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Atomized urbanism: secrecy and security from the Gulag to the Soviet closed cities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2021

Asif Siddiqi Open the ORCID record for Asif Siddiqi [Opens in a new window]
Asif Siddiqi*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Fordham University, 441 E. Fordham Road, Bronx, NY10458, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: siddiqi@fordham.edu
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Abstract

This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 190 - 210
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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Footnotes

†

I would like to acknowledge the support of the Graham Foundation for supporting research for this article. In addition, I thank Ekaterina Emeliantseva, Xenia Vytuleva and Esther Cuenca for comments, suggestions and ideas at various stages of the writing process. Finally, a note of gratitude to the anonymous reviewers whose input was crucial to improving the article.

References

1 Lappo, G. and Polian, P., ‘Zakrytye goroda: arkhipelag “ZATO”’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 2 (1998), 43–7Google Scholar.

2 Rowland, R.H., ‘Russia's secret cities’, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 37 (1996), 426–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Aksiutin, Iu.V. and Zhuravlev, V.V., ‘Nemnogo istorii: “zakrytye goroda” v kontekste vyzovov “kholodnoi voiny”’, Sotsial'no-politicheskie protsessy i ekonomicheskoe sostoianie rossii, 2 (2009), 113–20Google Scholar. The number of closed cities has fluctuated since they were officially identified in 1992, reaching as high as 45 in 2009 and down to 38 in 2019. These changes reflect changes in administrative definitions rather than any physical transformation of the towns.

4 Calculated from data in Table 2 in Rowland, ‘Russia's secret cities’, 432. See also Zaiats, D.V., ‘Zakryta rossiia: chto takoe ZATO’, Geografiia, 7 (2004), 7–12Google Scholar.

5 For recent historical work in Russian, see Mel'nikova, N.V., ‘Tvortsy sovetskogo atomnogo proekta v rezhimnykh gorodakh’, in Kondrat'eva, T.S. and Sokolov, A.K. (eds.), Rezhimnye liudi v sssr (Moscow, 2009), 49–66Google Scholar; V.N. Kramarenko, ‘Gosudarstvennaia politika sssr po sozdaniiu i razvitiiu zakrytykh administrativno-territorial'nykh obrazovaniii v 1945–1991 gg. (na materialakh Nizhnego Povolzh'ia)’, Astrakhan State University, Candidate of Technical Sciences thesis, 2007; Faikov, Iu., Zakrytie administrativno-territorial'nye obrazovaniia: ‘atomnye’ goroda (Sarov, 2010)Google Scholar; Narykov, D.N., ‘Istoricheskii aspect sozdaniia v rossii zakrytykh administrativno-territorial'nykh obrazovanii’, Mir nauki, kul'tury, obrazovaniia, 1 (2012), 246–8Google Scholar; Kuznetsov, V.N., Atomnye zakrytoe administrativno-territorial'nye obrazovaniia Urala: istoriia i sovremennost’ (Ekaterinburg, 2015)Google Scholar.

6 The concept of ‘regime zones’ is developed in T.S. Kondrat'eva, ‘Vvedenie’, in Kondrat'eva and Sokolov (eds.), Rezhimnye liudi v sssr, 10–22.

7 M. Gentile, ‘Former closed cities and urbanisation in the FSU: an exploration in Kazakhstan’, Europe-Asia Studies, 56 (2004), 263–78.

8 Some use the terms ‘ZATO’ as a subset of the larger category of naukogradi. See, for example, G.M. Lappo and P.M. Polian, ‘Naukogrady rossii: vcherashine zapretnye i poluzapretnye goroda – segodniashnie tochki rosta’, Mir rossii, 1 (2008), 20–49. A more accurate accounting suggests an overlap between the two since many features of each were not common across both. See, for example, V.A. Kolosov and P.M. Polian, ‘Ogranichenie territorial'noi mobil'nosti i konstruirovanie prostranstva ot stalinskoi epokhi do nashikh dnei’, in Kondrat'eva and Sokolov (eds.), Rezhimnye liudi v sssr, 25–48 (see esp. 39–42). For case-studies of closed cities that were not strictly ZATOs, see S.I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Baltimore, 2017); P.R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton, 1997); E. Emeliantseva, ‘The privilege of seclusion: consumption strategies in the closed city of Severodvinsk’, Ab Imperio, 2 (2011), 238–59.

9 See, for example, the vast scholarship from security studies scholars on the ZATOs, focused on fears of nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation or economic development: O. Bukharin, ‘The future of Russia's plutonium cities’, International Security, 21 (1997), 126–58; O. Bukharin, ‘Stewards and custodians: tomorrow's crisis for the Russian nuclear weapons complex’, Nonproliferation Review (Fall 1999), 128–38; N. Kutepova and O. Tsepilova, ‘Closed city, open disaster’, in M.R. Edelstein et al. (eds.), Cultures of Contamination: Legacies of Pollution in Russia and the U.S. (Amsterdam, 2007), 147–64; M. Feshbach, Secret Cities, Glasnost, and Global Environmental Threats, The National Council for Soviet and East European Research, report, undated; S.K. Weiner, ‘Preventing nuclear entrepreneurship in Russia's nuclear cities’, International Security, 27 (2002), 126–58; G. Brock, ‘Public finance in the ZATO archipelago’, Europe-Asia Studies, 50 (1998), 1065–81; G. Brock, ‘The ZATO archipelago revisited: is the federal government loosening its grip? A research note’, Europe-Asia Studies, 52 (2000), 1349–60; I. Bushmakova, ‘Redevelopment of Russian closed towns: the example of ZATO Zvezdnii’, Biuletyn KPZK, 264 (2016), 225–42; Gentile, ‘Former closed cities and urbanisation in the FSU’.

10 R. Lemaître, How Closed Cities Violate the Freedom of Movement and Other International Human Rights Obligations of the Russian Federation, Working Paper 77, Institute for International Law, K.U. Leuven, June 2005.

11 For a rare historical case-study in English, see N. Chernyshova, ‘Consuming technology in a closed society: household appliances in Soviet urban homes of the Brezhnev era’, Ab Imperio, 2 (2011), 188–220. For a comparative environmental history of American and Soviet atomic closed cities, see K. Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York, 2013). Although not strictly on a nuclear ZATO, Emeliantseva's ‘The privilege of seclusion’ is an excellent introduction to the social history of closed cities in the late Soviet period.

12 N. Lebina, ‘Krasnoiarsk-26: a closed city of the defence-industry complex’, in J. Barber and M. Harrison (eds.), The Soviet Defence-Industry Complex from Stalin to Khrushchev (Basingdale, 2000), 195–202.

13 K. Brown, ‘The closed nuclear city and Big Brother: made in America’, Ab Imperio, 2 (2011), 159–87. Emphasis mine.

14 The literature on the Gulag is vast and far too large to summarize in a single note. For recent key texts in the English language, see P.R. Gregory and V. Lazarev (eds.), The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (Stanford, 2003); A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York, 2003); O.V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, 2004); S.A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton, 2011); M. David-Fox (ed.), The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison (Pittsburgh, 2016).

15 Emeliantseva, ‘The privilege of seclusion’.

16 Official data calculated on 1 Jan. 1953 indicated a population of 2,472,247 prisoners. See G.M. Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System (Armonk, 2000), 65.

17 ‘Lektsiia nachal'nika GULAGa V.G. Nasedkina, prednaznachennaia dlia slushatelei vysshei shkoly NKVD sssr’ (5 Oct. 1945), in A.I. Kokurin and N.V. Petrov (eds.), Gulag (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei) 1917–1960 (Moscow, 2000), 296–315. Original in State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. r-9414, op. 1, d. 77, ll. 66–108.

18 ‘Spravka po byvshemu 7 otdelu I upravleniia GULAGa MVD SSSR’ (11 Jun. 1951), GARF, f. r-9414, op. 1, d. 91, l. 4.

19 Decree ‘On Special Settlers’ published in ‘Spetspereselentsy – zhertvy “sploshnoi kollektivizatsii”’, Istoricheskii arkhiv, 4 (1994), 145–80 (see esp. 165–9). Original in Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), f. 17, op. 162, d. 10, ll. 154–9. Emphasis mine. OGPU stood for Ob'edinennoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie or United State Political Directorate, the state body that was the predecessor to the NKVD and, later, the KGB.

20 See for example ‘Excerpt from a report to the head of the GULAG of the NKVD USSR, I. I. Pliner, on the isolation and regimen of prisoners and the sanitary conditions of the guards in the Ukhta-Pechora’ (20 Jan. 1938), reproduced in Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag, 119–23.

21 ‘Instruktsiia oo [sic] propusknom rezhime v lageriakh NKVD’ (1943), GARF, f. r-9414, op. 1 dop., d. 1382, 5–6ob.

22 Quote from ‘On stepping up the struggle against escapes and violations of the camp regimen’ (31 Jul. 1939), reproduced in Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag, 215–16.

23 Based on tables reproduced in A.B. Bezborodov et al. (eds.), Istoriia stalinskogo gulaga: konets 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov, t. 4 (Moscow, 2004), 111, 135–6.

24 O. Khlevniuk and S. Belokowsky, ‘The Gulag and the non-Gulag as one interrelated whole’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 16 (2015), 479–98 (see esp. 486).

25 A. Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town (New Haven, 2014), 4.

26 For the cross-pollination between the Gulag and non-Gulag worlds, see G. Alexopoulos, ‘Amnesty 1945: the revolving door of Stalin's Gulag’, Slavic Review, 64 (2005), 274–306.

27 ‘On strict control over the correspondence of the ITL [Corrective-Labour Camp] prisoners’ (16 Aug. 1939), in Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag, 329.

28 R. Podkur, Za povidomlenniam radians'kych setsslushh [in Ukrainian] (Kiev, 2000), 138, cited in Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag, 393 n. 2.

29 Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism, 81–2.

30 Ibid., 37.

31 J. Cooper, ‘Introduction’, in J. Cooper, K. Dexter and M. Harrison, The Numbered Factories and Other Establishments of the Soviet Defence Industry, 1927–67: A Guide: Part I. Factories and Shipyards, University of Birmingham Centre for Russian and East European Studies, Soviet Industrialisation Project Series, Occasional paper no. 2, iv–v; M. Harrison (ed.), Guns and Rubles: The Defense Industry in the Stalinist State (New Haven, 2008).

32 Dolgikh to Kruglov (22 May 1951), GARF, f. r-9414, op. 1 dop., d. 91, l. 1.

33 For Beria, see A. Knight, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (Princeton, 1993).

34 The literature on the Soviet atomic bomb programme is vast. For academic works in English that benefit from post-Soviet disclosures, see D. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, 1996); M.D. Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (New York, 2009). Because Holloway's otherwise excellent book was written without access to archival documents, he missed some salient and important details of the effort. Gordin benefited from these disclosures and locates the Soviet bomb project in an international context. The principal archival declassifications on the Soviet atomic project involved the publication, between 1998 and 2009, by the Russian Academy of Sciences of 10 volumes (plus one for the index) of archival sources on the atomic and thermonuclear programmes under the general title Atomnyi proekt sssr (Atomic Project of the USSR). These provide a fascinating look at the project but lack an overarching narrative structure. For shorter narrative works in Russian that benefit from archival sources, see E.T. Artemov, ‘Sovetskii atomnyi proekt v sisteme “komandnoi ekonomiki”’, Cahiers du monde russe, 55 (2014), 267–94; G.A. Goncharov and L.D. Riabev, ‘O sozdanii otechestvennoi atomnoi bomby’, Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk, 171 (2001), 79–104.

35 ‘Protokol No. 5 zasedaniia spetsial'nogo komiteta pri sovnarkome sssr’ (28 Sep. 1945), in L.D. Riabev (ed.), Atomnyi proekt sssr: dokumenty i materialy, vol. II: Atomnaia bomba, 1945–1954, book 1 (Moscow, 1999), 27–35.

36 Kuznetsov, Atomnye zakrytoe administrativno-territorial'nye obrazovaniia Urala, 76.

37 ‘Pis'mo B.L. Vannikov, A.P. Zaveniagin, N.A. Borisova L.P. Beria o vybor ploshchadok dlia stroitel'stva zavodov No. 817 i 813’ (25 Oct. 1945), in L.D. Riabev (ed.), Atomnyi proekt sssr: dokumenty i materialy, vol. II: Atomnaia bomba, 1945–1954, book 2 (Moscow, 2000), 345–8.

38 Kuznetsov, Atomnye zakrytoe administrativno-territorial'nye obrazovaniia Urala, 93. For a detailed account of the Gulag labour to build one of the major facilities of the Soviet nuclear project, see V.N. Kuznetsov, Atomnyi proekt za koliuchei provolokoi (Ekaterinburg, 2004).

39 Data from ‘Spravka A.N. Komarovskogo na imia B.L. Vannikova o stroitel'stve spetsial'nykh ob'ektov PGU pri SM SSSR’ (5 Sep. 1949), in L.D. Riabev (ed.), Atomnyi proekt sssr: dokumenty i materialy, vol. II: Atomnaia bomba, 1945–1954, book 4 (Moscow, 2003).

40 ‘Svodnyi dannye sekretariata spetsial'nogo komiteta o sostave Spetsial'nogo komiteta pri SM SSSR, PGU, ego uchrezhdenii i predpriiatii, a takzhe uchrezhdenii i predpriiatii drugikh vedomstv’ (no later than 29 Oct. 1949), in Riabev (ed.), Atomnyi proekt sssr: dokumenty i materialy, vol. II: Atomnaia bomba, 1945–1954, book 4, 736.

41 Kuznetsov, Atomnye zakrytoe administrativno-territorial'nye obrazovaniia Urala, 97.

42 ‘O podgotovke i srokakh stroitel'stva i puska zavoda No. 817’ (9 Apr. 1946), in Riabev (ed.), Atomnyi proekt sssr: dokumenty i materialy, vol. II: Atomnaia bomba, 1945–1954, book 4, 192–7.

43 Kuznetsov, Atomnye zakrytoe administrativno-territorial'nye obrazovaniia Urala, 192.

44 Ibid., 98.

45 This institute, the State Union Planning Institute No. 11 (Gosudarstvennyi soiuznoi proektnyi institute-11, or GSPI-11), was brought under Beria's control on 4 Sep. 1945, soon after the Soviet decision to build the atomic bomb. See ‘O peredache 1-mu Glavnomu upravleniiu pri sovnarkome sssr Gosudarstvennogo soiuznogo proektnogo instituta No. 11 (GSPI-11) Narkomboepripasov’ (4 Sep. 1945), in Riabev (ed.), Atomnyi proekt sssr: dokumenty i materialy, vol. II: Atomnaia bomba, 1945–1954, book 2, 18. GSPI-11 was later renamed Lengiprostroi.

46 ‘Stroitel'stvo goroda’, https://зато-северск.рф/stroitelstvo-goroda, accessed 8 Jun. 2020.

47 KPP = Kontrol'nyi propusk punkt (Pass Control Station).

48 ‘Stroitel'stvo goroda’.

49 For more on the khrushchevka, see Harris, S.E., Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Baltimore, 2013)Google Scholar; Meuser, P. and Zadorin, D., Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR, 1955–1991 (Berlin, 2016)Google Scholar; Smith, M.B., Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb, 2010)Google Scholar.

50 Mel'nikova, ‘Tvortsy sovetskogo atomnogo proekta v rezhimnykh gorodakh’, 52–3.

51 Ibid., 54.

52 Ibid., 51. For the sharashka system, see Siddiqi, A., ‘Scientists and specialists in the Gulag: life and death in Stalin's sharashka’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 3 (2015), 557–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Kuznetsov, Atomnye zakrytoe administrativno-territorial'nye obrazovaniia Urala, 196.

54 Reut, G.A., ‘Ispol'zovanie dvoinogo naimenovaniia v zakrytykh gorodakh sibiri v 1950-nachale 1990-kh gg.’, Vestnik KrasGAU, 5 (2014), 242–6Google Scholar.

55 Mel'nikova, ‘Tvortsy sovetskogo atomnogo proekta v rezhimnykh goroda’, 55.

56 Ibid., 54.

57 ‘O dopolnitel'nykh merakh po sokhraneniiu sekretnosti svedenii, otnosiiashchikhsia k “spetsial'nym rabotam”’ (25 Sep. 1948), in Riabev (ed.), Atomnyi proekt sssr: dokumenty i materialy, vol. II: Atomnaia bomba, 1945–1954, book 4, 151–6; Kuznetsov, V.N., Istoriia atomnogo proekta na urale: ocherki i stat'i (Ekaterinburg, 2009), 82–99Google Scholar (see esp. 83).

58 ‘O prisvoenii uslovnykh naimenovanii osobym lageriam MVD’ (10–11 May 1948), GARF, f. r-9401, op. 1, d. 857, ll. 395–6. For such ‘special camps’ in general, see Barnes, Death and Redemption, 155–200.

59 ‘O perevode na novyi poriadok adresovaniia chastnoi i sluzhebnoi pochtovoi korrespondententsii’ (16 Apr. 1948), Municipal Archive of the Ozersk City District, f. 111, op. 1, d. 19, ll. 137–8. See also www.ozerskadm.ru/city/history/index.php, accessed 8 Jun. 2020.

60 ‘Ukaz o preobrazovanii nekotorykh naselennykh punktov v gorod oblastnogo podchineniia i rabochie poselke’ (17 Mar. 1954), GARF, f. A-385, op. 23, d. 1466, l. 1. See also www.ozerskadm.ru/city/history/index.php, accessed 8 Jun. 2020. The decree created the cities of Novo-Ural'sk, Zheleznogorsk, Seversk, Ozersk and Lesnoi.

61 Aksiutin, Iu.V. and Zhuravlev, V.V., ‘Nemnogo istorii: “zakrytie goroda” v kontekste vyzovov “kholodnoi voiny”’, in Sudakshin, S.S. (ed.), Sotsial'no-politicheskie protsessy i ekonomicheskoe sostoianie rossii: materialy nauch. seminara (Moscow, 2003), 113–21Google Scholar.

62 Reut, ‘Ispol'zovanie dvoinogo naimenovaniia v zakrytykh gorodakh sibiri v 1950-nachale 1990-kh gg’.

63 A. Nelepo to P.F. Lomako (23 Sep. 1963), Russian State Archive of the Economy, f. 4372, op. 81s, d. 360, ll. 1–2. The decree, no. 208-76 dated 14 Feb. 1963, was issued by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers.

64 Memoirs of V.D. Iastrebov in Mozzhorin, Iu.A. (ed.), Nachalo kosmicheskoi ery: Vospominaniia veteranov raketno-kosmicheskoi tekhniki i kosmonavtiki, vyp. vtoroi (Moscow, 1994), 320–1Google Scholar.

65 Rowland, ‘Russia's secret cities’.

66 ‘Ob utvershdenii perechnia zakrytykh administrativno-territorial'nykh obrazovanii i raspolozhennykh na ikh territoriiakh naselennykh punktov (s izmeneniiami na 29 avgusta 2019 goda)’, http://docs.cntd.ru/document/901792112, accessed 8 Jun 2020.

67 Brown, Plutopia, 3.

68 C. Becker, S.J. Mendelsohn and K. Benderskaya, Russian Urbanization in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras, Urbanization and Emerging Population Issues, Working Paper 9, United Nations Population Fund, Nov. 2012, 36.

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