City 40 Page #2

with my grandmother

who was a chemical engineer.

You were named after your grandmother?

Yes, my mother named me

in honor of my grandmother.

Whose mother was she?

Mother told me it was

a very long train journey.

People were telling

all kinds of tall stories.

That it was a subterranean city,

they would live underground.

Nobody knew anything.

To build the factory,

they used forced labor

from the prison camps

as construction workers.

They also brought in elite physicists

from all over the country.

Nuclear physics was only just being born.

It was for the best and most intelligent.

Mother told me Grandmother was working

with Kurchatov to produce plutonium.

At that time,

they were scooping it up with spoons.

As she recollected.

People worked with plutonium

with bare hands.

Many died, so they had to bring in

more and more people.

Families were created...

children born.

This is how the town became a real town.

Everything was heavily controlled

by Stalin's secret police.

If someone refused to work, they'd be

taken to a prison camp and executed,

because they were introduced

to state secrets.

They had no choice.

We got used to the fact that, like pawns,

we were moved from one place to another.

We accepted it as a natural process...

of socialist construction.

Though, of course,

the situation here was,

I would say, like a prison camp.

When did they allow people

to go outside the city?

I don't remember exactly,

but, I think, after eight years.

My mom told me

people who were relocated to Ozersk

were considered missing by relatives.

EMPLOYMENT RECORD BOOK

Of course, there was a terrible secrecy.

They weren't allowed to leave town,

weren't allowed to write letters.

It was as if they disappeared

into oblivion.

People tortured by the war, famine,

prison camps

were brought to a place

that felt like paradise.

Suddenly there's food,

social life and entertainment.

Their silence was payment to the state

for a better life.

They created their own ideology,

"We're the saviors of the world,

creators of the nuclear shield."

This ideology is what keeps them

running to this day.

We lived like well-fed animals in a zoo.

We were provided everything.

I never wondered...

why it was like that

and nobody explained to me

why we were so lucky to live

such happy lives.

We had plenty of kielbasa, food,

sports clubs for kids, everything.

Beautiful!

My father made

enough money to give

the family everything.

He could afford to give me

a ruble each day for food.

We had stacks of chocolate stored at home.

You bet.

That is why they called us

"Chocolate Kids."

I didn't tell my family...

where I was working, or what I was doing.

I always told my daughter that

I was working at a chocolate factory.

So I always had to buy good chocolates...

to bring her.

Let me tell you about

the resentment outsiders have,

calling us the "Chocolate People."

How privileged we are and so on.

I can say that in our ranks,

they were getting good money and still do.

We are used to it and this is how

we want to live.

The majority of people want it this way,

and I want it too.

Ozersk is a big city.

The friends of my parents

who lived in the city of Ozersk

told us that their life was different.

And I can think of one episode

when I was seven,

I was a first-grader at school.

They came to visit us,

our friends from Ozersk,

and they brought me a present.

It was a bunch of bananas.

For someone who grew up as a kid,

in the Soviet times,

in the city of Chelyabinsk,

a bunch of bananas was like...

a part of a fairy tale.

It was absolutely out of this world.

When I traveled outside our town,

I was shocked they had nothing

in their shops.

They had no bread,

no sausage, no milk.

They had empty shelves.

These people who lived

in the city of Ozersk,

they had things like caviar

and condensed milk,

which was really something rare

and something that every kid

in the Soviet Union dreamed about.

You need to understand what

the Soviet Union was like back then.

It was prestigious for those people

to be here.

They didn't feel restricted.

They had the best they'd need.

It was prestigious. They had the best.

Besides, scientists are obsessed

with what they do...

splitting atoms. If they're happy

with how the atoms split, they won't

notice anything else around them.

I can tell you an interesting story.

Not a story, a fact.

Once there was a spill of powder...

the radioactive kind of powder.

And my father, following party rules,

bent over and with no tools, nothing,

collected the powder with his hands.

My father died...

of lung cancer at the age of 55.

I think one of the factors

that contributed to it

was that he inhaled that powder.

My family moved

to City 40, now Ozersk.

There were many deaths.

We didn't know

the cause then and had not established

the connection.

But mostly people were dying

of carcinogenic diseases.

Of course, we did not suspect

that the town at that time...

was already...

unfit for humans.

Several of my young cousins

died...

between the ages of 18-38.

Such were the stories.

In a way, it was a form of heroism.

This is one of those tragic cases

when people "burned" with enthusiasm.

But, the work had to be done.

SHERSHNEV ANTON:

VELIKANOV VLADIMIR

Absorbed in the Cold War...

those working on their main task

of creating a nuclear shield...

They worked honestly,

in good faith, selflessly,

and were always proud

of belonging to this industry...

and proud of working

at the first nuclear power enterprise.

It was the demand of the time.

It was the period of the Cold War.

It wasn't us who instigated it.

I grew up in Ozersk.

I finished school in Ozersk.

When I was a little kid,

we had bomb shelters

in case of an emergency.

One bomb shelter

for every few residential buildings.

At school, starting from first grade,

they taught us how to use the shelters.

As they developed nuclear weapons...

the danger of a small-scale nuclear war

or accidental explosion became real,

and as nuclear plants developed,

a power plant accident was also possible.

I got a job with an experimental

scientific research station here.

It was a secret institute

to study the impact of radiation

on health and the environment.

For that year I was head

of the "Chernobyl Union" in Ozersk.

To the right...

is central block number four.

Higher!

Wow, hold on that spot.

Hold where the smoke is!

An accident has occurred

at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Steps are being taken

to deal with the situation,

and aid is being given to those affected.

My research, suddenly...

became relevant, in the wake

of the Chernobyl disaster,

when a large population

were living and farming

in a contaminated territory.

This expertise would be necessary

in case of a local nuclear war.

People need to eat,

they live in a radioactive zone.

So methods of survival have

to be worked out.

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