Abstract
The dream of the Soviet paradise had many components. Men and women were to be equal, and different duties were to represent the same value. Work and leisure were to be smoothly combined and the living environment to comprise both the city and the countryside. During the Soviet era, new settlements were established on previously uninhabited land, moving people over great distances to create new ideal worlds based on industrial enterprises. Did the dreamt paradise ever come close to realization anywhere within the vast empire? And what happened to the dream when the empire collapsed in 1990?
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Notes
Paul Josephson, Red Atom: Russia’s nuclear power program from Stalin to today (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1999), 34.
See, for example, Sonja D. Schmid, “Celebrating tomorrow today: The peaceful atom on display in the Soviet Union,” Social Studies of Science 36, no. 3 (2006), 356.
Arne Kaijser and Per Högselius, Resurs eller avfall? Politiken kring hanteringen av använt kärnbränsle i Finland, Tyskland, Ryssland och Japan, R-07–37 (Stockholm: SKB, 2007), 41;
Andis Cinis, Marija Drėmaitė, and Mart Kalm, “Perfect representations of Soviet planned space: Mono-industrial towns in the Soviet Baltic Republics in the 1950s–1980s,” Scandinavian Journal of History 33, no. 3 (2008), 237;
Per Högselius, “Connecting East and West? Electricity systems in the Baltic region,” in Networking Europe. Transnational infrastructures and the shaping of Europe 1850–2000, ed. Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2006), 251.
Cinis et al., “Perfect representations of Soviet planned space,” 237; Kristina Šliavaitė, From pioneers to target group. Social change, ethnicity and memory in a Lithuanian nuclear power plant community (Lund: Lunds universitet, 2005), 64, 70f.
Cited in Šliavaitė, From pioneers to target group, 70f.; combining Soviet and American contexts, Kate Brown describes how places were regarded as empty of history and then given a beginning and thus meaning through the establishment of a nuclear enterprise. See Kate Brown, “Gridded lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana are nearly the same place,” The American Historical Review 106, no. 1 (2001), 28.
There are other terms used such as “atomograds,” “mono-cities,” and “company towns.” Nevertheless, the best expression is perhaps “mono-industrial towns” since it was used in the Soviet Union and allows a distinction from Western-style company towns where the private patriarchal owner was the driving force for the establishment. See, for example, Cinis et al., “Perfect representations of Soviet planned space,” 227f., 236f.; Nicole Foss, Nuclear safety and international governance: Russia and Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, 1999), 76, note 109.
Ibid., 23, 45; Viktor Ševaldin, interview, Ignalina, November 25, 2010; the residents of secret cities have also been referred to as “chocolate eaters.” See Brown, “In the house that plutonium built,” 29; the material benefits were even more pronounced in plutonium- producing cities, “plutopias” to use Kate Brown’s term. See Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); The utopian character of secret cities encompassed not only the Soviet Union and the United States. For an example from Australia,
see Gunilla Bandolin and Sverker Sörlin, Laddade landskap — värdering och gestaltning av teknologiskt sublima platser, R-07–14 (Stockholm: SKB, 2007), 11.
Liutauras Labanauskas, “Social aspects of the functioning of the Ignalina nuclear power plant,” Viešoji politika ir administravimas, no. 22 (2007), 79f.
Kaijser and Högselius, Resurs eller avfall?, 41; a related argument is that the United States’ military nuclear activity after World War II became a key nationbuilding project and a national fetish. See Joseph Masco, The nuclear borderlands: The Manhattan project in post–Cold War New Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Kaijser and Högselius, Resurs eller avfall?, 42; Michael Herttrich, Rolf Janke, and Peter Kelm, “International co-operation to promote nuclear-reactor safety in the former USSR and Eastern Europe,” in Green Globe Yearbook of International Co-Operation on Environment and Development 1994, ed. Helge Ole Bergesen and Georg Parmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 89.
Josephson, Red Atom, 281; Paul Josephson, “Technological utopianism in the twenty-first century. Russia’s nuclear future,” History and technology 19, no. 3 (2003), 282; Sovietologist blog, http://www.sovietologist.blogspot.fr/2008/04/rbmk-reactors-and-weapons-grade.html (accessed April 15, 2014).
Kaijser and Högselius, Resurs eller avfall?, 42; Herttrich et al., “International co-operation to promote nuclear-reactor safety,” 89ff.; Jane I. Dawson, Eco-nationalism. Anti-nuclear activism and national identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 3.
Josephson, Red Atom, 204; “Technological utopianism,” 277; Foss, Nuclear safety and international governance, 7; energy, and especially nuclear energy involving uranium mining, has long been key feature of colonial and postcolonial relationships in many parts of the world. See Gabrielle Hecht, Being nuclear: Africans and the global uranium trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012);
Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled geographies: Empire and technopolitics in the global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
Alfred Erich Senn, Gorbachev’s failure in Lithuania (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), xiv; for the use of religious symbols as a mark against Soviet atheism, from 1989 and onward, see
Tatiana Kasperski, “Chernobyl’s aftermath in political symbols, monuments and rituals: Remembering the disaster in Belarus,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 30, no. 1 (2012), 86.
See, for example, Adriana Petryna, Life exposed: Biological citizens after Chernobyl (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002), 2; Brown, “In the house that plutonium built,” 2.
V. Kopustinskas et al., “An approach to estimate radioactive release frequency from Ignalina RBMK-1500 reactor in Lithuania,” Zagadnienia eksploatacji maszyn 1, no. 149 (2007), 189; Foss, Nuclear safety and international governance, 11, 89; Herttrich et al., “International co-operation to promote nuclear-reactor safety,” 92.
Wendland, “Inventing the atomograd,” 17; Šliavaitė, From pioneers to target group, 12; Petryna, Life exposed, 4; for the connection between Chernobyl and Ukrainian independence, see Ulrich Beck, World at risk (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 171f.; for the connection made in Belarus, see Kasperski, “Chernobyl’s aftermath in political symbols.”
Dalia Gineitiene et al., “Public risk perceptions of nuclear power. The case of Sweden and Lithuania,” in Social Processes and the Environment. Lithuania and Sweden, ed. Anna-Lisa Lindén and Leonardas Rinkevičius (Lund: Lund University, 1999), 149.
Alfred Erich Senn, Lithuania awakening (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 64;
Leonardas Rinkevičius, “Attitudes and values of the Lithuanian green movement in the period of transition,” Filosofija, sociologija, no. 1 (2001), 75.
P. Butcher et al., “TSO assistance towards the improvement of nuclear safety in Lithuania. Achievements and perspectives,” Paper presented at the Eurosafe forum 2001, Paris, France: 2001.
The nostalgia was also a question of relating one’s own biography to the history of the towns, since many of the inhabitants arrived in their twenties. The new borders furthermore made it more expensive and difficult to travel between Lithuania and Russia, which implied disconnections between many people in Sniečkus and their relatives still living in the Russian cities from where they once came. See ibid., 28f., 100, 134; see also Josephson, Red atom, 38; Foss, Nuclear safety and international governance, 22; Joy Parr, Sensing changes: Technologies, environments, and the everyday, 1953–2003 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 8; Brown, “Gridded lives,” 41.
Quote from Butcher et al., “TSO assistance towards the improvement of nuclear safety”; Renata Karaliūtė, “Nuclear knowledge management and preservation in Lithuania,” International Journal of Nuclear Knowledge Management 1, no. 3 (2005), 218.
In 2004, the European Union enlarged by adding five new Central and Eastern European members operating nuclear power stations: Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. All these nations relied on nuclear power for at least a quarter of their electricity needs. See Jane I. Dawson and Robert G. Darst, “Meeting the challenge of permanent nuclear waste disposal in an expanding Europe: Transparency, trust and democracy,” Environmental Politics 15, no. 4 (2006), 610, 625.
Joanna Bourke, Fear: A cultural history (London: Virago, 2005); Beck, World at risk;
Spencer R. Weart, The rise of nuclear fear (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012);
Charles Perrow, Normal accidents: Living with high-risk technologies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999);
Paul Slovic, The perception of risk (London: Earthscan Publications, 2000); Slovic cited in Dawson and Darst, “Meeting the challenge of permanent nuclear waste disposal,” 23.
Wendland, “Inventing the atomograd,” 18; Stefan Buzar, Energy poverty in Eastern Europe: Hidden geographies of deprivation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
Marija Drėmaitė, “Industrial heritage in a rural country: Interpreting the industrial past in Lithuania,” in Industrial heritage around the Baltic Sea, ed. Marie Nisser et al., Uppsala Studies in Economic History 92 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2012), 65f.
Within this trend, some nuclear power plants have been reused for cultural and commercial uses, although this is rather rare. One example is a breeder reactor site that was never in operation, Kalkar in Germany, now transformed into an amusement park (including a museum of the site’s history). See Maja Fjæstad, “Ett kärnkraftverk återuppstår: Från Snr300 till Wunderland Kalkar,” Bebyggelsehistorisk tidskrift, no. 63 (2012).
Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed ground: America’s landscapes of violence and tragedy, revised edition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 29.
The construction of reactor 3 started in 1985, was suspended in 1988, and demolition began in 1989. Dismantling was completed in 2008; for a discussion on decommissioning costs, see Åsa Moberg, Ett extremt dyrt och livsfarligt sätt att värma vatten: En bok om kärnkraft (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2014), 246.
David E. Nye and Sarah Elkind, eds., The anti-landscape (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014).
See also Gunilla Bandolin and Sverker Sörlin, Laddade landskap — värdering och gestaltning av teknologiskt sublima platser, R-07–14 (Stockholm: SKB, 2007).
Paul Ricœur, Memory, history, forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
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© 2014 Anna Storm
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Storm, A. (2014). Lost Utopia. In: Post-Industrial Landscape Scars. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137025999_4
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