Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett Read Free Book Online Page B

own name and was referred to by a post office box number, Krasnoyarsk-26—Krasnoyarsk being the nearest big city, forty miles away. It was only in 1992 that its existence was officially confirmed, when President Boris Yeltsin decreed that closed cities could finally be revealed.
    Yet Zheleznogorsk is still closed and entry is highly restricted. The hosts of any visitor must submit their request to the security services and the Ministry of Atomic Energy, and even local residents need to get permission to come and go. Surprisingly, Zheleznogorsk remains closed because its residents like it that way. In 1996 they voted to remain shut away from the world. It is at this point that the story of Zheleznogorsk begins to contradict our preconceptions about life in secret places within authoritarian regimes. Closed places and secret cities fitted snugly into the paranoid mindset of Soviet communism, but in a postcommunist era there are other reasons why communities might decide to be cut off from the rest of us. It’s not only about hanging on to secrets; it’s about holding on to a lifestyle.
    Closed cities were once among the best-funded and most prestigious settlements in the USSR, with well-paid jobs that attracted high-achieving technicians and scientists. They were aspirational destinations. The tranquil, kempt character of Zheleznogorsk, with its large park, lakeside setting, and forests and hills, is something its residents want to preserve. They have witnessed what “opening up” has done to the rest of Russia, and they aren’t keen to go the same way. Soviet nostalgia hangs heavy in Zheleznogorsk: it’s the kind of place that the USSR always promised its citizens. The adulatory website “Zheleznogorsk: Last Paradise on Earth” appears not to be ironic. It’s where one local writer, Roman Solntsev, describes the town’s appeal as a “wonderful feeling of relaxation, calm and peace of mind.” Solntsev goes on to point out the “sharp contrast with the soot-covered, noisy industrial centers and big cities.”
    Zheleznogorsk is part of a club of approximately forty “closed administrative-territorial formations,” which are home to 1.3 million Russians who embrace what might look to the outside world as something imposed. One ex-resident of another closed city labeled with a box number, Kuznetsk-12, posting on a chatroom about why, even though he lives in the United States, he comes back every year with his daughter, writes: “It is a unique place on earth where my child can experience a freedom of exploring a small town, independence and beautiful walks in nature without the fear of anything happening to her since everyone knows each other.”
    Sarov, formerly Arzamas-16, a city of ninety-two thousand, which is still an important center for nuclear missile development, has also fought to restrict entry. It was disappeared from the map in 1946 but remains closed off through local determination rather than Moscow edict. A town tour guide, Svetlana Rubtsova, explained to Russian journalists, “Being part of a closed city gives you a feeling of comfort and protection—that people of this city are all together your family.” Sarov, like a number of other restricted cities, is also an ethnic Russian enclave, situated as it is in the ethnically mixed and potentially separatist region of Mordovia. By remaining closed “we defended it from chaos,” says Sarov resident Dmitry Sladkov. An urban planner by training, Sladkov moved with his family from Moscow in 1992 in order to escape the disorder engulfing the capital.
    In an era when claiming to be open to the world can seem mandatory for cities that wish to prosper, the dogged survival of closed places may appear shortsighted and misanthropic. But Dmitry Sladkov’s desire to flee with his family from the “chaos” of open cities is not a uniquely Russian sentiment. It isn’t just in Russia that people are building closed communities. As modern cities around the