Second World Urbanity

„The weather is fine. Everything is blossoming. We are looking forward to our Mayday and Victory day celebrations. Victory day is the most important holiday. But the foremost thing is peace.” These sentences evoke words, sounds, and melodies from the Soviet 1980s, but they are really from the Polissya region in Northwestern Ukraine, April 2014, and Svitlana is writing an e-mail to me. She is a former teacher who is now working as a public relations officer at Rivne NPP (Nuclear Power Plant) in Western Ukraine, in the Atomic city of Kuznetsovsk. The city, on the river Styr, is made of 1970s-style white concrete panel apartment blocks, filled with green space and blossoming cherry trees, and a place with many children—Kuznetsovsk is one of the few growing industrial cities in Ukraine. It was founded in 1973, its citizens come from all over the former Soviet Union, and many of the male, single migrants of the 1970s and 80s got married to local Western Ukrainian women. Continue reading →

Comparative histories have a tricky road to navigate. While they may illuminate common points of reference and can highlight counterintuitive connections, they also depend on a fundamental conceit: the degree to which an author is persuasive in the claim that we can gain a deeper understanding of two (or more) seemingly disparate phenomena in juxtaposition. Kate Brown’s wonderful recent book, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, wholly succeeds on this account. It takes two important sites for the production of plutonium—Richland (in Washington state) and its associated Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and the Russian city of Ozersk and its co-located Maiak Plutonium Plant—as points of entry into a richly detailed account of the horrific human and environmental damage wrought by the production of nuclear weapons. Bringing to relief the ways in which the lives of these two cites mirrored each other, she makes a convincing argument that “after this book [she] hope[s] it will no longer make sense to tell the two histories separately” (p. 4). Within the framework of Cold War history, the book is a significant contribution to our understanding of the ways in which imperatives organized at the very highest levels of power could have real-world consequences at the local level.

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We’re pleased to begin our next book discussion of the Second World Urbanity project: an exploration of Kate Brown’s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013). In this richly researched book, Brown explores the common origins and trajectories of an American city–Richland, Washington–and its Soviet counterpart–Ozersk, Cheliabinsk oblast–and their residents’ lives over the span of the Cold War’s nuclear age and up to the present. Both cities were at the forefront of their countries’ nuclear weapons programs, as well as the secrecy and social engineering that the race to produce plutonium engendered. The two cities’ role in the Cold War and the security regimes built around them set Richland and Ozersk apart from “normal” American and Soviet cities. Yet, as Brown argues, the underlying dynamics that bound residents to their governments through these cities captured in stark relief a broader condition of Cold War urban life on both sides of the Iron Curtain: a willingness to give up one’s civil, political, and even “biological rights” in exchange for the security, exclusiveness, and consumer abundance that both cities provided.

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