It's almost impossible for a person from outside to get into the closed town. Photo CC0 1.0 Universal: Sergey Shinkaruk / Flickr.A shabbily dressed older man in a cap with ear flaps, looking like a character out of a Soviet film, walks past some women, wrapped up in padded jackets and old fur coats, selling socks, toys and frozen fish. This odd mini market is right next to a bus stop.
Behind this market lies the small town of Nizhnyaya Tura, which boasts a café, open 24/7, that offers rooms for intimate encounters during the evening; a pelmeni restaurant serving meat-filled dumplings to a clientele of rough-looking young men, and numerous down-at-heel shops selling household appliances. Three metres away, on the other side of the road, is a security checkpoint, two rows of barbed wire and troops checking the ID of everyone going through the control point. This is one of the roads into the closed town of Lesnoye, and no outsider can enter.
A Nuclear World Cup
The Russian Federation still has several dozen closed towns and cities left over from the Soviet period, homes to industrial installations of various kinds. Some produce warheads for nuclear weapons; some – radioactive isotopes. All types of closed towns live under a regime of security and state secrets that creates less-than-standard living conditions for local people.
