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In the middle of the 20th century at the beginning of the Cold war USSR started the development of new kinds of cities: closed, military governed research centres, which were aiming for studying nuclear physics. They have been called the ZATO (from Russian): Zakrytye Administrativno-Territorialnye Obrazovania or Closed Administrative-Territorial Entities. For the first time in history the whole network of ZATOs stretched out over the USSR in less than a lifespan of one generation - yet almost no one didn’t know about their very existence. Even their names were erased and replaced by spurious ones with added numbers.
The structure of ZATOs enclosure duplicated twice the reasons for its own emergence, externally and internally. From the outside ZATOs replicated the closed, guarded borders of the USSR itself; from the inside - their interconnected network resembled the structure of a nuclear power plant, where communication between its subparts was extremely regulated and whose shielded walls retained the radioactive radiation.
A research concerning ZATOs presumes emphasis on certain topics, like achievement of the nuclear program or the institute of secrecy in the USSR. But what if we look not at borders of ZATOs, but at bordering techniques implemented there?
ZATOs are defined by their borders. It even seems like a border was drawn before a city was actually built. Then a city was formed and framed by and within the wall. Could it be that, while creating borders in space, we also change the flow of time within it?
By separation, the border starts multiple new processes. On the level of a single ZATO It induces other borders to appear and another to disappear. Together they produce bordering cascades.
Science implies openness in opposition to secrecy. Despite the secrecy of nuclear physics research, scientists from ZATOs were constantly exchanging the information. Such informational connectedness of geographical distant closed cities is an example of their paradoxical openness.
We could then think of different “enclosures” which would provide connections and permeability.
Based on the case of ZATOs we explore the nature of their borders to conceive different modes of enclosure and to depict the gradual rise of inaccessibility of information. This leads us to invent new bordering techniques.
From the point of view of an average city, ZATO is a unique urban formation. Their whole network emerged rapidly in 1940s-1960s - the USSR provides the unique opportunity to see, when 44 closed cities came into existence in a couple of decades in complete secrecy. 14 of ZATOs were conducting nuclear research under the control of the Special Committee of the USSR Council of Ministers. ZATOs history started in 1946. The main Research Institute of Experimental Physics was built in the city Sarov, with nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov as its director. The whole city then was renamed to Arzamas-16 (also known as KB-11) and chosen as the centre for the whole A-bomb project. Soon it was removed from all unclassified maps and its existence was rejected by authorities until 1994. In less than a decade newly built nuclear research cities in the USSR formed the whole network of secret interconnected nuclear-related projects. Clusters dedicated to Nuclear fuel, Nuclear weapons testing and Nuclear weapon production formed a combinatorial governance system for ZATOs. For example, Chelyabinsk-65 was one of the only places in the world with a plutonium production plant - he was part of a Nuclear fuel cluster. In brief, we can divide history of that period into 3 main phases by following the process of mastering the energy of a nuclear fission. At first, from 1946 until 1953, these cities were united by one goal - creation of the atomic bomb. After that, from 1954 to 1970s, ZATOs benefited greatly from the development of nuclear power plants in the USSR. Amount of available energy produced this way also has increased scope and variety of follow-up nuclear projects in 1960s - 1980s: from large-scale particle colliders to atomic clocks.
Secrecy surrounded ZATOs as walls, and the A-bomb was the ultimate reason for their enclosed nature.
First of all, every ZATO had a secret name which was given according to the closest city. Many other resources were kept confidential too, such as information about the “invisible” train with secret load: first USSR atomic bomb transferred from Arzamas-16 to testing poligon in Semipalatinsk-21.
Some information about building walls around these cities or secret “military service” chasing around the city was not documented well. Due to the urgency of borders construction numerous materials about them were not even archived.
Even scientific papers related to nuclear physics were ciphered in internal communication between ZATOs and censored before being sent in international journals. Thus, contacts in person have been especially meaningful.
In parallel to development of ZATOs, railroads stretched over the territory of the USSR. Nuclear scientists themselves were transported between the cities as pieces of information between servers. Transportation of scientists was done with extreme, overwhelming care: due to the special order from 1948, they were not allowed to drive cars themselves.
Life of scientists and engineers in ZATOs was controversial in other aspects as well. It was additionally supported by deficit goods like high quality meat, shoes, consumer electronics, even western movies and books were partially allowed. However people from ZATOs could not share any of that with their relatives or to invite them to come for a visit - special document was needed.
Administrative borders of ZATOs cut them from their territorial neighbours completely. Most often they also had unique municipal status which removed ZATOs from being subjected to local governance and attached them directly to a particular military base.
Communication between people from one ZATOs to another was allowed, while being kept secret from the non-ZATOs cities, as if the whole USSR had several subdivided habitable realms.
But how can officially-named closed ZATOs be connected to anything despite being bounded by their military protected borders? We have been looking at ZATOs from the present and already know what happened: rise, flourishing period, the end of the Cold War, the end of the USSR. What if we would change our perspective to ZATOs in time? 1940s. Attention to atomic nuclei is rising. Nuclear fission can be achieved by cutting-edge technologies and theories. ZATOs emerged to reveal these secrets yet to keep them even more classified within their walls. Now imagine the start of organic growth of cities-organs and their borders. Here we have a giant, blind, atomic-sensitive organism coming into existence. In order to investigate nuclear fission, this organism was planned to be multi-nuclear itself. It needs very special sensors - scientific institutions - to dig deep into the subatomic realm. The USSR grew the brain of the whole system: Arzamas-16. Soon the other city-components of multi-nuclear organism emerged. As embryos start the morphogenesis, ZATOs started to form functionally specialized clusters. Despite ZATOs enclosure, they communicated with each other with the highest speed possible. Nuclear physicists had been transmitting ciphered telegrams and traveling to each other. They were making calculations of plutonium critical mass, so the giant organism could produce the main item it was born for. The first atomic bomb of the USSR exploded on August 29, 1949, highlighting not the end of ZATOs but the beginning of the next phase of their existence. When you have different steadily developing ZATOs with already established connections, they could be better seen through lenses of cybernetics. Rapid growth was no longer a priority: the question was, how to manage the emerging structure, to effectively use it for gaining technological advantage. Once having nuclear fission under control, borders of closed structures of ZATOs served as logical units for performing multiple operations. Their interactions closely resembled distributed cognition implemented on the scale of cities. As ZATOs were seen differently through this perspective, as the concept of a “border” could be redefined: The most intuitive idea of "closed/open" scale for cities is where on one end is a walled castle, on the other - a village open to four winds. On this gradual line ZATOs with their borders seem to gravitate towards the pole of “enclosure”. Yet another intuition about the difference between closed vs. open systems could be brought from cybernetics. According to it, the system is closed not by its physical borders but by the absence of information exchange. In this perspective ZATOs border is an informational membrane, which allows the exchange of energy but not the information transfer. At least, not with non-ZATOs cities. To alter our basic notion of a border, we might also use an ecological approach. Environmental borders most often have gradient properties: they are not strict lines but transition zones, transient periods of succession. In contrast, anthropogenic bordering results in a boundary emerging as a separate entity, which breaks one area and gives rise to the other without a transition. Thus, the border of ZATO not only separates one landscape by dissecting it into two, but also starts irreversible processes in both landscapes. In each of these paradigms ZATOs demonstrate the intrinsic multiplicity of "enclosure" and intersection of them forms a multi-dimensional continuum: geometrical, informational, energetical. The further we go with clarification of borders of ZATO, the more complex they appear to be.
We are used to thinking of borders around the “well defined” objects as long as it remains a stable entity and with information available about it. It’s easier to think about the border around the city than around a gas cloud. l, Xena l Gradual loss of information isn’t merely collateral in our investigation of ZATOs borders – quite the opposite; the absence of information forces us to reconsider borders as such. The less data we have, the more fundamental premises about borders are to be revised. We explore different ZATOs around the USSR, their geographical positions on the map, the borders of their physical walls, even connections between them in a form of system of railroads. Moreover, we can distinguish industrial clusters among them and therefore demonstrate the “selective openness” of ZATOs. Despite the flourish of data at the beginning, we observe a lot of missing data about ZATOs: we can’t trace travel routes of scientists between them and flows of their correspondence. Clustered system of connections between scientific research centers of ZATOs shows us other side of borders: they function in a manner of “logical elements'', redirecting flows of information in a particular way to provide the generation of ideas. Even though we don’t have an actual schedule for trains between ZATOs, we can simulate them upon a map of real cities to see dynamic structures forming a distributed cognition network of nuclear science. Finally, we arrive at a stage where most of our premises about borders are no longer applicable. Temporal, Spatial, Causal, Cognitive – the main categories should be questioned at this point, where the missing information can’t be approximated. We introduce cascades of bordering, in which borders of different nature act upon the other. Some administrative borders might induce informational borders, while diminishing the commonly accepted borders. In turn, informational borders might dissect the space of communication between scientists working in the same institute and be supported by physical bordering of space. Next, physical borders may produce energetical borders, which then are able to alter administrative borders.
When we speak about a closed city we neglect that it’s border dissects only the surface of a land. Deep geological processes continue to happen underneath with their extremely slow speed, just as atmospheric flows of air openly interact with radioactive clouds. From 3-dimensional space borders of ZATOs seem 2-dimensional borders. However, even being visually separated from each other on a 2D-map, in space of information exchanges ZATOs are one instance. We broaden our topological perspective by adding one non-spatial dimension, ZATOs are revealed as complex objects with interlaced borders. What seems divided at a first glance, could be just a few apexes of a hidden united entity - one distributed atomic city to connect them all.
There are temporal borders as well. We think of physical time as a sequence of equal changes of material objects. But historical time is not that different realm, only its sequences combine objects of various natures – transportation systems, cultural habits, geopolitical relations, worldviews and beliefs. And temporal borders of ZATOs made them “natural reserves”: the Soviet Union has been encapsulated in these closed cites. Like local vortexes, they actually preserved some patches of the USSR atmosphere: heavy reliance on social services, non-commercial mindset, even domestic utensils retained from the soviet era. “We are children of ATOM-cities” as ZATO locals say.
Closed system of ZATOs emerged only once in history, and they won't return back again. But this case provides us with a unique opportunity – to look at ZATOs as a literally distributed cognition system, which generated knowledge about the world and applied it to very specific task. We now think of contemporary city centers of AI development as Babylon towers of constant informational exchange, yet these cities are like ZATOs also permeated with extremely intricate capillaries of enclosure and openness: access controls, availability of databases, lines of code. They form networks of distributed cognition too. By depicting entanglement of these invisible borders we obtain the ability to measure cognitive capacity of certain networks of cities all over the planet.
Only by allowing the known unknown into our picture of the world, we can see the hidden connections, can explain the dynamical patterns of the system, can even imagine the future forms of its distributed cognition. By following the gradual loss of information we obtain tools for answering the question: how reconsidering seemingly closed systems like ZATOs can help to find new types of borders? The example of ZATOs modes of “enclosure” in fact opens up possibilities for us to redesign borders framing a closed/open system continuum. Gradients can be adopted instead of a strict line between human settlement and its environmental surroundings. View of cascades of bordering might better describe some of our existing social institutions within a city. Implementation of new kinds of bordering techniques is happening already, bringing us a new perspective of planetary cities. Reconsideration of ZATOs highlights the future role of cities as a planetary network which transforms the Earth’s surface.
Liu Bauer Xena Poleschuk Dana Molzhit Evgenii Bykov
Art director: Vlad Afanasiev, Влад Афанасьев
Program directors: Benjamin H. Bratton, Nicolay Boyadjiev Strelka Institute for Media Architecture and Design
Бенджамин Браттон, Николай Бояджиев Институт медиа, архитектуры и дизайна “Стрелка”
Thanks to:
Jussi Parikka Ryan Bishop Nabi Agzamov Angelina Davydova
Daniar Yusupov Lydia Kallipoliti
Andrey Tetekin
Special thanks to TTF 2021 researchers for support, links, materials, inspiring discussions during nights and days, to TTF 2021 team for providing a borderless environment for work on the project.
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