Inside the closed city of Severesk (Alexey Lubkin)

Today in Russia, at least 1.5 million people live in cities that no one from the outside world is allowed to visit.

Many don’t appear on maps. Some have no road signs to indicate where they are. Still more are so cloaked in secrecy that people outside Russia don’t even know what they’re called.

They are Russia’s ‘closed cities’, a hangover from the Soviet Union when the then government went to extreme lengths to conceal locations of strategic importance.

The clandestine communities housed military bases, weapons factories and secretive research facilities that those in power wanted to keep hidden from foreign eyes – doing so by denying their existence altogether.

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The security checkpoint to enter the closed city of Severesk (Dmitry Afonin)

Currently there are still 44 publically acknowledged closed cities in Russia, and it is suspected that more remain under wraps.

Russia’s first closed cities were built in the late 1940s, and the Soviet Union had with a number of techniques to keep them out of sight.

Only classified maps – available to very few people – showed where the cities were located, and stops were omitted from transport timetables.

External communication with citizens wasn’t easy. Any post had to be delivered to a classified mailbox in another area, where someone in on the secret would then be able to forward it on.

And the residents themselves were by no means free to come and go as they pleased – special permission was required for travel outside the boundaries and visitors were heavily vetted.

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A nuclear power plant in the closed city of Sosnovy Bor (Alexey Danichev)

Since their peak under the communist government the number of closed cities has dropped dramatically. Their existence was officially revealed in 1986, and the majority were opened to foreign visitors and investors in the late ‘80s and ‘90s.

Those that remain are now known as ‘closed administrative territorial entities’, or ZATOs, and life for the citizens there has retained some of the bizarre attributes imposed on closed cities under communism.

In Zarcheny, a closed city in Penza Oblast, 12 kilometres from Moscow, 62,000 people currently live within a high barbed wire fence.

Ksenia Yurkova, a Russian photographer, was permitted to visit the city to document the city’s 55th anniversary parade.

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