Printer Friendly Page

Keeping The Cities' Secrets

Jonathan Ernst

The Augusta Chronicle

February 17, 2003

Imagine that all the people who work at Savannah River Site, along with their families, schoolteachers and shopkeepers, lived in an opulent, top-secret city known only by a ZIP code - "South Carolina 29808." Imagine that no one was allowed in; that those inside were hardly allowed out; and that even the people in Jackson and Barnwell had no clue who lived inside the fence or what they did.

This was life in Russia's 10 secret nuclear cities. Fifteen years ago, people who lived near the secret city of Zheleznogorsk had no idea what was manufactured in the factories under the low mountains across the river. They knew only of a secret land of luxury where the people were rich enough to eat chocolate whenever they wanted.

"They live in a beautiful city - like something out of a fairy tale," said Galina Belovina, a school principal in nearby Atamanova who visited there once. "There's so much to say. Everything is convenient. There are three-story houses, wide streets, many different shops and stadiums."

Today, the fairy tale has faded.

Since the end of the Cold War, outsiders have learned that Zheleznogorsk is an underground nuclear-weapons operation with a failing economy and all the social ills that go with it.

"The streets are still wide and clean, but the new problems are drug addiction, unemployment and budget shortfalls," said Russian journalist Alexander Kolotov, who covers life in the closed city.

Zheleznogorsk is one of the poorest districts in the Ministry of Atomic Energy, says a retired scientist who still lives there.

"The poverty is undermining security because the workers are so poorly paid," Anatoli Mamayev said.

Experts say such poverty holds dangers for the rest of the world. The worst-case scenario is that a disaffected worker would sell his nuclear know-how to Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein.

The problem has spurred SRS' David Zigelman and others in the U.S. Department of Energy to create jobs for some of the Russians who work in the closed cities, in hope of giving them a good reason not to sell their nuclear talents.

"We all knew who our enemies were," said Mr. Zigelman, who had spent his early career working against the Russian threat as a civilian attached to the U.S. military. "So that first time I went to Russia, and I late one night stood in Red Square looking up at the Kremlin, I said, 'What the heck am I doing here?'

"What you quickly find is people are not enemies. Governments are enemies."

Through DOE's Nuclear Cities Initiative, he leads Russian specialists through the process of creating civilian business plans, the best of which the U.S. government will finance. It can take months, sometimes years, and it is not always an easy sell.

"I've heard things like, 'This economic conversion thing is too difficult - can we go back to the good old days?"' he said. "Well, there's no choice."

Natalia Manzurova's parents were some of the first scientist-settlers at Ozersk, a closed city in the south Urals.

"My mother and father came to the city in 1948, when they were both 20," Ms. Manzurova said.

Six months after filling out a questionnaire, officials gave them three hours to pack their things and took them to a resort near the site of the Mayak plutonium plant. Later, they would be settled in the closed city.

"When the specialists were needed, they were taken from the resort to the production site. They never knew where they were going," she said.

Secrets abounded in the closed cities, and so did wealth. Nadja Kutepova, who grew up in Ozersk believing that her father worked in a candy-wrapper factory, not a bomb plant, remembers rare trips outside the fences.

"When I left for Yekaterinburg to visit my grandmother, I was usually carrying lots of things - even milk - because there was none in Yekaterinburg," she said. "When I was a small child, Ozersk was a very nice place. We had good production, good shops."

Nikolai Gidenko was one of the young construction soldiers who went to Ozersk in the 1950s to build dams along the Techa River for the nuclear operations.

"We were young! We never worried, we were busy in the evenings buying vodka and finding girls," he said.

The 68-year-old recalled that he and his comrades were given special coupons to buy such luxuries as sour cream, butter and chocolate.

"We would spend it all on chocolate. We thought the special meals were to keep us strong for the hard work," he said.

Long before Soviet secrecy crumbled in the late 1980s, however, Mr. Gidenko knew something was wrong. Every Thursday, a car came to their work site with a device that looked like an electric oven.

"We took off our uniforms and boots and put them in the device," he said. "They would call out some numbers and maybe keep the clothes, but we were never told why."

"It was just pure luck that I stayed healthy," Mr. Gidenko said.

Ms. Manzurova said her 74-year-old father is still proud of the days he worked with atomic icons such as Igor Kurchatov and Lavrenty Beria, fathers of the Soviet nuclear program.

"Radiation safety was bad, but he jokes about how many times there were accidents, and that to visit his friends he has to go to the cemetery," she says.

Ms. Kutepova, the little girl who grew up in Ozersk carrying packages of goodies to her grandmother on the outside, is now a graduate student in sociology and studies the people in the closed cities.

She tells of alcoholism and despair. She says the people of Ozersk still live in fear of the iron fist of the state and some still remember stints in Stalin's concentration camps.

"For so many years they have developed the opinion that Mayak is a monster," Ms. Kutepova said. "It is not useful fighting it. It is such a monstrous organization that if you start asking for your rights, you are afraid to lose your job."

Although she says 99 percent of the older generation is still very patriotic and believes in what it was doing, she was surprised to find in a recent survey that 63 percent of the people in Ozersk were against the import of spent nuclear fuel to the site - even though the project would mean essential jobs.

She has worked to create social programs, including sex education, prenatal care and ecological awareness. She wants to tackle unemployment in Ozersk and is interested in the Nuclear Cities work such as SRS' Mr. Zigelman is doing. But she's skeptical.

"We have many questions about the program," Ms. Kutepova said. "If the Americans want scientists to change their profession, then people should move from these places - because the place accounts for the mentality."

Hovering over an operation from a stepladder at Medical College of Georgia Hospital, Dr. Alexander Kozyrin leans in to admire his American colleague's economical use of silk in his closing stitches.

"You suture like a Russian," Dr. Kozyrin tells Dr. Tom Gadacz, the director of surgery at MCG, through an interpreter. Dr. Gadacz and the others get a chuckle out of the sideways compliment. It's part of the giddiness that comes along with doing their bit to save the world.

That is how Dr. Gadacz and his colleagues look at the work they have done through the Nuclear Cities Initiative programs at SRS.

Ever since Dr. Gadacz and the Americans helped install a laparoscopy unit - a much less invasive type of surgery - in the closed city of Sarov in 2001, the Russians have performed more than 500 operations with it.

The Nuclear Cities Initiative is one of several U.S. programs designed to stop the spread of lethal nuclear materials and knowledge out of the former Soviet Union.

Mr. Zigelman says he has "hit a home run" by reaching out to MCG for medical expertise, in addition to the work of business professors at the University of South Carolina Aiken who have helped build training programs in Sarov.

"In the end, the NCI program is to help shut down the nuclear facilities and make sure the scientists and engineers don't go elsewhere," Mr. Zigelman said. "Well, if you can improve the infrastructure and medical programs, you've provided another argument for the brains to stay at home."

Mr. Zigelman and DOE are helping shut down the Avangard nuclear weapons facility in Sarov and have created jobs for some of the displaced specialists.

Projects funded by Nuclear Cities in Sarov include one that is selling titanium parts for prostheses to a company in California - some of which are sold in the Augusta area under brand names such as Ohio Willow Wood and FlexFoot. Another is doing high-tech work to remove harmful chemicals from the Russian electrical transmission system.

There are a few rules, including one of Mr. Zigelman's personal guidelines that requires the ideas come from the Russians, not from him.

"Otherwise, they have no ownership of it," he said.

The program, begun in 1998, has had an uphill battle for funds and political support. Now, as it nears the end of its first operating agreement, it has been criticized by Russian and American experts, including the U.S. General Accounting Office, for creating jobs too slowly or expensively or concentrating on the wrong kinds of enterprises.

"I think that the program got off on the wrong foot by saying we were going to create all these jobs in the first year, because the problem is very hard," said Kenneth Luongo, of the Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council, whose 1997 report helped create the program. "It is very hard to create jobs in Russia when you're not behind a triple-security fence, and it's even more difficult to do it behind a triple-security fence."

Mr. Luongo said the program should apply Russian expertise to problems such as nuclear security or environmental cleanup.

"Someone ought to be paying these guys to think creatively about how to deal with these questions, as opposed to trying to build a kidney dialysis plant in a place where you used to manufacture nuclear weapons," he said.

As for the expense, Mr. Zigelman said, the overall cost is small compared with the full scope of nonproliferation programs.

"They say it may be cheaper if you took the money and just gave it to the scientists and the engineers there," he said. "But what happens when you stop sending the checks?"

Mr. Zigelman said the Nuclear Cities Initiative is getting better at cutting costs and creating more jobs. He also says that the program, charged with employing people with deadly nuclear knowledge, has a value that may be hard to quantify.

"By creating a job, have we given the guy back some self-esteem to where he'll never go work for the other country? I hope so," Mr. Zigelman said. "What's that worth?"