its height in the early 1950s, the camp system enclosed about 2.5 million people.Footnote 16
For the majority of this population, being a prisoner in the Gulag meant that free movement beyond the walls of the camp was impossible under normal circumstances. The Gulag's technologies of incarceration are well known, from barbed wire to high fences to the use of inaccessible locations. All of these techniques were energized by massive bureaucratic investments. In a 1945 presentation given to graduating officers of the Soviet security apparatus (the NKVD) on the history of the system, Gulag chief Viktor Grigor'evich Nasedkin (1905–50) listed the primary goal of the camp system was to ‘maintain in isolation from society, persons convicted of a wide variety of crimes [sic]’ which meant that of the Gulag's three main administrative directorates, the first (‘Directorate of Security and Regime’) was its most important and most well funded. A special paramilitary force was assigned the job of protecting the camps and the ‘suppression of escape attempts’ by prisoners.Footnote 17 Security regimes at the local camp level were constantly monitored by Moscow in order to ensure, as a document from 1951 underscored, ‘the prevention of the disclosure of state secrets’, and, of course, the maintenance of ‘the camp regime [through] isolation and guarding of the prisoners’.Footnote 18
Many documents spanning the three decades of the Gulag's official existence attest to the enormous investments in maintaining the carceral nature of the system, not just with the prison camps but also with colonies and special settlements. For example, the massive deportation and dispossession of kulaks (or rich peasants) during Collectivization in the early 1930s was accompanied by numerous efforts by the OGPU, the Soviet security apparatus, to ‘keep special settlers in their places of settlement’.Footnote 19 At the camps themselves, a variety of security orders from the 1930s onwards hardened the separation between prisoner and society writ large, especially in extremely remote sites where adverse natural conditions made it difficult to maintain total control over security.Footnote 20 The physical security of the camps, enumerated in a decree from 1943, was ensured by an extensive system of checkpoints, towers and gates, and the modern technologies of incarceration: electric lights, telephones and alarms.Footnote 21 In parallel, we find a consistent anxiety over porous boundaries in Gulag camps in the 1930s and 1940s and a concomitant bureaucratic response to promote a ‘struggle against [prisoner] escapes’.Footnote 22
The Gulag camp network was, of course, never airtight, either in its physical manifestation or as an epistemological object. Prisoner releases from the Gulag were an important aspect of the functioning of the camp system, and by some estimates, nearly seven million inmates were released between 1934 and 1952.Footnote 23 As Oleg Khlevniuk and Simon Belokowsky note, ‘the massive transfers of population out of the Gulag and into the non-Gulag served as an important channel between these parts of Soviet society’.Footnote 24 In his study of Vorkuta, the city, and Vorkuta, the camp, Alan Barenberg notes that ‘there were significant continuities between the two incarnations of Vorkuta’ with ‘thousands of [former prisoners] remain[ing] as workers in the new company town’.Footnote 25 A number of historians have speculated on the impact of this exodus on the larger Soviet population, but beyond people, the boundaries of the Gulag were also less than impermeable in terms of knowledge about the camps.Footnote 26 In many camps, prisoners, through clandestine means, sent letters to relatives, a source of unregulated information that the Gulag administration tried in vain to stop.Footnote 27 The millions who were released from the Gulag, especially the massive exodus in the post-war era (most of whom were returned to internal exile in ‘special settlements’), were also required to sign affidavits ‘affirming that [they would] not relate to anybody anything [they] saw or heard while under arrest [and] that for violating this regulation, [they would] be charged with a crime’.Footnote 28
As with the flow of people, the flow of information about the Gulag was also the subject of considerable regulation. If there were some sporadic accounts of the labour camp network in the Soviet press in the early years of Stalinist rule, ‘[b]y the end of the 1930s’, as Gulag historian G.M. Ivanova has noted, ‘the activities of the Gulag were completely shrouded in secrecy’. Describing the internal circulars distributed among the prison population (which were ‘[n]ot to be removed from camp territory’), Ivanova adds that ‘[h]undreds of censors worked vigilantly to ensure that no information, no matter how indirect, on the geographical location of the camp…or the nature of the camp work projects filtered through to the camp press’.Footnote 29 As a result, ‘the Soviet public had only the vaguest notion of the true scale and purpose of the Gulag system’.Footnote 30 During particular crisis episodes, such as the Great Terror of the late 1930s, bureaucrats had to take extra care to protect the nature and scale of the Gulag camp network. The seemingly indiscriminate scale and dynamic of the Terror required enormous amounts of clandestine and secret activities, from the most anodyne to the deadly, that could no longer be discussed in public.
The denial and obfuscation of the lived reality of the camp system required the adoption of hyper-bureaucratic argot. Previous to and beyond the Gulag, the language of Soviet governance was already characterized by a deep fascination with the banal (‘People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry’). Names were shortened (Narkomtiazhprom) and acronyms were everywhere (GOELRO, Osoaviakhim, etc.). Main directorates (glavka), departments (otdel), bureaus (biuro), commissions and councils proliferated in the Soviet economy, accelerated by mushrooming practices of secrecy in the Soviet military and defence sectors. In 1927, for example, all factories that produced items even peripherally linked to the military were renamed so that their traditional names (‘Bol'shevik’, ‘Barrikady’, ‘Arsenal’, etc.) were augmented by numbers beginning from 1 to 56.Footnote 31 By the 1930s, it was usually impossible to determine the main function of a particular factory since the only information might be a number.
The OGPU and later the NKVD consistently argued for such linguistic obfuscations, and once a large part of the Soviet economy came under NKVD control during World War II, such language became firmly lodged in both the Soviet economy and the Gulag. Like the larger economy, the Gulag was rendered legible in official (and secret) documentation through the vapid: we find the use of ordinal numbers for departments, directorates and construction projects (Construction-247, 2nd Department, etc.), banal acronyms for camps (such as ITL for Ispravitel'no-trudovoi lager’ or Corrective-Labour Camp), and shortened names for specific camps (Sevzheldorlag for Severnyi zheleznodorozhnyi ispravitel'no-trudovoi lager’ or Northern Railway Corrective-Labour Camp). A typical letter to the minister of internal affairs S.N. Kruglov from the head of the Gulag camp network, I.I. Dolgikh, complaining about a violation of secrecy, demonstrates how even speaking of secrecy required the language of obfuscation: ‘According to a communication from the 1st Department of the Dal'stroi UITL of the MVD, on February 24 of this year, unknown people stole a bag with secret mail consisting of 58 packages in the series “K” and the letter “A” from the car belonging to the Directorate of Spetssviazi of Dal'stroi.’Footnote 32 Here, numbers and letters serve both as signifiers and as instruments of the secrecy.
By the late 1930s and certainly into the late Stalinist period, the existence of the Gulag was an official secret. And simultaneously, it was an object that circumscribed the movement of millions of people, a prison system. But both of these official attributes conflicted with a countervailing force – the reality of the Gulag in the lives of most Soviet citizens, either as experience or as knowledge. Such knowledge destabilized the fixity inherent in the imaginary of the Soviet state and party. In turn, the state and party redoubled their efforts to fix an official narrative in stone. These struggles took the form of laws (to regulate further what was believed to have already been regulated), institutional reorganizations (such as moving the camps from the OGPU to the NKVD) or punitive measures. In the post-war era, this dynamic, between space and information, and between fixity and liminality, was subsequently transmitted and transmuted into another object defined in terms of its spatial and informational regimes, the closed city.
Atomic city
The Soviet closed city, although given birth from the Soviet atomic programme, inherited several features of the Gulag. These included adopting its spatial logic of secure borders and the use of obscurantist language to describe its various components. These features bled from the Gulag to the closed cities not only because both phenomena demanded similar forms of security and secrecy but also because the Gulag (or Gulag labour, to be more precise) was fundamental to the creation of the Soviet closed city. Eventually as Gulag labour, both manual and intellectual, populated these spaces, the cities adopted some normative functions and practices of Soviet socialist cities even as they produced a unique form of Soviet urbanism, ‘atomized urbanism’.
The Soviet closed cities found their first manifestations in residential settlements designed to support nuclear research or production. The history of the Soviet atomic programme has been amply chronicled, but it bears repeating some of its formational high points, given its key role in the founding closed cities. Although Soviet physicists had done considerable research on the problems of building an atomic bomb during the war, the effort was elevated to a footing of national importance following Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On 20 August 1945, the State Committee of Defence (the organ charged with managing the war effort) created a top-secret body known as the Special Committee, populated by a number of industrial managers, including a wartime commissar, B.L. Vannikov, and two already well-known physicists, Igor’ Kurchatov and Petr Kapitsa. Although technically an industrial project rather than a scientific one, the proper priority of the project was underlined by Stalin's choice to lead the Special Committee: the dreaded Lavrentii Beria, a man whose reputation for cruelty was matched by his organizational skills. The fact that he was effectively (although not officially) the head of the entire Soviet security apparatus, and thus its massive Gulag camp network, ensured a perfect channel for many of the practices and forms of the Gulag to translate into the shape of the early closed cities.Footnote 33
Within four years of the decision to build the bomb, under the tutelage of Beria, Vannikov, Kurchatov and physicist Iulii Khariton, the Special Committee oversaw the creation and expansion of a massive network of institutions that included research centres focused on basic and applied science, design bureaus for engineering support, facilities to enrich uranium and plutonium and factories to produce equipment and sites for testing bombs. By the time that the first Soviet bomb, known as RDS-1, was set off on 29 August 1949, the nuclear imprint across the Soviet landmass was gargantuan and indelible.Footnote 34
The early closed cities were created as a result of this effort: five were located in the Urals, three in Siberia and two in the European part of the Soviet Union. In determining the general location of industrial facilities to support the nuclear project (and therefore, ultimately, the location of the closed cities), Beria's Special Committee took a number of factors into account: first and foremost, the locations had to be far from large populations (and especially the borders of the Soviet Union) to maintain strict secrecy; second, they had to be proximate to large-scale industrial resources and infrastructure; and third, they had to have access to large volumes of fresh water, mainly to cool the hot core of nuclear reactors as well as to dispose of waste.
The early history of one of the early five closed cities in the Urals – now called Ozersk – underscores some common patterns that cut across the genesis of most of the Soviet closed cities. In October 1945, representatives of the Special Committee, including a delegate from Cheliabmetallurgstroi (ChMS), a branch of the NKVD used for various construction projects, carried out a survey of various regions in the southern Urals to apportion remote areas for nuclear work.Footnote 35 In justifying its choice of three potential sites in the southern Urals, the visiting commission explicitly listed the following requirements to Beria: the remoteness of the location; the availability of water, electricity and transportation infrastructure; and the availability of the proximate support of local construction battalions of the NKVD.Footnote 36 Among the sites earmarked was the so-called ‘Site A’ located near a train station known as Maiak on the rail line connecting Cheliabinsk to Ufa, two relatively large cities in the Urals about 350 kilometres apart.Footnote 37 Massive construction works soon converged at Site A to build a factory – ‘No. 817’ – whose primary goal would be to enrich plutonium for the first Soviet atomic bomb.
Almost immediately after these decisions were made, it was clear that the normative construction apparatus of Soviet industry would be inadequate for building Factory No. 817 and other similar facilities. Given the frenetic timeframes of the Soviet atomic project, Beria early on decided to use labour from the Gulag network for the bomb project. A decision in October 1946 essentially handed over the NKVD's massive construction apparatus, known as Glavpromostroi, directly to the nuclear project. This meant that herewith, the entire Gulag slave labour force of 2.23 million prisoners (and special settlers) were put at the disposal of the nuclear project.Footnote 38 It was Glavpromostroi, which from about 1945 to 1949 used Gulag labour to build a vast empire of 35 facilities for the Soviet atomic bomb project, including but not limited to 17 scientific-research institutes and pilot plants, seven mining and metallurgical installations and two massive factories in the Urals – Factories 817 and 813 – the heart of uranium and plutonium processing for the project.Footnote 39
The living quarters of the imprisoned construction workers – meant to be temporary – endured long after they were gone. Their labour was exhausting and exploitative and their living conditions also fell far short of basic needs. Many of the early ‘huts’, for example, were built only for the summer months and caused unbearable misery in the winter. Conditions improved by 1949 as the number of construction workers increased – by this time Glavpromostroi had allocated about 234,250 labourers, which included 113,600 prisoners, to work on the atomic project, necessitating more permanent and thus better housing on par with Soviet urban standards.Footnote 40 It is worth noting that productivity of imprisoned labour was always relatively low – not surprising given the abysmal living conditions, prompting Beria to add ‘free’ labour into the construction pool who were housed in more livable barracks. As discrete extensions of the Gulag, these camps inherited the features of camp architecture, such as rectangular living blocks, all of which were surrounded by ‘forbidden’ portions about 20–30 metres wide that encircled the living areas. On the outside was always a fence.Footnote 41
The source of the iconic closed cities were not these barracks but the new ‘residential villages’ for personnel tasked to operate the facilities. In addition to the atomic factories and labour camps, these villages formed the third leg of the triad of built facilities for the closed cities. When they were first set up, planners had little idea of the future of these sites, and their nature evolved slowly over time, responding to contemporary concerns, primarily the demand for secrecy. Original plans for the residential villages were rather modest: for Factory No. 817, for example, the idea was to build a settlement capable of housing 1,300 personnel and their families about 10 kilometres from the factory.Footnote 42 To direct their construction, Beria had engineers come in from the city of Cheliabinsk, about 100 kilometres to the south-east of the factory. They directed the roughly 42,000 Gulag prisoners in their daily construction work.Footnote 43
Both clemency and secrecy shaped the nature of the growth of population in these settlements. In 1947, for example, Glavpromstroi released 24,500 prisoners (including 5,000 women) when their original sentences expired. Typically, this might mean their departure from these remote outposts back to cities across the Soviet Union, but in this case, due to the demands of security, most were hired as ‘civilian’ employees at the growing residential village. A government decree from 8 August 1947 noted that to ensure the safety of state secrets on the construction of atomic facilities, it was forbidden to leave the limits of the construction sites. As a result, almost all who were released began paid employment at the atomic sites, many rejoining ‘free’ construction battalions.Footnote 44 The settlement attached to Factory No. 817, the largest closed village in the Soviet nuclear project, had a population of about 31,200 by the end of 1952. As free settlement populations increased – largely through migration of scientific and technical specialists and stationing of military personnel through the 1950s but also through prisoner releases – the population of the labour camps associated with the atomic sites also decreased, especially after the death of Stalin in 1953. Ultimately, the camps providing forced labour were closed by 1960, by which time, the closed cities effectively lost their triad character (camp, facility, settlement), now existing only as twin sites for living and working, symbiotically existing with each other.
In their architectural forms, the early closed cities were planned by a Leningrad-based design and planning institution founded in the 1930s, the so-called State Union Planning Institute No. 11 (GSPI-11), which had been commandeered by Beria after the war to work on the atomic project. In a fitting irony, in its early years in the 1930s, the institute's architects designed factories to mass-produce bombs; now it would design cities to mass-produce nuclear bombs.Footnote 45 Their aesthetic was largely functional and reproduced in all of the early closed cities – hence the eerie similarity in the forms of residential housings and cultural buildings in all the Soviet closed cities. In Seversk, as with many of the other ZATOs, planners designed the city with some clear restrictions in mind: a fixed outer limit for the city (of an area of 267 hectares) of which 30 was allocated to a residential neighborhood; a static target population (of 35,000); and the area organized into a relatively narrow strips between a water source (in this case, the Tom river) and the actual nuclear facility.Footnote 46 Like most Gulag prisoner camps, the entire boundary of the city was circumscribed by a barbed-wire fence with a few specific points of entry known as KPPs.Footnote 47 Most closed cities were over a hundred kilometres from the nearest inhabited settlement but many had settlements close by, within a hundred kilometres, although contact was severely discouraged. None of the closed cities, in fact, ‘grew’ past their original allotted area over the past 70 years.
The residential architecture of closed towns largely followed broader trends in Soviet city reconstruction in the aftermath of the war, with low-quality three- to four-storey residential buildings designed by architects from the same Leningrad planning institute. Despite severe housing shortages, city officials initially expended considerable funds to beautify the city through the construction of ornate monumental structures and buildings dedicated to Lenin and Stalin. With the process of de-Stalinization in full flight in the late 1950s, there were calls to be more modest, noting that ‘Soviet architecture should be characterized by simplicity, rigour of forms and cost-effectiveness of solutions.’Footnote 48 Soon, the closed cities were busy with construction of a new generation of prefabricated concrete-panelled five-storey housing structures, the so-called khrushchevka houses, especially the 1–335 model. Named after Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, these houses represented the party's attempt to provide standardized and affordable housing to all Soviet citizens.Footnote 49
The history of the closed cities passed through two phases, an earlier stage of extreme hardship in the 1950s followed by a period of comfort and relative affluence in the 1960s and 1970s. In the early years, the cohort of relatively young intelligentsia endured many privations, including being unable to visit family outside of the city – even in the case of death. Many felt trapped and disconsolate living through the extreme isolation, and resented both the constant intrusion by the KGB into their personal lives and the persistent Orwellian messages posted on city billboards, much like those in the Gulag, exhorting workers to be vigilant against supposed spies.Footnote 50 Drawing information from a post-Soviet survey of veterans who had arrived in the closed city of Lesnoi in the 1940s, historian N.V. Mel'nikova found that 78 per cent of the respondents found the closed nature of the city a great ‘inconvenience’.Footnote 51 Many were from the elite class of scientific and technical intelligentsia; demographic data suggest that as much as 29.2 per cent of the population were scientists or experts. We see here the echoes of the Gulag model of the sharashka, the prison camps exclusively holding arrested scientists, designers and engineers that existed through the entire lifetime of the forced-labour system.Footnote 52 If selected for work at the closed city, the assignment was a fait accompli and was not up for negotiation.Footnote 53 In contrast to the non-disclosure form that Gulag prisoners had to sign upon release, in the case of the closed city, the successful employee signed a special form upon entry, promising to maintain complete secrecy about his or her work.Footnote 54
Life in closed cities transformed by the late 1960s when these cities were flush with money from the massive defence buildup. Mel'nikova found that by the 1960s, families in closed cities had residential quarters far larger on average than the Soviet median. Closed cities had better schools, sports facilities, household goods, department stores and transport infrastructure than ‘open’ ones. Wages were considerably higher, which in turn fed a growing market for private consumer goods such as cars, refrigerators, washing machines, TVs and telephones.Footnote 55 A period of affluence, especially among the population who worked directly on weapons (rather than service personnel), engendered a culture of elitism and entitlement that was very much part of the closed city's identity. In the same retrospective survey of life in the closed cities, at least 71 per cent of the respondents who had lived in the closed city of Lesnoi in the 1960s now found secrecy ‘not at all inconvenient’.Footnote 56
Besides isolation, one of the principal tools for maintaining secrecy about these growing closed cities was the use of obfuscatory language, a lexicon imported directly from the dehumanizing argot of the Gulag camp system. This practice was characterized particularly by a bewildering practice of assigning, changing and omitting important names associated with both the institutions functioning within the closed cities and the cities themselves. Originally, when the facilities were being built, they had dual names. For example, the plutonium processing facility was referred to in documents as either ‘Object 859’ or ‘Factory No. 817’. The associated Gulag construction authority was known as both ‘Camp 859’ and ‘Construction 247’. But these were always in flux and victim to the nervousness of atomic industry managers who believed western spies were everywhere. At one point, on 25 September 1948, the Council of Ministers ordered nuclear programme managers to come up (in five days!) with replacements for the temporary code names and addresses of all facilities connected with the nuclear programme. Within five months, managers were again required to organize new fake offices which could serve as fronts for deliveries destined for the nuclear programme.Footnote 57 These practices were directly connected to management of the Gulag: in that very same year, 1948, when the Gulag administration formalized a system of ‘special camps’ for ‘dangerous’ prisoners who would live and work in total isolation, they issued an order to adopt fake postal addresses for these camps to obscure their function.Footnote 58
The main research institution for the nuclear programme, known as Design Bureau No. 11 (or Konstruktorskoe biuro-11, KB-11), had been founded in the village of Sarov not far from Moscow. Once massive amounts of labour and materials began to arrive there, Sarov was formally removed from the administrative subordination of the Mordovian ASSR, and following a 1948 decree ceased to exist as a legal entity, disappearing from maps. For the purposes of official but secret paperwork, it was renamed several times, to Iasnogorsk, to Kremlev, to Arzamas-75, and then finally, to Arzamas-16. The name-plus-number convention was an enduring legacy of the closed city, to link the unnamed and remote nuclear closed city with an actual public city (‘Arzamas’) located hundreds of kilometres away through an arbitrary number (‘16’). Although never spelled out, the goal was to implant the idea that correspondence destined for Arzamas-16 was heading to the real and rather unremarkable city of Arzamas.
Similarly, beginning in 1948, the residential village near Factory No. 817 was given the moniker Cheliabinsk-40 even though the actual city of Cheliabinsk, a thriving metropolis, was about a hundred kilometres away.Footnote 59 As most of these closed villages grew in size, planners had to confront the nature of their originally envisioned ephemerality – after all, they were probably now going to be permanent cities. In the case of Cheliabinsk-40 and six other nuclear settlements, the Supreme Soviet issued a decree on 17 March 1954 that changed each of their status from ‘settlement’ (naselennyi punkt) to an official ‘city’ (gorod), marking the formal creation of the phenomenon of the closed city.Footnote 60 Later decrees granted the cities the right to have their own Communist party city committee, necessary to facilitate the normative institutional structures of a city in the Soviet Union.Footnote 61
As if to underscore the instability of language in regards to the regulation of space and information, in that same 1954 decree, many of these new cities were (again) arbitrarily given new names from officials in Moscow. Not surprisingly, these names, such as Zheleznogorsk and Seversk, caused much confusion and in 1958 local party officials insisted on reverting back to the ‘tradition, established some years ago’ of using the fake postal addresses of these cities, in this case, Krasnoiarsk-26 and Tomsk-7, respectively.Footnote 62 Ensuring a mode of epistemological instability, in 1966, for reasons never explained, Cheliabinsk-40 was renamed Cheliabinsk-65. Informally, local populations, who originally migrated to build facilities and had remained behind, continued to use the long-abandoned old names in private, but all bureaucratic exchange had to keep up the constant name changes.
Closed cities of the type associated with the nuclear project eventually spread to other areas of Soviet military research and also to seemingly ‘civilian’ elements of Soviet science, including, for example, applied physics, the space programme, computing, etc. As with different Gulag objects (camps, colonies, settlements, etc.), closed cities were heterogeneous, following different models in the regulation of space and information, and thus adopting different secrecy regimes, but the roughly three to four dozen closed cities that emerged from the nuclear industry and expanded into the Soviet military-industrial economy all retained features of the Gulag camp system. The last remaining closed cities were formed in the 1960s but even they followed the epistemological and obscurantist logic of the Gulag. In 1963, for example, a Central Committee decree (‘On the Reinforcement of the Regime of Secrecy’) explicitly noted – echoing the exact language of Gulag administrators – that when new facilities for the Soviet space programme were to be established, they should be in remote areas with plenty of ‘boundary plots of land’ to protect the secrecy of their operations.Footnote 63
Much like the Gulag, officials were ever vigilant that western spies would reveal the location of closed cities. For example, the large population centre located near the launch site of Sputnik and Gagarin was under constant pressure of being revealed by the snooping cameras of American airplanes and satellites. This closed city, known during the Soviet era first as ‘Tashkent-90’, then ‘Kzyl-Orda-50’ (after a nearby river), as ‘Tiura-Tam’ to locals and then finally ‘Leninsk’ in local party documentation, was a thriving city of 50,000 by the late 1960s. But unlike the Gulag or the nuclear programme, the space programme required some degree of publicity, since such activities were a matter of national pride and international prestige. Something, in other words, had to be said about the location from where Gagarin had rocketed into orbit. This was especially urgent because an international organization, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), required this specific piece of data to accept formally Gagarin's mission as an international record. Given this conundrum, two junior officers at a military research institute (known as NII-4) were asked to come up with a solution. Because they were not allowed to mention Tiura-Tam, they ‘selected on the map the “most plausible” point of launch that was not far from Tiura-Tam…the town of Baikonur’ which was actually a town 320 kilometres to the north-east of the launch site.Footnote 64 Thus, for nearly three decades after the launch of Gagarin, official Soviet media assiduously maintained the fiction that Soviet rockets were launched from a place called ‘Baikonur’ hundreds of kilometres away from the actual launch point, whose residents were naturally bewildered to discover that their sleepy town was the home of the Soviet space programme.
The Soviet closed cities survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and only in 1992 were partially declassified. In this and subsequent decrees, the state admitted their existence, located them on official maps and were obliged to provide official statistics on their functioning. The cities ranged in population from as low as 2,000 to many hovering around 100,000, the largest being Seversk, formerly Tomsk-7, with a population in the mid-nineties of 110,300. Most, however, were in the range of 10,000 to 20,000.Footnote 65 The 1994 decree officially classifying them as ZATOs was essentially a step in integrating them into the open economic and institutional order of all Russian cities while still retaining strict restrictions on mobility and labour. Although their numbers continue to fluctuate depending on government edicts (in 2019, there were 38 holding ZATO classification), to this day, all ZATOs maintain strict entrance requirements, and it remains difficult for foreigners to gain entrance to them.Footnote 66
In terms of their names, all the cities relinquished the various code names given to them in the 1960s and 1970s and reverted back to fake names that had been provisionally assigned in 1954, which, despite the many efforts of Soviet authorities, never really dislodged the lexicon of their inhabitants who, for decades, had continued to use the numbered codes that Beria's people had assigned them in the early 1950s. Still, in the new Russia, Cheliabinsk-65 is officially now known as Ozersk. All these changes in names could not, however, mask the enormous human and environmental disaster left behind by the old Factory No. 817 and many of the other ZATOs. Once cities of an atomic future, these sites are caught in a ‘slow-motion [environmental] disaster’ of catastrophic proportions enabled by decades of nuclear accidents and contamination.Footnote 67 In that sense, when examined as environmental systems, the closed cities were anything but closed, having bequeathed, like their Gulag antecedents, irreversible human and environmental wreckage, a ghastly legacy of the mad logic of the Cold War.
Conclusions
In looking at the history of the Soviet closed cities, I make two principal claims. The first connects the closed cities to the Gulag camp system. There is an obvious connection here, predicated on the material contributions of Gulag management, labour and institutions to the construction of the first closed cities in the late 1940s and 1950s. We also see, in the lives of scientists and experts living in the closed cities, echoes of the Gulag's model of the sharashka system designed to hold imprisoned specialists. Such processes in turn ensured that the closed cities inherited key spatial and descriptive practices from the Gulag, both its ideology of security (manifested in physical enclosures, regulation of entry and exit and remote locations) and the continually adaptive but dehumanizing language of obfuscation in order to maintain secrecy. The logic of security and secrecy that connected these two twentieth-century phenomena is best encapsulated by the fact that both closed city residents and Gulag prisoners were obligated to sign non-disclosure agreements about their place of residence, the former upon entry and the latter upon exit. In their legacy too, they are connected, both leaving behind irreversible damage, the Gulag in the lives of millions imprisoned and died, and the closed cities, in the destruction to the environment that is their inheritance.
In abstracting, retaining and then modifying characteristic traits from the Gulag, the Soviet closed cities of the Cold War, I argue, represented a form of atomized urbanism, most obviously because of their deep origins in the Soviet atomic bomb project. But beyond that, the Cold War closed cities also perfectly embodied the tensions between the obduracy of the fixed object, the city – an atom – and the state's imperative, never quite successful, to obliterate, to atomize, the existence of the city through modes of secrecy. This regime of secrecy was, of course, enabled by deep geographical isolation but also in their absence from maps, their fake addresses, non-disclosure agreements thrust upon their citizens and, most strikingly, through a long list of ever-changing names. Many cities change their names over their history, but in the case of the Soviet closed cities, this process was entirely independent of changing cultural norms and driven singularly by an imperative to obscure completely the object itself. The city as obdurate object came into direct conflict with the imperative to obliterate it from the Soviet public imagination.
My second point is about the larger urban patterns followed by the closed cities and their placement in the larger vision of the post-war socialist city in the Soviet Union. In contrast to the Gulag – whose camps were usually close to large urban centres – the combination of the spatial logic of isolation and the need for extreme security in the closed cities produced a kind of atomized urbanism whereby all of the ZATOs in modern Russia are cities which have been unable to expand organically into suburbs, existing in isolation from nearly settlements, and usually far from other large cities. The process of spatial and cartographic secrecy left a legacy of isolated dots on the Russian maps, one that appears to have been echoed in broader urban trends in the Soviet Union beginning the early 1960s. As Becker et al. have shown, ‘Russia has an unusually high proportion of large cities relative to small ones.’ They note that because of this, ‘cities were surrounded by countryside rather than suburbs, and agglomerations – large urbanized regions emating [sic] from a central metropolitan that came to encompass smaller cities – were alien to Russia’.Footnote 68 More to the point, given most cities in the former Soviet Union assumed formal city status in the four-decade span from about 1960 to 2000, i.e. after the initial cluster of closed cities became legal entities, they undoubtedly inherited traits from early post-war decades when the first and largest wave of closed cities came into being. In other words, the evidence suggests that a kind of atomized urbanism – large cities far from others and disconnected from suburban growth – first manifested in the closed cities in the late 1940s and 1950s but later became prevalent in many other ‘open’ cities.Footnote 69
In viewing the history of the Soviet closed cities through the lens of atomized urbanism, we find that they were, in fact, much less exceptional than assumed, and that they reflected, if not accelerated, a general trend in Soviet urbanism in the late twentieth century – the lack of large urbanized regions organically growing. ZATOs too embodied architectural forms of the Soviet socialist city, especially in their adoption of mass housing redolent of late socialism. Finally, and perhaps most important, like most socialist cities, the ZATOs also functioned as nodes in ‘continuous operation as synchronized instruments of economic production and social transformation in physical space’.Footnote 70 Like the ideal socialist city, the closed cities were conceived and operated – at least in theory – within a large state planning system of economic, scientific and industrial activity that was also articulated explicitly as a model of social transformation.
Yet, in many significant ways, the atomized urbanism of Soviet closed cities was also exceptional. If the socialist cities of high Stalinism were supposed to be citadels for migrating peasants who would transform into the proletariat, the ZATOs could never achieve that ideal, since their population was produced remotely and artificially and with specific limits. There was never an option for organic growth. The closed cities also cultivated a kind of Soviet elite, completely antithetical to the notion of an idealized Soviet city. Their self-perceived status of privilege, seclusion and exclusion was a perfect distillation of the contradictions between the rhetoric and reality of late period (‘developed’) socialism. Finally, unlike the idealized version of the socialist city, the closed cities, because of their invisibility, could never be mobilized for the cause of socialist construction, at least in the public eye. In another world, these cities could have been portrayed nationally and internationally as potent exemplars of socialist urbanism – citadels of prosperity and at the vanguard of modern science – but the demands of secrecy made this utterly impossible.
Ultimately, all of these atomic cities were imagined as cities of the future, an urban future where scientific and technical experts would live well, dream big and be the architects of an imagined social order of plentitude. These cities, where the regulation of space and the regulation of information was intimately co-produced, suggest a lineage back to the horrors of the Gulag but they also, in many ways, hint at our own future. Given current-day trends towards regulating borders against migration and the concomitant ability of states (and corporations) to control the circulation of knowledge, the precedent of the Soviet closed city points the way to uncomfortable possibilities that may already be emerging: future techno-Gulag cities, modelled not only on Cheliabinsk-65 but also on Silicon Valley and Singapore, run by technocrats who work to maintain cities where space and information is perfectly regulated and controlled.
