Word: sverdlovsk
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...vital centers of Russia's military-industrial complex had long been hidden away in closed cities referred to only by code names -- Chelyabinsk-65 or Sverdlovsk-45 -- located far from Moscow, in the Urals or Siberia. Today the cities are no longer secret, but life there has changed for the worse. Scientists earn less than $100 a month, and political control remains in the hands of the military, the KGB and former Communist Party officials. As factory subsidies erode and payrolls shrink, thousands of Russia's most talented researchers and millions of factory workers are struggling just to survive. They...
...final stop was Yekaterinburg, formerly known as Sverdlovsk, the provincial city in the Urals where the Bolsheviks assassinated Russia's last Czar, Nicholas II, and his family in 1918. It is also the place where Boris Yeltsin rose to power as a party boss: he was there in 1979 when a leak from a biological-warfare plant released a cloud of deadly anthrax virus that killed 64 people...
...broker was less interested in Yekaterinburg's history than he was in Sverdlovsk-45, the site of Russia's assembly plant for nuclear warheads, 124 miles farther north. There scientists and technicians have begun the process of dismantling most of Russia's 32,000 nuclear weapons, converting the weapons-grade plutonium into commercial-reactor fuel. The KGB still blocks any visits to Sverdlovsk-45, even turning away Yeltsin's nuclear-safety inspectors. But because of its proximity to all the nuclear and missile complexes in the area, Yekaterinburg has become a shopping center for the hottest market in restricted products...
...traveling companion and I found ourselves parked at the side of the road, approximately 93 miles south of Sverdlovsk-45, sharing a picnic lunch with a Russian scientist and two former military officers. Ignoring the freezing wind, we ate brown bread heaped with butter and red caviar. We drank tea from a thermos that had given up its heat hours ago, and stamped our feet in the snow as we discussed the import of a meeting held two hours earlier...
...metals from a factory dismantling warheads would have to be revamped. Even though my companion was interested in purchasing only "dual use" rare metals (rather than unequivocally illegal material, such as plutonium), there was a problem. Last summer, they said, more than a dozen plant directors and supervisors from Sverdlovsk-45 -- most of them KGB officers attached to the facility -- had been arrested and sent to prison for conspiring with the mafia to sell enriched uranium and plutonium abroad. Moscow had sent in a new KGB colonel to clean up the place...