Posts tagged as:

Closed cities

The town that Gazprom built is dying

December 15, 2006

Russian company towns are similar to the US company towns of fifty years ago. But today, they’re dying too:
Gazprom has quietly begun cutting back on the Soviet-style paternalism for which it is renowned, hiving off “social assets” such as nurseries, subsidised housing and sanatoriums. Already almost half of its 9,320 “social properties” have been [...]

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Closed cities from the inside

October 10, 2005

Last week I wrote about the disgraceful number of closed cities in Russia, another of those leftovers from an anarchic age that Russia remains addicted to, despite (or perhaps because of) the restrictions it places on the human rights of their 1.7 million residents.
In a rather timely decision, the BBC have just decided [...]

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Closed cities and the Democratic Deficit

October 6, 2005

If you thought that the demise of the Soviet Union meant the demise of closed, or secret cities, then you’d be wrong. Today, it is thought that there are up to forty closed cities (also referred as ZATO’s, or Zakrytye Administrativno-Territorial’nye Obrazovaniia) in Russia, although the Russian government will only confirm the existence of [...]

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