At the end of May, Nadezhda Kutepova, the CEO of Planet of Hopes, an NGO in Ozyorsk, a ‘closed’ town in the southern Urals, received an anonymous text message reading: ‘I saw the report where they called you a traitor’. The message referred to a story broadcast on Rossiya 1, a popular state news channel. Standing in front of the town’s barbed wire perimeter fence, the channel’s correspondent, Olga Skobeyeva, declared that the NGO’s ostensible support for pregnant women was just a front for its true role: ‘carrying out industrial espionage in return for American cash’.
The Soviet Union established closed towns and cities, with stringent residence and travel regulations, during the 1940s—usually because they were the location of sensitive military, industrial, or scientific facilities, such as arms plants or nuclear research sites. Their number was much reduced in the 1990s, but Ozyorsk remains a closed town because of its proximity to the Mayak plant, a source of plutonium during the Cold War and now a facility for processing nuclear waste and recycling materials from decommissioned nuclear weapons.
The NGO said that the closed town system contravened their residents’ human rights
