The development of nuclear power in the Soviet Union produced distinct forms of material culture: industrial infrastructures, architecture and landscapes, as well as a wide range of objects ranging from laboratory and plant equipment to museum and informal collections, from chemical residues in the environment to packaged nuclear waste. All of these can be described, following Susan Schuppli, as material witness to the nuclear past, which contains layered evidence of its productive and destructive impacts.Footnote 1 This article develops a cultural heritage perspective on public engagement with nuclear cities as material witness, which presents a novel approach to the study of the management of nuclear legacies. It shows the lasting power of material culture to preserve the layers of history despite the continued political attempts to redact, cover up and erase the past.Footnote 2 Drawing on the case-study of the closed city of Sarov (formerly Arzamas-16), the heartland of the Soviet and Russian nuclear weapons industry, I demonstrate how new, plural forms of agency can emerge in the context of stringent secrecy and authoritarian rule, where the nuclear industry, local authorities and grassroots actors negotiate inheritance of nuclear material culture. By focusing on the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian case, this article contributes new empirical materials to the wider scholarship on the late modern politics of industrial urbanism. It argues for the importance of nuclear cultural heritage-making as a particular form of spatial politics defined by secrecy and restricted access and yet coupled with the global political economy of nuclear security.
All heritage-making is, by definition, selective. However, nuclear cultural heritage-making in Russia is selective in the extreme and became subject to a particularly active revision of history after the Cold War. The case of Sarov is particularly helpful for understanding the political agency of Russian nuclear communities – scientists, engineers and residents in atomic cities – as it manifested in urban space and changed from the late state socialist period (1970s–80s) to the present. Geir Homeland and Anne‐Kristin Jorgensen described closed cities as an ‘archipelago of federal islands’, suggesting that they were closely integrated with Moscow-based institutions and, in some cases, with each other, while remaining detached from local and regional communities and authorities.Footnote 3 However, in Sarov there were significant cases where nuclear scientist communities challenged this fragmentation and sought to localize their experience of the nuclear weapons programme through amateur history research and preservation of material culture. In doing this, they created nuclear kraevedenie, a mode of studying local history popularized in the Soviet Union and strongly associated with the volunteer participation of non-professionals. I argue that nuclear kraevedenie manifests in the formal and informal museums of nuclear and local lore as well as in the cultural heritage valuation of urban and natural environments that were transformed by the nuclear industry. Both formal actions, such as creating and curating museums, as well as informal heritage valuation of the environment through public debate, tourism and informal collection and archiving practices, were eventually supported by the state-owned Rosatom corporation, the successor of the Soviet Minsredmash (Ministry of Medium Machine Building). Rosatom brands itself as a territorial actor, even a ‘country’ (strana Rosatoma). The ‘Rosatom country’ laboratories and institutes could be seen as forming distinct krai, a subnational geographical space comparable to the French pays in that they bore a strong connotation with a cultural homeland, as in rodina or heimat. In the 1920s–30s, the Soviet government actually promoted kraevedenie as a virtuous and morally edifying activity, a source of patriotism and human dignity.Footnote 4 At the same time, Soviet kraevedenie ranged from subversive local history research that asserted the agency of grassroots, particularly ethnic, minorities, to extending centrally administered colonial knowledge in non-Russian regions.Footnote 5
This ambivalent effect of asserting civil agency and autonomy, while bolstering state power, also characterizes nuclear kraevedenie in Arzamas-16, a high-security city, where the emancipatory potential of nuclear cultural heritage intertwined with the reproduction of Russian colonialism, state and ecclesiastic power. Arzamas-16 was built on Mordovian land in the region that was colonized by Orthodox monasteries and settlers from Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the late nineteenth century, one of the most prominent ecclesiastic sites was Sarov monastery (Sviato-Uspenskaia Sarovskaia Pustyn’) located close to the village of Sarov. The village was the home of St Seraphim (1754–1833), a prominent Orthodox saint, whose canonization, marked by the consecration of St Seraphim church in 1903, was a national event and made the monastery famous during the late Russian empire. In the early twentieth century, St Seraphim was promoted alongside Alexander Pushkin as key figures of Russian culture.Footnote 6 However, following the communist revolution, St Seraphim church was nationalized and converted into a theatre. Sarov monastery, dispersed in 1927, first housed a refugee camp and then a young offender colony administered by the State Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Parts of the monastery complex were demolished and the remainder was repurposed as a factory during World War II. With the arrival of KB-11, the first nuclear weapons laboratory in 1946, the history of the locality was classified. Half a century later, beginning in 1995, some archival documents pertaining to the Soviet atomic programme were released and the first history volumes in Russian published, including volumes containing historical materials on Arzamas-16.Footnote 7 Although many nuclear scientists were atheists, the leadership of the nuclear sector aligned with the Orthodox church in an effort to revive public faith in the nuclear industry’s importance for national security.Footnote 8 Vying for power, the Orthodox church positioned itself as a mediator in the construction of the new techno-political identity of post-Cold War Russia by designating St Seraphim a patron saint of the nuclear industry and sending his relic bones to the Space Station (and back) in 2017.Footnote 9 In this way, the urban material culture of Arzamas-16/Sarov was reconfigured in the context of techno-optimism and the promotion of the radiant, nuclear future of atomically powered communism, the green ‘nuclear renaissance’ and Orthodox messianism.Footnote 10
Beginning in the late 1990s, a growing volume of doctoral dissertations and research publications explored the social and economic development of closed towns. Russian researchers recorded oral histories and mapped the cultural spaces of atomic cities.Footnote 11 Prominent US science diplomats published memorial statements collected from those who participated in USSR–USA exchange programmes.Footnote 12 Rosatom too conducted an oral history project to mark the industry’s 75th anniversary in 2015.Footnote 13 However, the Russian government signalled that even research based on open sources was closely watched and any accumulation of detailed empirical evidence on the history of nuclear weapons was not welcome.Footnote 14 During my visits to Moscow (2016–19), I was not able to visit Sarov: access for foreigners was severely restricted. Instead, I draw on materials gathered during my fieldwork visits to Russian museums of science and technology, interviews with cultural practitioners and representatives of Rosatom and primary and secondary data that is publicly available. In what follows, I first map the political economy of Arzamas-16 that establishes the context for heritage-making, which is then detailed in three sections that explore the official, grassroots and dissident forms of heritagization.
The political economy of nuclear cultural heritage in Sarov
Many Cold War science cities developed as high-technology spaces in the context of rurality in the Global North and South. Arzamas-16/Sarov was not an exception. The ubiquitous images of the cityscape, circulated since the 1990s, reveal what comes across as a typical planned mono-industrial Soviet city where multistorey apartment blocks surround a historical centre, which, in this case, is dominated by an impressive monastery complex and its distinctive bell tower. Several residential districts feature semi-detached and detached houses as well as areas for allotment gardens. The most striking feature, however, is greenery where mature trees obscure the dilapidated high-rises and blur the urban boundary as it gives way to explosion and technology-testing polygons, the security perimeter of the nuclear weapons factory complex, and then merges with the Mordovia nature reserve. Now with just under 100,000 inhabitants, Sarov is a compact city, structured by roads and small rivers, which together shape its religious pilgrimage, leisure and nationally strategic character. The city, as I detail below, evolved through the recombination of multiple layers of landscapes, infrastructures and material cultures, which were partially destroyed, hidden by new tiers of Soviet urban development, then recovered as part of the temporary post-Soviet liberalization and, later, of Russian Orthodox religious revival. In public narratives and visual representations, Sarov was constructed as a laboratory, factory, symbol of Cold War nuclear secrecy and, later, Russian great power ambitions.
Initially called KB-11, after the code name designating the first Soviet nuclear weapons design laboratory, Arzamas-16 was established in 1946 and acquired city status in 1954.Footnote 15 Situated in a remote but accessible area about 400 kilometres from Moscow, Arzamas-16 was strictly classified and absent from Soviet public maps and publications until 1990. Arzamas-16 accommodated research, industrial and residential functions. Starting in the 1950s, separate districts were constructed for workers, featuring low-rise apartment buildings and individual houses, including Finnish and German assembly houses acquired through post-war reparations. Leading scientists and administrators were granted spacious, attractive villas that typically housed two families and were surrounded with lush greenery in the so-called ‘engineer-technical workers district’. Much of the land use was allocated to nuclear weapons production: as of 2018, 61 per cent of the Sarov area was occupied by industrial facilities, including the nuclear weapons factory Avangard (1949), which borders the Mordovian nature reserve.Footnote 16 The development of the city was undertaken by Avangard, along with KB-11 (renamed All-Union Research Institute for Experimental Physics (VNIIEF) in 1966), and the construction company US-909. These three enterprises employed the city’s population and directly funded all the urban and social infrastructure.Footnote 17
An interesting source on the early development of the town is the documentary film Kremlev (1962–63), part of the series about Soviet nuclear cities commissioned for ‘internal use’ at the Soviet nuclear weapons ministry Minsredmash. The footage presents an architecturally homogeneous urban space formed by Stalinist neoclassical buildings and a rational street network that connected the KB-11 facility based in the monastery with public squares, avenues and cultural amenities, such as a house of culture (1956), a cinema (1957), a hospital and schools.Footnote 18 All of them featured typical Minsredmash designs seen in other atomic cities such as Obninsk, Ozersk and Snezhinsk.Footnote 19 Lively people, most likely Minsredmash staff, are shown in the film entering the buildings while the narrator emphasizes the planning commitment to providing jobs and social well-being for the population. There is no mention of the city’s industrial profile.
Following the end of the Cold War, former Soviet secret cities were redefined as closed administrative-territorial units by government act (ZATO, zakrytoe administrativno-teritorial’noe obrazovanie) in 1992. Subordinated to federal ministries, mainly the Ministry of Atomic Energy and the Ministry of Defence, ZATOs remained relatively independent of regional authorities.Footnote 20 The cultural imaginary of Arzamas-16 oscillated between a Gulag camp and a fortress with overlapping layers of mythologization. The first public media report on Arzamas-16 was an article in the Komsomolskaia pravda newspaper (November 1990), which described the city as a ‘zone’ surrounded with a barbed wire fence and monitored by the KGB so closely that it ‘did not need a prison’.Footnote 21 During the 1990s, closed cities were renamed, and some were partially opened. However, their residents’ mobility remained restricted based on possession of classified information. Physical access to Arzamas-16, renamed Sarov in 1995, remained strictly controlled, but stories and images describing the place began to circulate in the public domain through memoirs, photo albums and websites.Footnote 22
Moreover, the history and material culture of the secret nuclear sector began to acquire a new strategic value for both industry and local government. From the late 1980s, the nuclear industry experienced a crisis in status: influenced by the Chornobyl catastrophe (1986) public attitudes turned anti-nuclear while debates about the climatic impact of nuclear war (1983–88) proliferated.Footnote 23 Mikhail Gorbachev declared that the nuclear industry was ‘dominated by servility, bootlicking, cliquishness, and persecution of those who think differently’ and dismissed Anatolii Aleksandrov and Efim Slavskii, the heads of the Soviet nuclear complex.Footnote 24 The economic decline that followed the Soviet collapse exposed nuclear workers to precarity as their salaries went unpaid and, for the first time, residents of atomic cities faced a severe shortage of goods.
During this moment of glasnost, when democratization and economic decline intertwined, the nuclear industry leadership began to selectively assemble and stage the history of nuclear weapons, showcasing what had been previously reserved for temporary displays in military parades. Whereas the Komsomolskaia pravda reporter regretted not being able to see a nuclear bomb, this practice changed in 1992 when the first museum exhibit of nuclear weapons was opened by Boris El’tsin.Footnote 25 Furthermore, Arzamas-16 sought to reach out both to the public and the new government by securing a presence on the capital’s cultural stage and in the public imagination. As part of these efforts in 1995, VNIIEF gifted a mock-up of the RDS-1 bomb to the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow.
Furthermore, the heritage of secret science cities was deployed as part of science diplomacy that showcased Soviet/Russian nuclear achievements.Footnote 26 Starting in the late 1980s, the first opening of Soviet nuclear facilities and associated cities to foreign visits formed part of nuclear arms reduction negotiations. For instance, the US physicist Frank von Hippel, an arms control scientist, was taken on ‘glasnost’ tours to military facilities such as the Krasnoiarsk radar station and was among the first Westerners to visit the plutonium production town Cheliabinsk-40 in 1987–88. The first US scientists stepped inside a Russian nuclear laboratory in 1990. As of 1992, ‘people to people’ diplomacy was conducted through correspondence, student exchange and family visits between Arzamas-16 and the US nuclear town at Los Alamos, New Mexico.Footnote 27 Science diplomacy was motivated by a mixture of commercial and security interests. Western nuclear scientists considered the Soviet nuclear legacy an ‘inheritance from hell’ that posed both environmental and proliferation risks.Footnote 28 For the Russian nuclear establishment, foreign visits mattered in terms of economic opportunities but also symbolically by bolstering what was formerly the ‘Soviet’ and now ‘Russian’ nuclear industry and reinforcing the sense of historical mission among nuclear workers. Heritage was staged as part of diplomatic visits. For example, in February 1992, the director of Los Alamos Laboratory was shown around the newly established Museum of Nuclear Weapons at Arzamas-16 and was photographed with ‘Tsar Bomba’s’ shell, as was the US Energy Secretary Steven Chu in 2001.Footnote 29
Facing the past of the Soviet nuclear complex also meant recognizing its devastating impacts: mass repression, human suffering and environmental destruction. Arzamas-16 is a relic of what Kate Brown described as a ‘continuum of incarcerated space’, an extensive and heterogeneous network of high-security locations, a concept that echoes the prominent Russian dissident Zhores Medvedev’s idea of a ‘Soviet nuclear archipelago’.Footnote 30 Lavrentii Beria (1899–1953), the head of the NKVD under Stalin, was in charge of administering this repression apparatus and running the Gulag system. Known for his ruthlessness, Beria was appointed to supervise the Soviet atomic programme in 1942.Footnote 31 Under Beria’s supervision, the initial settlement for KB-11/Arzamas-16 was built by some 10,000 prisoners brought in to construct the laboratories and housing. Once the work was completed, most of them were then forced to settle in the remote Far East of the Soviet Union to secure secrecy.Footnote 32 When approached spatially, Arzamas-16’s radioactive footprint on the environment is significant. It formed a key node in the chain of nuclear production sites that generated some of the world’s worst contamination in uranium mines, plutonium production sites, nuclear testing polygons and radioactive waste dumps. Although the International Atomic Energy Agency lists only one serious nuclear accident that involved a fatality in the city (1997), the construction and operation of KB-11/Arzamas-16 featured many tragic events: a group of convicts were executed while trying to escape during construction; VNIIEF and Avangard workers were injured and died from exposure to radioactive and explosive materials; and radioactive water was released regularly into the Sarovka River.Footnote 33
Celebratory nuclear cultural heritage-making was further complicated by the socio-economic decline of the 1990s and early 2000s. Although many studies detail the elite and privileged character of Soviet closed cities, which inhabitants of surrounding areas called islands of communism surrounded by socialism, the lived reality was complex. The closed city residents referred to the outside as ‘the mainland’ (bolshaia zemlia).Footnote 34 Many residents of Arzamas-16 doubted the rationale for the city. Retrospectively, some first-generation scientists admitted they had never intended to commit their entire lives to the closed city and to the making of a so-called ‘nuclear shield’, but had hoped to ‘do their job and to leave peacefully’ after the detonation of the first bomb. The leading scientists and managers were awarded apartments and summer houses in Moscow, which they could visit, something not granted to the ordinary scientists and engineers working in the Arzamas-16 facilities. A promise of a Moscow apartment and city residency (propiska) was used to attract young scientists at a later stage. Some prominent scientists even left Arzamas-16 so that they would not forfeit their Moscow propiska. Footnote 35 In the 1990s, the city’s viability was even questioned. Reflecting on the failing economy, a frustrated scientist, for instance, observed that the only stream of income was ‘holy water’ drawn from the Sarovka River.Footnote 36 The media nicknamed the atomic cities ‘Beriia reserves’ (beriiski zapovedniki) and called to open them. This was met with great concern by some nuclear scientists who saw this as a threat to nuclear security.Footnote 37 Even in 2025, Rosatom still recognizes that Sarov is not attractive for young Moscovites and seeks to recruit its new generation of workers from regional universities, such as Nizhnyi Novgorod.
The collapse in the nuclear city’s status was painful both locally and nationally. Western leaders no longer saw Russia as a threat, but rather as a failed developing state. Arzamas-16 was transformed from the guardian of a great nuclear power into a recipient of international aid.Footnote 38 In the late 1990s, the US Department of Energy (DoE) funded the safeguarding of nuclear materials, principally plutonium and heavily enriched uranium, and control over 50 nuclear sites in Russia, in exchange for Russia halting its nuclear co-operation with Iran.Footnote 39 In 1998, the DoE established the Nuclear Cities Initiative, a collaboration with 10 Russian cities, to prevent the brain drain of ex-Soviet scientists to ‘rogue’ states such as Iran, Iraq or North Korea, and to stop the leak of radioactive materials to terrorist organizations. Under this programme, which sought to strengthen the closed city economies by improving public health and redeploying the military industry to civil use, Sarov gained a computing centre, a medical technology production area and access to business loans from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.Footnote 40 Sarov nuclear institutes partnered with Lawrence Livermore Laboratory while hundreds of US–Russian scientists paid visits to their respective labs. These exchanges fostered a sense of nuclear camaraderie in the context of declining government interest in nuclear power. But the high security that restricted logistics made their socio-economic impact less evident.Footnote 41
In this context of institutional and cultural secrecy, the Russian nuclear sector searched for new channels to accumulate social and political power and a new narrative to bolster the sector’s legitimacy. This, according to Maria Engström and Dima Adamsky, prompted the rapprochement between the nuclear industry and the Russian Orthodox church, which began to mediate between the government, the military and nuclear sectors.Footnote 42 As Engström argued, by 2013 the Orthodox theological notion of Russia as katechon, a shield against the world’s chaotic forces, informed Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy doctrine and, by extension, supplied a particular spiritual discourse to the nuclear weapons industry.Footnote 43 This was particularly salient in Sarov, where the spatial location and institutional influence of the Orthodox church intersected with nuclear weapons production.
The military to civil sector conversion programmes coincided with a key shift in cultural policy towards ‘creative cities’ in the late 1990s, when arts and culture were redefined as drivers of the economy. Like deindustrializing European countries such as the UK, Germany and France, post-Soviet Russian authorities expected the creative sector to generate jobs through cultural tourism and innovative business. In Russia, according to Irina Sandomirskaja, a form of memorial capitalism emerged that fused the ex-Soviet emphasis on heritage as a sphere of ideological exchange with the new notion of economic value.Footnote 44 In the 2000s, Rosatom emerged as the key actor. The newly appointed CEO of Rosatom, Sergei Kirienko, visited the Sarov Museum of Nuclear Weapons in 2007. The following year, Kirienko appointed Sergei Novikov as the head of Rosatom’s public relations department. In 2013, Novikov, who was deeply interested in arts and heritage (particularly opera), created a Rosatom Historical and Cultural Centre, based in Moscow, to oversee the official presentations of nuclear history. Hundreds of enterprises, institutes, laboratories and cities that belonged to the Rosatom empire began to compete with each other for recognition, contracts and staff through participation in wide-ranging cultural heritage projects.Footnote 45 These cultural initiatives were anchored in the national cultural policy framework that sought to professionalize cultural management at the local and regional levels. Cultural heritage policies prioritized ‘small towns’ including nuclear ZATOs. In 2006, Sarov was awarded a prize for the best cultural tourism route alongside traditional heritage sites such as Gatchina and Vyborg.Footnote 46
The US withdrew the Nuclear Cities Initiative programme in 2005, when Putin’s government began restructuring the nuclear sector (Putin first visited Sarov in 2003). The programme expired just before Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Russia’s subsequent actions in Syria, the Baltic states and alleged meddling in the US elections in 2016 led to the pause of formal high-level nuclear co-operation.Footnote 47 Western scientists who had lobbied for aid programmes for the Russian nuclear complex in the 1990s now described Putin’s regime as unbearably ‘paranoid’, making further visits impossible.Footnote 48 Meanwhile, Sarov’s population grew to 96,000 in 2016.Footnote 49 A satellite techno-park was established outside the closed city perimeter, where new offices for R&D enterprises were constructed next to dilapidated wooden cottages. In 2012–13, Rosatom began construction of a high-power laser UFL-2M to bolster nuclear testing and the laser weapons programmes. Although the urban economy bounced back somewhat with the average monthly salary (c. $800 in 2022) almost double that of elsewhere in the region, the residents did not regain the sense of prosperity and confidence comparable to the Cold War period.Footnote 50 As of 2024, the Russian government’s ambition to reclaim the status of a great nuclear power continues to clash with the social and material reality of Sarov’s ageing infrastructure and experience of social inequality.
The beginnings of official nuclear kraevedenie
The first initiative to preserve and make public Soviet nuclear material culture was proposed by VNIIEF scientists who sought to preserve their legacy, enhance symbolic capital and create a sense of social and spatial cohesion. For them, nuclear cultural heritage-making was a form of kraevedenie, an attempt to understand their institutional and physical locality and situate themselves within the complex history of science and technology, the Cold War and social and environmental change. However, these attempts were severely constrained by secrecy. As Asif Siddiqi has detailed, Soviet policies of secrecy established physical and informational boundaries of access to objects and knowledge.Footnote 51 The physical boundaries of secret nuclear cities drew on the Gulag model of physical infrastructure, where the police and military security forces guarded the urban perimeter, laboratories and factories. The informational boundaries governed the circulation of knowledge, obscured the identities of individuals and hid the true purpose of research and design. Even where the objects and individuals were declassified, their public presentations were censored. Accordingly, a very restricted number of material objects and people were selected to manifest the past. Secrecy, in this way, reinforced the hierarchical, restrictive and compartmentalized narratives developed in nuclear cultural heritage-making.
In 1978, VNIIEF proposed a museum of nuclear weapons to celebrate ‘the glory of labour’ contributing to the radiant communist future.Footnote 52 Whereas museums of socialist labour were established at many Soviet industrial establishments towards the end of the 1970s, by proposing this museum VNIIEF was also vying for international status: the US Los Alamos Laboratory began to display declassified objects in 1963, while the Sandia military base opened a nuclear weapons exhibit to the public in 1969. Longing for public recognition, a scientist described the envisioned heritage venue as ‘a hermitage museum of nuclear weapons’.Footnote 53 The scientist here referred to Catherine the Great’s art collection, accumulated as part of the competition for prestige with other European empires and displayed at the specially built Hermitage gallery in Saint Petersburg (1764).Footnote 54
The first museum, established as Laboratory no. 2033 in 1979 and led by the VNIIEF deputy director, engineer Nikolai Petrov, was modest. Focusing on the ‘methodology and history of the special technology’, the Laboratory began assembling an audio-visual archive of ‘technical films’, detailing the operation of different nuclear devices, including nuclear testing. The Laboratory also documented VNIIEF’s everyday life, the construction of new residential districts in Arzamas-16 and produced aerial photographs of the city.Footnote 55 Following the Chornobyl catastrophe, the Laboratory filmed the clean-up and construction of the reactor’s temporary cover. Their heritage activities evolved from the sorting of accumulated film footage and chronicling current events to historical research. In the early 1990s, the Laboratory created several interview-based films about the history of the Soviet atomic programme at Arzamas-16.Footnote 56 Much of this work was initiated and carried out by Viktor Luk’ianov, a physicist and photography enthusiast, who was appointed director of the collection in 1983 and then head of the Museum in 1992, where he remained until 2013.Footnote 57 Luk’ianov was inspired by the Bradbury Science Museum of Los Alamos as well as the National Nuclear Museum in Albuquerque which he visited in 1994.Footnote 58
The opening of a public Museum of Nuclear Weapons was the culmination of this Minsredmash-oriented nuclear kraevedenie. The new VNIIEF director, Vladimir Belugin (1987–96), was so impressed with the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, which he visited in 12–14 February 1992, that he asked Boris El’tsin for permission to declassify the exhibition of bomb mock-ups during El’tsin’s visit to Arzamas-16 on 28 February 1992.Footnote 59 The first exhibition, situated in a humble canteen building in Sarov’s polytechnical institute, was inaugurated in November 1992. It featured a shell of the first atomic bomb RDS-1 (1949) as a centre piece, alongside the shells of RDS-4 (1953–54), RDS-6c, AN-604 (1961), sections of the control panel Pioner (1976), as well as OKA shells (1981) and mock-ups of missile delivery systems.Footnote 60 The overall narrative emphasized the power of Soviet and Russian science and technology, while admitting, however, that the RDS-1 was developed on the basis of stolen US designs of the plutonium bomb nicknamed Fat Man. This exercise in transparency strongly resonated inside Arzamas-16. Many scientists never saw the end product of their work and did not even know that their research had contributed to the bomb.Footnote 61 Having inaugurated the exhibition alongside El’tsin, the celebrated nuclear physicist Iulii Khariton (1904–96) described the Arzamas-16 scientists as a fragmented knowledge community, who were ‘the unintentional prisoners of their own imagination or of misconceptions from the past’. Khariton stated that without full access to the archives even a technical history of nuclear science and technology was flawed.Footnote 62
However, material culture also mattered, especially where it formed part of the urban built environment. The Memorial House Museum of Igor Kurchatov, who built the first pile reactor F-1 in 1946 and was the first scientific director of KB-11, was opened in Moscow shortly after his death in the 1960s. However, since it was situated within the closed territory of the Institute for Nuclear Research, it was not accessible to the public. Similarly, in Sarov, Iulii Khariton is memorialized in the Museum of Nuclear Weapons’ expositions, as well as in the Khariton Memorial House Museum, which opened in 1999. In co-operation with the Rosatom Historical and Cultural Centre, the Museum of Nuclear Weapons’ exposition was refurbished in 2016; an annex hosting a personal train car, given to Khariton in 1952, was added. Khariton had the right to attach his car to any trains to travel to nuclear sites, which he did until the end of the 1980s.Footnote 63
Khariton’s call for historical truth and escaping the prison of imagination was not the only driving force behind heritagization in closed cities. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Museum of Nuclear Weapons’ narrative of the nuclear past emphasized heroic successes during the Cold War and linked them to the envisioned future development of the Russian military-industrial sector. Although many scientists and leaders of the Soviet nuclear industry hailed from Ukraine (which was also the home of UFTI, the first Soviet nuclear physics research institute), the Museum of Nuclear Weapons does not detail the internal ethnic and colonial dynamics of Soviet nuclear power.Footnote 64 In 2023, its exhibits presented objects covering the period from the 1940s to the 1980s, including computers, such as the mainframe BESM-6 (1966) used at VNIIEF in 1966–91, and laser and fusion devices.Footnote 65 This emphasis is part of current development priorities. VNIIEF is the main supercomputer developer in Russia and is building a laser facility to replace physical nuclear testing.
Although the Museum of Nuclear Weapons is centrally located and within walking distance of the historical centre of Sarov monastery, where KB-11 was based, its spatial presence in the city is inconspicuous. The expositions are housed in a refurbished Soviet office building, which is unimaginatively covered with grey thermal isolation panels, and has an aesthetically incongruous red-brick annex. Neither the building nor the exhibition architecture makes a distinctive aesthetical statement. Exhibits are aligned along the walls to make space for public events that are regularly organized by the Museum, including veteran memorials, anniversary celebrations, youth days and popular science events. The Museum celebrates the local nuclear community by recognizing their contributions as ‘heroic’, in line with the Soviet rationale of recognizing ‘heroes of socialist work’.Footnote 66 However, the expositions feature selected elite scientists, following the romantic model of techno-scientific innovation of the ‘founding fathers’ and devices that were ‘firsts’. The Museum receives some 15,000–20,000 visitors annually, less than, for instance, the remotely located National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Sandia (40,000 visitors). By contrast, over one million people visited the Atomic Pavilion, an architecturally ambitious Rosatom’s project opened in Moscow (2023), which reaffirms the centralization of the nuclear cultural economy and diplomacy in the capital. Putin took Narendra Modi to the Pavilion to discuss nuclear co-operation in July 2024.Footnote 67
Rosatom issued a call to collect oral history from pioneering scholars, which was published as part of the Living History project on its website in 2015. The contributions were most likely (self-)censored to align with corporate and political policy. These and other memoirs written by Sarov’s residents and VNIIEF scientists and managers resonate with the Museum of Nuclear Weapons’ narrative in repeating the assertion that the USSR developed nuclear weapons in fear of imminent US invasion.Footnote 68 Unlike Andrei Sakharov, who described the repressive side of the Soviet nuclear programme in his memoir, the contributors rarely reflected on the suffering and death inflicted on uranium mine workers or on residents living near nuclear test sites, or animals used in tests.Footnote 69 Non-Russian republics or indigenous communities tend not to be mentioned at all. For instance, the Semipalatinsk and Novaia Zemlia nuclear test sites are referred to without mentioning Kazakhstan or Nenets people. The non-Russian republics appear only to illustrate hierarchies of power. VNIIEF scientist Iurii Barmakov, for instance, remembered kick-opening the office doors during his 1955 visit as a Minsredmash representative to what was probably the military factory PO-555 in Vilnius, Lithuania.Footnote 70 Others, like Leonid Poliakov, praised the Arzamas-16 residents for abstaining from any public protests in the late 1980s to early 1990s, which, according to him, was proof of their loyalty to the state.Footnote 71 The official narrative, in this way, decontextualizes the nuclear sites and scientific communities both spatially and temporally and instead casts them as a direct extension of state sovereignty.
It is in reference to the local, lived urban environments and surrounding landscapes where these oral history accounts diverge from the official narratives. For instance, mentions of the Orthodox church as a political institution and the theological notion of katechon are rare and minimal. Instead, the significance of ecclesiastic heritage spaces is explained through references to secular cultural awareness and heritage preservation, defensively rejecting the image of nuclear workers as technocratic brutes who leave only destruction behind. An excellent example of this rich ambivalence in uncovering the layers of the uncomfortable past by narrating the development of urban infrastructure is a memoir by Anatolii Gerasimov, the leader of the construction of Arzamas-16, which was published in 2013. Gerasimov described Sarov as his ‘second homeland’, where he arrived by train going through a guarded corridor of double barbed wire.Footnote 72 Gerasimov’s story of building the nuclear weapons city articulated the management of material layers of the past, as he detailed the dangers of supervising prisoner work, described participation by ethnic minorities, particularly Buriats, in the construction and regretted destroying two churches and the filling of a moat. A secret monastery cave system was discovered by a digging machine. This incident was kept secret until the 1990s; the caves were consecrated in 2003. Furthermore, Gerasimov, as well as scientists interviewed for the Living History project, detailed the pervasive violence that Arzamas-16 residents encountered in their everyday life. Workers enjoyed long holidays fishing in nearby rivers and hiking in the woods, but these spaces were wrought with social tension and danger. Gerasimov detailed extensive encounters with organized crime (armed poachers and smugglers), and his colleague was murdered while camping. Like many memoir writers, Gerasimov described the beauty of nature that transgressed the security zone boundaries. Elk came to cool in the water collected in the holes dug for construction. But even such idyllic accounts were accompanied with regret, noting that in other atomic cities, like Snezhinsk, the elk population, decimated by poachers, stopped visiting the zone in the 1990s.Footnote 73
Localizing the nuclear city: the grassroots heritage movement
Some VNIIEF scientists established archives and museum expositions seeking to reinforce the nuclear sector’s political status and develop institutional self-knowledge. Others, however, engaged in urban kraevedenie as a response to the profound lack of knowledge about their locality caused by nuclear secrecy. The first grassroots heritagization initiative emerged during perestroika, following Minsredmash’s decision to permit public clubs. A group of VNIIEF researchers, the so-called neformaly (informals), created the Sarov Pustyn (Sarov monastery) historical-philosophical club, hosted at the Scientists House in 1987. When chatting during a mountaineering trip, the initiators, young designers Anatolii Agapov and Aleksei Fedorov, both born in Arzamas-16, realized that neither they nor their children knew anything about their native town and decided to establish a local history club. Contemporaries described the charismatic Agapov as a person characterized by ‘passionarity’, noting his boundless energy for public association. Agapov also founded several sports clubs and even a club dedicated to ‘anomalous phenomena’ such as UFOs and telepathy. The Sarov Pustyn society strictly avoided discussing ‘politics’ or ‘money’, and distanced themselves from what Irina Sandomirskaja described as an emergent memorial capitalism, where the Russian state reconfigured the layers of the imperial, Orthodox and Soviet past and aligned them with the logic of marketization. They also distanced themselves from the City Museum (est. 1957), an official kraevedenie institution, which combined a natural history exposition containing geological objects and taxidermies with celebration of the socialist struggle, but carefully omitted both the nuclear and non-Soviet cultural history of the area.
The interest in local history, as detailed in the memoir of a Sarov Pustyn member, was motivated by the need to fill the vacuum of site-specific knowledge. Members critiqued the official historical storylines in which Russia’s history was reduced to grand events such as the battle of Kulikovo (1380), the communist revolution (1917) and the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). Their feeling was that these narratives had little relevance to their lived historical environment, which was materially present, but cognitively inaccessible. The history of Sarov monastery was classified, so as not to disclose the location of Arzamas-16. At the entry to the city a road sign stated merely ‘Gorod’, a city.Footnote 74 Back in the 1980s, Arzamas-16 scientists ridiculed this secrecy as excessive and undermined by satellite surveillance.Footnote 75 To counter this, members of Sarov Pustyn engaged in amateur archaeology, scouted antiquities markets, ordered books on medieval history through interlibrary loan and spent evenings discussing the readings. In December 1990, they installed a first amateur museum in a former bomb shelter that displayed objects connected to the monastery and the natural environment found by association members or donated by city residents. The club gained popularity and branched out into a section focused on reviving the Orthodox faith, although the core group was more interested in new religious movements.Footnote 76
In the early 1990s, the Sarov city administration assumed responsibility for transport infrastructure, social welfare and cultural institutions. The Sarov Pustyn association attracted the municipality’s attention as an economically viable cultural resource. The Orthodox church activities were intensifying; professionals, pilgrims and tourists began to visit the city and all of them wanted ‘to see something’. In December 1992, the Sarov Pustyn Museum was given a larger space in a monastery building previously used by the Soviets as a drunk tank. Two years later, the municipality granted the museum the status of a local authority organization with salaried positions. At the end of the 1990s, the Sarov City Museum began to develop a local history exhibition and, in 2006, added Sarov Pustyn Museum as a department. In November 2010, a decision was taken to close the amateur exposition. Although the objects remained at the City Museum, the exhibit ceased to exist as an autonomous unit in 2011.Footnote 77
The absorption of the grassroots initiative by the city administration was part of the recentralization of public cultural activities and a consolidation of memorial capitalism. Being acutely aware of the need for cultural branding, the Sarov municipality supported a strategically layered heritagization of urban space that combined references to local history, ecclesiastic and World War II heritage. For instance, in 2024–25, there were several professionally managed online resources on Sarov’s architecture and environment which contain both archival and contemporary visual documentation.Footnote 78 These sites and blogs contain photos of the Sarov cityscape, villas and apartment blocks immersed in greenery or snow, and seek to create cultural interest in the changing styles and technologies of Soviet housing. Just like the nuclear veterans’ memoirs, these blogs are carefully edited not to contravene the official regulations regarding cultural criticism or secrecy. They focus on forensic documentation of urban change within permissible limits. The governmental 2030 Strategy of National Cultural Policy, adopted in 2016, explicitly banned ‘the distortion of historical memory’, particularly ‘spreading of false perceptions that the Russian Federation is a historically underdeveloped state’.Footnote 79 However, by photographing melting snow, water levels in Sarovka and Satis streams, construction of children playgrounds and new apartment blocks, refurbishment of cinemas and shops, bloggers also register abundant signs of dilapidation and decline.
In this way, details about the city’s Soviet and post-Soviet past are captured in memoirs and contemporary documentation practices, even those that are endorsed by Rosatom. These elements, like remnants of steel and concrete barrels used to contain explosion tests that littered the edges of the city as late as 2009, help to reconstruct the lived experience of the city. This was the case even though explicitly critical heritage activities were squeezed out by the institutional alignment between the Kremlin, Rosatom, the Sarov municipality and the Orthodox church.
The dissonant anti-nuclear and human rights heritage
The principal example of the deeply ambivalent layers of the nuclear past is the spatial and material legacy of the prominent nuclear scientist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov (1921–89), who developed the original designs for some of the most powerful nuclear bombs as well as the Tokamak fusion reactor at Arzamas-16. Sakharov rose to international prominence through his protests against the violation of human rights in the Soviet Union in 1966 and his call for a nuclear test ban and prohibition of nuclear weapons in 1968. The Soviet government exiled Sakharov to Nizhnii Novgorod in 1980, where, ironically, he was housed in an apartment block constructed by the same enterprise that built Arzamas-16. He was rehabilitated in 1986. In Arzamas-16, the figure of Sakharov signalled openness and democratization in 1991, when the municipality renamed Zhdanov Street as Sakharov Street: a significant move because under Stalin, Andrei Zhdanov led harsh anti-Western propaganda measures.Footnote 80 However, key sites memorializing Sakharov as a symbol of the global human rights movement were situated outside the zone. In 1992, a modest museum was opened in a Nizhnii Novgorod flat and the Sakharov Centre, containing an archive and museum dedicated to Sakharov’s life, opened in Moscow in 1994.
Sakharov is prominent in the official Rosatom heritage and public history discourses. But his legacy is framed selectively in the extreme, mainly drawing on the views that Sakharov espoused in the 1950s and early 1960s, when he justified his engagement in the nuclear weapons programme by the desire to ‘make the country strong enough’.Footnote 81 The anti-nuclear and democratic connotations of Sakharov’s legacy were actively written out of official Rosatom expositions and narratives. Although the Sakharov Centre was declared a ‘foreign agent’ in 2012, Rosatom curators relied on the Sakharov Centre collections and expertise for the flagship anniversary exhibition of the Russian nuclear industry, organized in Manege, Moscow in 2015, where a mock-up of the AN-604 bomb, designed by Sakharov, formed a centre piece.
Furthermore, shortly after the COVID lockdowns in 2021, Rosatom celebrated the centenary of Sakharov’s birthday by hosting high-profile public events in Sarov. Rosatom’s CEO and the Russian Academy of Sciences opened a monument to Sakharov. A nuclear academy named after Sakharov opened in Nizhnii Novgorod. The memorial museum in the apartment where the exiled Sakharov lived was refurbished and extended.Footnote 82 However, following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Sakharov Centre was evicted from its premises by the Moscow city administration in 2023 and the staff fled to Germany. At the same time, the Museum of Nuclear Weapons continues promoting Sakharov’s contribution to Russian nuclear science on social media. Both Khariton’s and Sakharov’s villas are incorporated into Sarov’s cultural strategies of memorial capitalism: they are listed as attractive examples of elite dacha lifestyle on guided urban tours.
Epilogue: the radiant future melting the past
The public perceptions of Arzamas-16 evolved from a privileged ‘island of communism surrounded by socialism’ in the 1950s to a stigmatized ‘Beriia zapovednik’ (Beriia nature reserve) in the 1990s. Both notions, however, withered away by the 2020s. When the Museum of Nuclear Weapons posted on their VK profile an archival photograph of a street in Sarov explaining that it was originally called Beria Street, a commentator replied: ‘They should return this name.’Footnote 83 It is unlikely that this was an ironic response considering Rosatom’s sustained efforts to reinsert Beria, who was executed in 1953, into heritage-making. Both memoirs and the official nuclear historiography detailed Beria’s ‘exceptional’ management skills and contribution to the birth of the Soviet nuclear military-industrial complex, while scientists’ letters to Beria are displayed in the Museum of Nuclear Weapons and Sarov City Museum.Footnote 84 In 1953, the remains of the executed Beria were cremated at Moscow’s first crematorium, which was built at the repurposed St Seraphim church. Ironically, in 1992 the site where the body of fiercely anti-religious Beria was turned into ashes was reconsecrated as the church of the nuclear industry’s patron saint. Beria’s reinsertion in historical narratives and material culture is a striking case of managing the historical layers of urban space.
In the last two decades, Russian nuclear cultural heritage-making, as described in this article, developed by adding new layers to material relics and new discourses of the nuclear military-industrial complex, intertwining Soviet ideology, the Russian empire, the Orthodox church and entrepreneurial capitalism. Converging into what Sandomirskaja termed ‘memorial capitalism’, this cultural activity superimposed new layers on the inconvenient past, where the relics of grassroots and anti-nuclear movements are obscured, but not necessarily erased, by militarized forms of patriotism in combination with economic entrepreneurship, all in the name of the radiant future. Reconfigured in line with the evolution of Russian state ideology and political economy, many material witnesses who criticized and resisted Soviet/Russian nuclear authoritarianism appear to melt away. It remains to be seen to what extent the material culture of the past will remain preserved, if hidden, in these urban infrastructures and spaces.
Funding statement
This research has been supported by the research project “Nuclear Spaces: Communities, Materialities and Locations of Nuclear Cultural Heritage (NuSPACES)”, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/W000253/1), 2021-2024.
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