Atomgrads | Hacker News Reader

Atomgrads

en.wikipedia.org

31 pointswslh11 comments

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

Yeah, it was quite common:

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..

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

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.

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...

I merged the two pages, mainly because of znowi's comment: 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

grad means town/city

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