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Internal border checkpoint in the closed city of Seversk

A closed city or closed town is a settlement with travel and residency restrictions in the Soviet Union and some of its successor countries. In modern Russia, such places are officially known as "closed administrative-territorial formations" (Закрытые административно-территориальные образования, Zakrytye Administrativno-Territorial'nye Obrazovaniya, ZATO).

History

Closed cities were established from the late 1940s onwards under the euphemistic name of "post boxes", referring to the practice of addressing post to them via mail boxes in other cities. They fell into two distinct categories. The first category comprised relatively small communities with sensitive military, industrial or scientific facilities, such as arms plants or nuclear research sites. Examples are the modern towns of Ozyorsk (Chelyabinsk-65) with a plutonium-production plant, and Sillamäe, the site of a uranium-enrichment facility. Even Soviet citizens were not allowed access to these places without proper authorization. In addition to this, some bigger cities were closed for unauthorized access to foreigners, while they were freely accessible to Soviet citizens. These include cities like Perm, a center for Soviet tank production, and Vladivostok, the base of the Soviet Pacific Fleet.

The second category consisted of border cities (and some whole border areas, such as the Kaliningrad Oblast) which were closed for security purposes. Comparable closed areas existed elsewhere in the Soviet bloc; a substantial area along the inner German border and the border between West Germany and Czechoslovakia was placed under similar restrictions. Citizens were required to have special permits to enter such areas.

The locations of the first category of the closed cities were chosen for their geographical characteristics. They were often established in remote places situated deep in the Urals and Siberia, out of reach of enemy bombers. They were built close to rivers and lakes which were used to provide the large amounts of water needed for heavy industry and nuclear technology. Existing civilian settlements in the vicinity were often used as sources of construction labor. Although the closure of cities originated as a strictly temporary measure which was to be normalized under more favorable conditions, in practice the closed cities took on a life of their own and became a notable institutional feature of the Soviet system.[1]

Movement to and from closed areas was tightly controlled. Foreigners were prohibited from entering them and local citizens were under stringent restrictions. They had to have special permission to travel there or leave, and anyone seeking residency was required to undergo vetting by the NKVD and its successor agencies. Access to some closed cities was physically enforced by surrounding them with barbed wire fences monitored by armed guards.

Ukraine

Ukraine had eleven closed cities: among them the Crimean port of Sevastopol and the industrial city of Dnipropetrovsk, though both were restricted to foreigners, not locals. Travel restrictions were lifted in the mid-1990s.

As early as July 1944, the State Committee of Defense in Moscow decided to build a large military machine-building factory in Dniepropetrovsk on the location of the pre-war aircraft plant. In December of 1945, thousands of German prisoners of war began construction and built the first sections and shops in the new factory. This was the foundation of the Dniepropetrovsk Automobile Factory. In 1947 and 1948 this factory produced the first cars and special military automobiles. However, on May 9, 1951 the USSR Council of Ministers decided to transform the main shops and sectors of this factory into a secret enterprise, which included not only special military vehicles but also powerful rocket engines and different modern military aircraft. The former Dniepropetrovsk Automobile Factory was transferred to the Ministry of Armament of the USSR and it received a new name – the State Union Plant #586.

Stalin himself suggested special secret training for highly qualified engineers and scientists to become rocket construction specialists. He recommended introducing a new college degree at Dniepropetrovsk State University: a master of sciences in rocket construction. In 1952 the university administration formed the new department with the name “physical-technical faculty.” It was the largest department at the university, admitting an average of four hundred students per year. These students received better accommodations and a higher stipend payment then students from other departments and colleges. The lowest stipend for this department was 450 rubles per student, while the highest stipend at another prestigious school, the Dniepropetrovsk Medical Institute, was 180 rubles. A special commission from Moscow selected talented undergraduate students studying physics from engineering schools all over the USSR and sent them to the physical-technical department at Dniepropetrovsk State University, where they resumed their studies as rocket engineers. Simultaneously, the university administration announced the admission of new freshmen students in this department. The promise of a good stipend and a glamorized career as a rocket engineer attracted thousands of talented young people to this “secret” department, which provided training specialists only for one industrial enterprise, the Dniepropetrovsk Automobile Factory.

In 1954 the administration of this automobile factory opened a secret design office with the name “Southern” (konstruktorskoe biuro Yuzhnoe – in Russian) to construct military missiles and rocket engines. Hundreds of talented physicists, engineers and machine designers moved from Moscow and other large cities in the Soviet Union to Dniepropetrovsk to join this “Southern” design office. In 1965, the secret Plant #586 was transferred to the Ministry of General Machine-Building of the USSR. The next year this plant officially changed its name into “the Southern Machine-building Factory” (Yuzhnyi mashino-stroitel’nyi zavod) or in abbreviated Russian, simply Yuzhmash. The first “General Constructor” and head of the “Southern” design office was Mikhail Yangel’, a prominent scientist and outstanding designer of space rockets, who managed not only the design office, but the entire factory from 1954 to 1971. Yangel’ designed the first powerful rockets and space military equipment for the Soviet Ministry of Defense. Moscow sent specialists and invested money into Yangel’ and his colleagues’ projects. Yangel’ collaborated with talented engineers who later became the leaders of military production in Dniepropetrovsk and the official directors of Yuzhmash. Two close collaborators of Yangel and of his successor V. Utkin (1971-1990) were the Yuzhmash directors Leonid Smirnov (1952-1961) and Aleksandr Makarov (1961-1986).

In 1951 the Southern Machine-building Factory began manufacturing and testing new military rockets for the battlefield. The range of these first missiles was only 270 kilometers. By 1959 Soviet scientists and engineers developed new technology, and as a result, the “Southern” design office (KBYu – as abbreviated in Russian) started a new machine-building project making ballistic missiles. Under the leadership of Yangel’, KBYu produced such powerful rocket engines that the range of these ballistic missiles was practically without limits. During the 1960s, these powerful rocket engines were used as launch vehicles for the first Soviet space ships. During Makarov’s directorship, Yuzhmash designed and manufactured four generations of missile complexes of different types. These included space launch vehicles Kosmos, Interkosmos, Tsyklon -2, Tsyklon-3 and Zenith. Under the leadership of Yangel’s successor, V. Utkin, the KBYu created a unique space-rocket system called Energia-Buran. Yuzhmash engineers manufactured 400 technical devices which had been launched as artificial satellites (Sputniks). For the first time in the world space industry, the Dniepropetrovsk missile plant organized the serial production of space Sputniks. By the 1980s, this plant manufactured 67 different types of space ships, 12 space research complexes and 4 defense space rocket systems. These systems were used not only for purely military purposes by the Ministry of Defense, but also for astronomic research, for global radio and television network and for ecological monitoring. Yuzhmash initiated and sponsored the international space program of socialist countries, called Interkosmos. A majority of the 25 automatic space Sputniks (22) of this program, were designed, manufactured and launched by engineers and workers from Dniepropetrovsk. Yuzhmash and KBYu became an important center for the Soviet space industry, Soviet military industrial complex and also the main rocket producer for the entire Soviet bloc.

On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, KBYu had 9 regular and corresponding members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, 33 full professors and 290 scientists holding a Ph.D. They awarded scientific degrees and presided over a prestigious graduate school at KBYu, which attracted talented students of physics from all over the USSR. More than 50,000 people worked at Yuzhmash. At the end of the 1950s, Yuzhmash became the main Soviet design and manufacturing center for different types of missile complexes. The Soviet Ministry of Defense included Yuzhmash in its strategic plans. The military rocket systems manufactured in Dniepropetrovsk became the major component of the newly born Soviet Missile Forces of Strategic Purpose.

According to contemporaries, Yuzhmash was separate entity inside the Soviet state. After a long period of competition with the Moscow center of rocket construction of V. Chelomei (a successor of Koroliov) Yuzhmash rocket designs won in 1969. Since that time leaders of the Soviet military industrial complex preferred Yuzhmash rocket models. By the end of the 1970s, this plant became the major center for designing, constructing, manufacturing, testing and deploying strategic and space missile complexes in the Soviet Union. The general designer and director of Yuzhmash supervised the work of numerous research institutes, design centers and factories all over the Soviet Union from Moscow, Leningrad and Kyiv, to Voronezh and Erevan. The Soviet state provided billions of Soviet rubles to finance Yuzhmash projects.

Officially, Yuzhmash manufactured agricultural tractors and special kitchen equipment for everyday needs, such as mincing-machines or juicers for peaceful Soviet households. In official reports for the general audience there was no information about the production of rockets or spaceships. However, hundreds of thousands of workers and engineers in the city of Dniepropetrovsk worked in this plant and members of their families (up to 60% of the city population!) knew about the “real production” of Yuzhmash. This missile plant became a significant factor in the arms race of the Cold War. This is why the Soviet government approved of the KGB’s secrecy about Yuzhmash and its products. According to the Soviet government’s decision, the city of Dniepropetrovsk was officially closed to foreign visitors in 1959. No citizen of a foreign country (even of the socialist ones) was allowed to visit the city or district of Dniepropetrovsk. After the late 1950s ordinary Soviet people called Dniepropetrovsk “the rocket closed city.”

Only during perestroika Dniepropetrovsk was opened to foreigners again in 1987. (see in detail in Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985 (Baltimore, MD: the Johns Hopkins University Press & Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010), 18-28.

Estonia

There were two closed cities in Estonia: Sillamäe and Paldiski. As all the other industrial cities, the population of them was mainly Russian-speaking. Sillamäe was the site for a chemical factory that produced fuel rods and nuclear materials for the Soviet nuclear power plants and weapon facilities. Sillamäe was closed until Estonia regained its independence in 1991. In Paldiski, there was a Soviet Navy nuclear submarine training centre and the city was closed until 1994 when the last Russian warship left.

Closed cities today

The policy of closing cities underwent major changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some cities, such as Perm, were opened well before the fall of the Soviet Union; others, such as Kaliningrad and Vladivostok, remained closed until as late as 1992. The adoption of a new constitution for the Russian Federation in 1993 prompted significant reforms to the status of closed cities, which were renamed "closed administrative-territorial occupations" (or ZATO, after the Russian acronym). Municipally, all such entities have a status of urban okrugs, as mandated by the federal law.

Russia

There are currently 42 publicly-acknowledged closed cities in Russia with a total population of about 1.5 million people. 75% are administered by the Russian Ministry of Defence, with the rest being administered by the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency, formerly the Ministry for Atomic Energy (Minatom).[2] Another 15 or so closed cities are believed to exist, but their names and locations have not been publicly disclosed by the Russian government.[3]

The number of closed cities in Russia is defined by government decree (see links below). They include the following cities:

Some of them are open for foreign investment, but foreigners may only enter with a permit. An example is the Nuclear Cities Initiative (NCI), a joint effort of the United States National Nuclear Security Administration and Minatom, which involves in part the cities of Sarov, Snezhinsk, and Zheleznogorsk.

The number of closed cities has been significantly reduced since the mid-1990s. However, on 30 October 2001, foreign travel (except for Belarusian citizens) was restricted in the northern cities of Norilsk, Talnakh, Kayerkan, Dudinka and Igarka. Russian citizens visiting these cities are also required to have travel permits.

Kazakhstan

Three closed cities under Russian administration exist in Kazakhstan. They are Baikonur (formerly Leninsk), a city constructed to service the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Kurchatov township at the Semipalatinsk Test Site and Priozersk which is the administrative center of the Sary Shagan anti-ballistic missile testing site.

See also

References

  1. ^ Victor Zaslavsky, "Ethnic group divided: social stratification and nationality policy in the Soviet Union", p.224 in Peter Joseph Potichnyj, The Soviet Union: Party and Society, Cambridge University Press, 1988. ISBN 0521344603
  2. ^ Nadezhda Kutepova & Olga Tsepilova, "A short history of the ZATO", p. 148-149 in Cultures of Contamination, Volume 14: Legacies of Pollution in Russia and the US (Research in Social Problems and Public Policy), eds. Michael Edelstein, Maria Tysiachniouk, Lyudmila V. Smirnova. JAI Press, 2007. ISBN 0762313714
  3. ^ Greg Kaser, "Motivation and Redirection: Rationale and Achievements in the Russian Closed Nuclear Cities", p. 3 in Countering Nuclear and Radiological Terrorism, eds. David J. Diamond, Samuel Apikyan, Greg Kaser. Springer, 2006. ISBN 1402048971
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