Life Inside Russia's Secret "Closed" City

Secrets have been pouring out of Russia like water through a sieve ever since the Iron Curtain collapsed, making it easy to disregard any newly discovered "secrets" as just another batch of sensationalized snack-sized news bites, but in the case of Russia's secret "closed" city Zarechny it's far too surreal of a story to ignore.

Zarechny is one of 44 cities which didn't officially "exist" under Communism- they weren't on any map, they were home to over a million people yet the rest of Russia's citizens had no idea about these cities until knowledge of their existence was revealed to the public in 1986, and now they're slowly but surely being opened up to the outside world.

Photographer Ksenia Yurkova traveled into the forbidden zone known as Zarechny to snap some amazing pics for The Calvert Journal, and her first indication that Zarechny wasn't like other cities came upon entering the city, which is surrounded by a chainlink fence topped with barbed wire and requires a pass to enter.

Once home to "secret government strategic facilities", today Zarechny is home to Rosatom, a "state-owned corporation that manufactures parts for nuclear weapons". Sounds totally legit to me!

-Via AnimalNY


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Supposedly there were secret cities that were reproduced version of American ones, to train spies.

(to be fair, my sources for that are the movie THE EXPERTS and an episode of MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE where the IMF team was joined by Mr. Sulu, beamed down from the Enterprise).
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