

Atomgrads - wslh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomgrads

======
countersixte
Most of these cities (e.g. Zheleznogorsk [1]) seem to have a stylized atom as
part of their coat of arms. I wonder if it was common practice in the USSR to
incorporate similar symbols into the coat of arms of other newly founded
industrial cities?

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheleznogorsk,_Krasnoyarsk_Krai](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheleznogorsk,_Krasnoyarsk_Krai)

~~~
a-nikolaev
Yeah, it was quite common:

[http://bit.ly/14HIT5f](http://bit.ly/14HIT5f)

I think, it was really fun. Sadly, it seems that nowdays, our (Russian)
government favors religiouis symols over indistrial/sientific ones..

------
znowi
They're commonly known as "closed cities". You can read up more here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city)

~~~
a-nikolaev
Yeah, I have never heard the Atomgrad word, though some people can probably
use it.

Btw, cities like that are also commonly called "scinetific cities"
("naukograds"), though "naukograds" are not necessarily closed and don't have
to do nuclear physics research.

------
weinzierl
The page the original link pointed to was just redirected to the "closed
cities". Original page this post linked to:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atomgrad&oldid=545...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atomgrad&oldid=545560153)

~~~
martey
I merged the two pages, mainly because of znowi's comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843809](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843809)

The "Closed City" article has significantly more information that the Atomgrad
article did, and is a more useful resource.

~~~
imrehg
Was that really necessary?

This results in actual information loss, since the closed cities page does not
have the same detail about this particular part. And also, now the original
post makes no sense, since the word "atomgrad" is not even present on the
closed cities page.

~~~
martey
> _This results in actual information loss_

The "History" subsection of the "Closed city" article acutally contains more
information on such cities that the "Atomgrad" article did. The list of
"atomgrads" in the original article were already included in the list of
Russian closed cities.

If there are additional important details that you feel are missing from the
"Closed city" article, please feel free to add them.

> _now the original post makes no sense_

I make edits on Wikipedia in order to make Wikipedia a better resource, not to
make it more consistent with Hacker News posts. I am not a HN editor, so I
cannot edit this post's title to "Closed Cities". I think the added
information from the "Closed city" article more than makes up for any
confusion that people who click on the link from HN but fail to read this
comment thread, the notification at the top of the "Closed city" article that
they have been redirected from the "Atomgrads" article, or the edit history of
either article.

------
hkmurakami
Fascinating. Any idea what the suffix numbers stand for for these cities?

~~~
itafroma
I followed a chain of linked articles from OP and eventually found an
explanation on an article for Ozyorsk[1]:

> Until 1994, it was known as Chelyabinsk-65, and even earlier, as
> Chelyabinsk-40 (the digits are the last digits of the postal code, and the
> name is that of the nearest big city; which was a common practice of giving
> names to closed towns).

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk,_Chelyabinsk_Oblast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk,_Chelyabinsk_Oblast)

------
malkia
grad means town/city

