In pursuit of superpower status during the Cold War, the Soviet Union built 60 science boomtowns. Then in 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed, and funding for the cities ended. Masha Gessen reports from Russia on this grand experiment in failure.

When two protons collide in an accelerator, they are transformed into muons and other particles. One Russian physicist offers this analogy: it's like two Soviet Fiats colliding to produce a bus and a Mercedes Benz 600. That's the thing about high-energy physics: the total is different than the sum of its parts.

So it was in 1978 that when the proton beam entered Anatoli Bugorski's skull it measured about 200,000 rads, and when it exited, having collided with the inside of his head, it weighed in at about 300,000 rads. Bugorski, a 36-year-old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, was checking a piece of accelerator equipment that had malfunctioned - as had, apparently, the several safety mechanisms. Leaning over the piece of equipment, Bugorski stuck his head in the space through which the beam passes on its way from one part of the accelerator tube to the next and saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns. He felt no pain.

From what we know about radiation, about 500 to 600 rads is enough to kill a person (though we don't know of anyone else who has been exposed to radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of sound). The left side of his face swollen beyond recognition, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow so that doctors could observe his death over the following two to three weeks.

Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue. The inside of his head continued to burn away: all the nerves on the left were gone in two years, paralyzing that side of his face. Still, not only did Bugorski not die, but he remained a normally functioning human being, capable even of continuing in science. For the first dozen years, the only real evidence that something had gone neurologically awry were occasional petit mal seizures; over the last few years Bugorski has also had six grand mals. The dividing line of his life goes down the middle of his face: the right side has aged, while the left froze 19 years ago. When he concentrates, he wrinkles only half his forehead.

Because virtually everything connected with nuclear energy was kept secret in the Soviet Union, for more than a decade Bugorski observed an unspoken ban on talking about his accident. About twice a year he went to the Moscow radiation clinic to be examined and to commune with other members of the brotherhood of nuclear-accident victims. "Like former inmates, we are always aware of one another," he says. "There aren't that many of us, and we know one another's life stories. Generally, these are sad tales."

Bugorski thinks of himself as a fortunate exception: a man in reasonable health, able to continue living a full life. For years, he was a poster boy for Soviet and Russian radiation medicine, which was entirely content to take the credit for his good fortune. Last year, though, when Bugorski finally decided to apply for disabled status, which would allow him to receive his epilepsy medication free of charge, the doctors chilled on him.

For his part, now that his fate is no longer secret, he would like to make himself available to Western researchers, but he doesn't have the money to leave the science town of Protvino and go west. He thinks he would make a brilliant object of study for someone: "This is, in effect, an unintended test of proton warfare," he claims. More to the point, he believes, "I am being tested. The human capacity for survival is being tested."

This is the thing about science towns. They should all be dead by now, but they limp along, half frozen and half hopeful. The unglamorous miracle of their survival might indeed make a brilliant object of study. It is, in effect, an unintended experiment in grand failure, an eerie test of the ability of people to live and work after death. That they manage to do it is, perhaps, in part good fortune and in part the nature of the beast: the end result is always different than the sum of history, people, and money.

In the postwar drive to harness the atom, the Soviet government built little towns charged with various scientific tasks. About 60 of these towns were created between the late 1940s and early 1980s. Some of them, towns where new weapons were designed, were not even on the map. Other towns worked on what the Soviets called "the peaceful atom" and were considered "open," which meant that access to them was highly restricted for foreigners and that the residents themselves were closely monitored by the secret police.

In exchange for their isolation - these towns were generally situated at least a couple of hours outside major cities - the researchers enjoyed a standard of living significantly higher than elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The towns, usually built in beautiful wooded areas, boasted better town planning - well, any town planning was better than the haphazard warehousing of the citizenry that went on elsewhere - higher salaries, and, paradoxically, a sort of cloistered freedom. The scientists in some of the open towns were allowed to organize performances of singers or exhibits of artists considered too ideologically unreliable for a wider audience. For the intelligentsia living outside, science towns held the allure of romantic impossibility. When I was 8, my translator grandmother married a nuclear physicist living in Dubna, one of the science towns - and it seemed my family's entire Moscow social circle was struck by the glamour of it.

The exchange of talent for the good life made for an extraordinarily productive relationship between the state and the scientists. The science towns helped ensure the Soviet Union's standing as a military and intellectual superpower, and the state paid them back by ensuring their continued comfort.

The top graduates of the country's famous math and science high schools and high- pressure technical colleges were assigned to the science towns, where they received good pay and, usually, an apartment - while their peers had to make do with dorm rooms or communal flats. They were the chosen people.

In 1990 science funding suddenly dropped about 90 percent. With the country on the brink of collapse, international prestige finally had to take a back seat to economic emergencies. Construction in the science towns froze and the trickle of young science graduates dried up. By 1993, many institutes could not afford to keep their electricity turned on, and the life in most labs had ground to a halt. While the economic disaster of the early '90s hit the entire country, the science towns were arguably in the worst position to adjust. Unlike military-factory towns, which also lost their funding overnight, the science towns had no industry to convert to civilian production. Unlike their colleagues living in other cities, the scientists in science towns could not switch to careers in finance or the service industries: most of them lived hours away from anything that wasn't a research institute, and they had no money to move.

While a small scientific lobby is pushing a hopeless bill in the Russian parliament to secure full federal funding for at least a dozen of the towns, salaries and pensions in some science towns are held up for months, even more than a year at a time. When the wages are paid, they generally range between about US$70 and $200 a month. The head of one nuclear institute at the heart of a science town shot himself last year - his colleagues are convinced it was over the lack of funding. For a few years, starting around 1992, various Western foundations, led by American financier-philanthropist George Soros's organization, gave out small grants to Russian exact scientists. Now most of that funding has dried up: Soros, for one, has said he will no longer single-handedly attempt to save Russian science if the Russian government plans to do nothing to help.

Many scientists find occasional teaching gigs in the West: if they are frugal during their semester of lecturing in some Midwestern town, they can save enough money to finance the following year at home. Some get financial infusions from more fortunate relatives living elsewhere. Many find ways to procure cheaper produce, even to live off the land with tiny plots they stake out outside the towns.

But even if each individual survival can be explained separately, the mechanism of the towns' collective endurance remains largely a mystery. Without the infusions of money and people, the towns and their populations are aging steadily, slowing down, and losing their old buzz, but the buildings are not crumbling and the residents are not deserting. In fact, the "brain drain" that has been the bugbear of post-Soviet science and technology, whose best and brightest are lured to the West, has barely affected the science towns. A recent survey of science towns' residents conducted by the Russian Labor Institute found that most young people would like to stay in the towns and in the sciences. Perhaps they are incurable romantics.

Or perhaps, being the best and the brightest among the best and the brightest, they know something we don't; perhaps they are right in believing that they are in possession of something so unique and precious that they should spend the rest of their lives propping up - and touching up - these 60 giant monuments to the power of science, the future ruins of the Nuclear Age.

Protvino, population 40,000, is one of the youngest science towns. The Institute for High Energy Physics was founded in 1963 and its accelerator completed in 1967, with the first experiments run in 1968. The town is built in a moderately impressive pine forest about 100 kilometers outside Moscow, where the small Protva River meets the larger Oka. The problem is, it is haunted. Subterraneanly, that is.

It could have been foreseen: the town was founded on a bunch of dead bodies. In 1941 the southern front line outside Moscow cut through this area, and before the Germans were finally forced out, they retreated and returned seven times. World War II continued for another three and a half years, and, it seems, no one really bothered to clean up the bodies and the ammunition both armies left behind. When the first scientists moved here in the late 1960s and '70s, their kids kept dragging home rusty helmets and unused ammo ribbons they'd found while digging around the old trenches. Construction workers still find human remains.

Too modern to fear bad omens, Soviet scientists and bureaucrats had big plans for Protvino. They built the largest particle accelerator in the world and imported a group of artists and designers from around the Soviet Union to make it into the prettiest of towns. "There was no architecture then in the Soviet Union," remembers Vitaly Gubarev, who headed up the beautification task force until its demise in 1991, "just prefab concrete boxes." It's a wonder, he says, that Protvino has buildings designed especially for the town: two pyramid-shaped brick high-rises and two "saw buildings," long zigzags in gray concrete that may look like a typical Eastern bloc monstrosity to the untrained eye but in fact consist of split-level apartments - an unheard-of luxury. The master plan called for the cluster of these apartment buildings with stores and schools to create a pedestrian-only zone. A miniature beltway around the town, with no exits into Protvino itself, would keep out cars and accidental tourists.

The plan behind the master plan was to win the State Prize - the highest Soviet honor - for the best town plan. But in the mid-1970s construction engineers made a horrifying discovery: this area was what geologists call a karst, a limestone region that contains giant underground hollow caverns. The master plan had to be revised again and again as more caverns were found; the original cluster idea had to be abandoned. A few years later another small town, just outside Moscow, was refashioned as a pedestrian cluster and promptly received the State Prize.

Thus began the tradition of failing to be the first. Other countries, too, were building accelerators, so that by the middle of the 1980s the Protvino machine was only fourth-largest in the world, trailing accelerators in the United States, Switzerland, and Germany. Plus, the US was starting to build the supercollider. To save the prestige of Soviet high-energy physics, in 1987 the government launched the construction of a new accelerator, the biggest ever at 21 kilometers in length. It would in fact be three accelerators in one extralong channel: one "warm" accelerator - that is, one made with regular magnets - and two "cold" accelerators, created with superconducting magnets. All over the Soviet Union, wherever there were large building projects, signs went up inviting construction workers and engineers to come to Protvino. They needed hundreds of people just to create the channel: you'd think the planners would know better, but they were going to put it underground.

Starting in 1990, when science funding was cut, the big project was gradually revised down from three accelerators to the one warm one. As the staff of the institute continued to assemble giant magnets for the accelerator at an ever-decreasing rate, it gradually became clear that the accelerator had no chance of being completed before it became obsolete.

Big dreams leave big traces. Enormous warehouses filled with thousands of magnets and hundreds of generators stand as giant monuments to the accelerator that never was. Most of the equipment is useless for any other purpose and wouldn't be worth much as scrap metal, but ultimately it could be disposed of. The creaky mechanism of assembly, storage, and upkeep of the accelerator parts could ultimately be forced to stop churning.

The problem, of course, is the tunnel. The circle was completed in October 1994, and it now haunts the town from below. Left alone, engineers estimate, it would be destroyed by water in four years. The way of the land is such that the level of groundwater to one side of town is higher than the street level in Protvino itself. In other words, if the tunnel were left to fill with water and collapse, in four years the earth would open up to swallow the town of Protvino.

Alexander Vasilevski, a large, bearded man in his 40s who came to Protvino as a college graduate, is the chief engineer of the accelerator project. He has calculated that it would cost nearly as much to fill in the tunnel as to complete the accelerator: about $200 million. For the last few years the project has been receiving seemingly random amounts ranging anywhere from $3 million to $30 million a year, which Vasilevski has been using to maintain the tunnel and continue, little by little, to assemble the magnets. He does not have any choice but to keep going: it seems the government will never be able to fork up enough cash at one time to make it possible to fill the tunnel. That, of course, is irrelevant: whatever the needs of the scientists, Vasilevski believes the tunnel ought to be built. "The accelerator would only be in use for 20 or 30 years anyway," he argues. "But if we build it right, the tunnel will be there for another 250 years. A structure like this should be used." Yes, it could be the world's longest underground shopping arcade. Or the world's only subway in the woods. Or a nuclear fallout-shelter for forest dwellers.

It is time to stop thinking so big. Protvino may have some trouble coming to terms with this imperative, but 20 kilometers down the road, in the biologists' town of Pushchino, small has come to mean survival. Granted, unlike Protvino, Pushchino was never meant to hit it big: it was too secret for that. Yuri Bespalov, the official local historian, even claims, with some pride, that the town plan was devised to make it impossible to add on to Pushchino. It would always be three finite zones: Zone A for the scientific institutes (all nine of them), Zone B for greenery, and Zone C for living (in any one of three types of nine-story concrete-block buildings). Nearly 30 years after the town was built, its population still only about 20,000, the experiment in stasis can be deemed successful: the new era has managed to insinuate itself into the Pushchino look in just two ways - the glass panes that residents have now been allowed to put on their balconies (in the old days this was believed to spoil the gorgeous uniformity of the façades), and the retirees who gather in front of the store in the morning to find out when their pension might be paid and to beg shyly.

With no money for the institutes, the answer to the townpeople's problems clearly lies outside of Pushchino. About a mile outside, that is. Residents have turned the tracts of land that once guaranteed their isolation into tiny garden plots - 20 or 30 square meters a person. Weekends and evenings year-round, half the town is working the land. The more enterprising types have put up miniature houses - half tool shed, half status symbol - on their plots; others just spend their time pulling old nylon pantyhose onto tiny year-old apple trees.

"People were suffering unnecessarily trying to work on their garden plots," explains Gennadi Bulatkin, head of the Laboratory of Bioproductivity of Agricultural Ecosystems and a chief instructor at the school. "What they needed was scientific knowledge to make their work efficient." Researchers at the Institute of Soil and Photosynthesis have organized the School of Practical Fruit and Vegetable Gardening. Most of the students are scientists - biologists, astronomers, and physicists. Bulatkin plans to devote this year to the study and practice of basic gardening, with instruction on tree-wrapping and crown-trimming, then eventually graduate to beekeeping. "Every plot should have at least two or three beehives," he says emphatically. "That's good for pollination and teaching your children, both."

Bulatkin should know. He has spent his life in science studying complex ecosystems; he claims to head the only lab in the world to study the relative energy consumption and production of natural and agricultural systems. A believer in the efficiency of agricultural ecosystems, he says two thirds of his family's sustenance comes from their little plot. Walking through the gardening tract on a December Saturday, he examines his colleagues' and students' efforts, praising the fir-tree-branch coverings here (they help create a layer of snow to insulate the soil), criticizing the evident lack of attention there. We pass a couple of abandoned plots - an institute director and his grown children have moved abroad - and greet the assistant director of another institute in his garden. This PhD, decked out in a gray cotton quilted jacket and tall rough soldier's boots, clearly relishes his back-to-the-land persona. He poses for the photographer, smoking one of those foul hollow-filter cigarettes found in Russian villages and prisons.

There is something outrageously subversive about staking a small project against the grandeur of Soviet science. Soviet science set itself up for it, though, by creating its little havens: the blueprints for a cozy individualism the residents would eventually come to claim. Long before the state left its scientists to fend for themselves, popular Soviet mythology already portrayed the science towns as oases of progress, modernism, and comfort.

The generic symbol of all the science towns was Dubna, a nuclear physicists' town two and a half hours northwest of Moscow. Here the popular fascination with the romance of science towns got to run wild. One well-known writer waxed sentimental upon visiting the town: "In our days, when even the poles of the earth are becoming inhabited, it is rather difficult to become known for youth and novelty. Yet the young town of Dubna did. The interest in this town of nuclear physics is now universal.... Its streets are cuttings in the forest. Its squares are forest glades. The prevailing sound is the forest stillness. Probably, such will be the towns of the future." Yuli Kim, a quasi-underground singer-songwriter, crooned of Dubna. Alla Pugacheva, the megapopular pop star, sang of future geniuses who "study the Synchrophasotron in Home Ec."

Dubna's Synchrophasotron, a light-nuclei accelerator constructed in the 1950s, captured the imagination of many Russians. Its neoclassical building with a flattened round dome became the symbol of Dubna's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. Not that many people from outside the institute had ever seen the mythical structure: though Dubna was an open town and its institute was international, the Synchrophasotron itself hid in the woods behind several fences and a tall embankment. This, of course, only added to the mystique.

As a kid, I spent all my school holidays in Dubna - friends and I killed entire vacations lurking around the Synchro-phasotron fence. Kids elsewhere may have lived for legends of their football or fishing exploits, but all our adventures focused on the Synchrophasotron.

Along most of the inside of the Synchrophasotron fence ran a strip of turned soil, off-limits even to employees: its inside perimeter was marked with barbed wire. This, we were convinced, was like the neutral zone at state borders - an area specially designed for gunning down trespassers. In fact, it appears, it was sealed off to make sure that trespassers left footprints. The summer I was 9 we discovered a small patch of the strip that the guards used for shooting practice. My most trusted friend Anton and I took a few days to dig a tunnel beneath the wooden fence and spent all summer making triumphant, if nerve-racking, forays into the shooting range to collect spent bullet casings (the guards, it turned out, used handguns with tiny copper bullets and shotguns with blanks weighed down with dried peas). We shared the secret passageway with a few other friends with whom we then traded casings and adventure stories.

When all nine years of your life have unfolded against the background of the world's grandest dream, you need a mythology that makes you a part of it. There was never much doubt in our minds that we'd become scientists: we were all attending math schools, the rebel among us wanted to become a geologist.

But making career plans was not enough. We needed romance, and romance was in the Synchrophasotron. We needed conflict, and conflict was in the imaginary gunfire. We performed our job of trespassing on adult territory with the determination and literalism of future scientists. (The rebel did become a geologist and moved to the Russian Far East; his brother, my old friend Anton, is a scientist at the Dubna institute. I lost touch with them when my family emigrated to the US when I was 14. I haven't looked for them in the four years I have been back.)

Pavel Zarubin, the plump youthful scientific secretary - a sort of scholarly PR rep - for the Laboratory of High Energies, which oversees the Synchrophasotron, refuses to believe a bunch of kids managed to breach the accelerator's security 21 years ago. "But we got shot at," I claim in an irrational reach for credibility. "Well, my friends did."

Born and reared in Dubna, Zarubin is, I suppose, either what I would have become had I settled in this town or, alternatively, what I would have had to be to stay. He is a fountain of variously mystical metaphors. In a single run around the dimly lit Synchrophasotron - the institute has to save on electricity - Zarubin manages to compare it to a castle, a monastery, and an abbey. The point is, the Synchrophasotron was built to stand for centuries - not unlike the Protvino tunnel except, of course, that it was actually completed.

The moment of the Synchrophasotron's obsolescence more or less coincided with the end of science funding, so the local researchers, who'd been counting on conducting future experiments in Protvino, came up with the brilliant idea of putting a new accelerator right where the old one was. The Synchrophasotron could not be dismantled, mind you - if the hundreds of tons of steel that comprise it were shifted, the entire castle just might slide into the nearby Dubna river - but they had learned to miniaturize, so they put the Nuclotron, a superconducting accelerator of nuclei and heavy ions, just below the Synchrophasotron. The first Nuclotron experiments were conducted in 1994.

Thus Dubna, population 68,000, became the first and possibly only success story among the struggling science towns. Constructing the Nuclotron, the scientists and engineers had to invent cheaper ways of doing their thing. The traditional way to make the tube that holds the beam, for example, is prohibitively expensive: a high-pressure chamber is generally used to force the metal alloy to conform to the complex shape required of the tube. In Dubna they used water frozen with the aid of liquid nitrogen to do the work of the pressure chamber.

"This is the innovation level of a guy working in his garage," Zarubin claims with a folksy pride. "Guys need their garages. Russian monasteries were always the repositories not only of spirituality, but also of skills. And technical culture, engineering culture, the belief in scientific values - all this has almost a religious quality. In times of trouble Russia often lost its churches, but never its monasteries."

Yes, I say, still sore over his refusal to believe my shooting story, but in Soviet times a lot of the monasteries were turned into prisons. "They became only more sacred for that," Zarubin retorts. One has to cultivate an enlightened disregard for history in these science towns. If Protvino was built on the bodies of soldiers, then Dubna rests on the bones of labor camp inmates. The town sits on an island shaped by the Dubna and Volga Rivers and the Moscow Channel, which connects the Volga with the Moskva River. The channel, a utopian dream of Russian rulers for centuries, was built in the 1930s by prisoners - as many as 700,000 of them, according to sources.

After the war, prisoners were used to build the first accelerator here (the world's biggest, naturally), the Synchrocyclotron, which became operational in 1949. The entire project was the province of the Ministry for Mid-Range Machinery, as the Soviet ministry of atomic warfare was euphemistically named. It was a state unto itself, with Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's police chief, as its czar, and labor camp inmates as its citizens. The first scientists, who moved to Dubna in the 1940s and '50s, remember that the large green between Dubna's luxurious (by Soviet standards) hotel and the Volga used to be the campgrounds. They remember too that the inmates were escorted by armed guards to the Synchrophasotron construction site.

It was all top secret then; the physicists were not even allowed to publish their findings. But then in 1954, Western European physicists joined forces to create CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, now known as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics and the place where the World Wide Web was invented) on the Swiss-French border. Soviet Science had to retaliate with a Warsaw Pact center, and in 1956 the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research was inaugurated around the Synchrophasotron (then the world's biggest) in a freshly built town full of yellow Hungarian-style cottages (for the top scientists) and gray Bulgarian-designed apartment buildings (for the rest). The only memory of the labor camp inmates lay in their unmarked graves. "Where the prisoners' graves are, there is a stream," Zarubin tells me. "Local men use the water for pickling cucumbers, and they don't have to boil it first." He pauses. "It is holy water," he explains. This man can put a good spin on anything.

Even with a correction for Zarubin's PR prowess, the picture that emerges from our circular tour of the venerable Synchrophasotron and the defiant Nuclotron is one of folksy ingenuity riding in on a good old workhorse to save Soviet science. At a time when, in most science towns, salaries have not been paid in months and institute directors have resorted to hunger strikes and even suicide, the mere fact of functioning can be a source of boundless pride. In 1996, the year of the science town's 40th birthday, Dubna put on a lavish celebration of its continued existence. Façades were painted, roads repaved, and new streetlights erected to greet visiting dignitaries. The money ran out before some of the repairs were completed, though; at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, for example, the front entrance is sealed off. This lab, the source of Dubna's greatest prestige, is also the recipient of the largest part of the institute's budget.

Thanks to the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, all of Dubna hopes to immortalize itself in the name of element 105 (one of those blank spaces in the periodic table), which, if all negotiations among international agencies go as planned, will become officially known as dubnium. The Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, with its four small accelerators, synthesizes the nuclei of new elements. It is a source of great pride in Dubna that elements 102, 103, 104, and 105 are generally acknowledged to have been synthesized first in Dubna, and elements 106, 107, and 108 are said to owe a sizable debt to Dubna as well. It is element 114, however, that the lab is pinning its hopes on.

"It has been predicted," explains director of the lab Mikhail Itkis, "that element 114 will live a long time. The nuclei of other elements we have synthesized have been short-lived, dying after milliseconds or microseconds, while this one may live for days or even months." Led by the theoretical predictions, scientists have been looking for it. The prediction, explains Itkis, is that element 114 will have a magical nucleus - that is, a nucleus with magical numbers of neutrons and protons. Like lead, for example: it has 114 protons and 184 neutrons, which makes it doubly magical. The point is, a nucleus possessed of magical numbers is extraordinarily resilient. "We are looking for a new island of stability," says Itkis. Aren't we all. Measured against other science towns, though, Dubna seems to have come closest to finding the magical combination, the correct relationship between scaling down and insisting on the dream. It's just lucky not to be saddled with a dream that's 21 kilometers long.

Tito Pontecorvo is one of Dubna's most famous residents. His father Bruno, the brother of Italian film director Gillo Pontecorvo, studied with the great Enrico Fermi, then fled fascist Italy, emigrating to Canada and disappearing with his wife, a Swedish communist. As it turned out, the man who was dubbed the Hydrogen Traitor (though he maintained he'd never worked on the H-bomb) went to Finland and crossed the border into the Soviet Union, where, apparently by prior arrangement, he was hidden - in Dubna. A couple of years after Bruno Pontecorvo disappeared in the West, he reappeared at a press conference in Moscow, his transformation into Soviet scientist complete. He lived in Dubna for the rest of his life; his wife, they say, lost her mind.

Dubna myths feed on the memory of Bruno Pontecorvo's flamboyance: he is said to have delivered April Fool's Day lectures and to have ridden his horse through Dubna at midnight wearing a wide-brimmed hat. The latter story, though, seems to conflate his image with that of his youngest son: Pontecorvo the father is most fondly remembered for introducing the Soviets to snorkeling; his son is the one with the horses. Tito Pontecorvo started out as a scientist in oceanology and spent most of his time at sea - but as the son of foreigners, he was not considered reliable enough to disembark in foreign lands. finally, Pontecorvo quit, declaring to anyone who would listen that he had been forced out of science.

Since he was a child, Tito Pontecorvo had had a thing about horses. Enough of a thing, apparently, to do the unimaginable: launch a private enterprise not just anywhere in the Soviet Union, but in one of its showcase towns. In 1979 he built a barn right where the town of Dubna met the forest and started offering riding and horse-grooming lessons.

Having a local riding school appealed to the Dubna ambition for the finer things in life. Tito Pontecorvo and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research entered into a mutually beneficial relationship that lasted a dozen years and produced hundreds of Eastern bloc city kids uncommonly good with horses. In 1991, when Russia legalized private farming, Pontecorvo set about building the dream of his lifetime. He spent more than a million dollars of borrowed money to build the biggest palace the Volga has seen. He situated it on the opposite side of the river from Dubna, where the gray-brown of dilapidated villages unexpectedly gives way to the spectacle of a red-brick rendition of a sugar castle, with tiny turrets and silver-topped towers stretching as far as the eye can see. The castle lies low in a valley, surrounded by the green pastures rolling down to the river, dotted with Pontecorvo's 200 Akhal-Teke, some of the world's most exotic, most expensive and, possibly, most beautiful horses; there are only 2,500 of them on earth.

But the Russian nouveau riche have not rushed to buy these fine animals. And the state is in no hurry to fork over half a million dollars in farming subsidies that Pontecorvo figures he is due. Pontecorvo's plan now is to use his natural charm, native English, and Canadian citizenship to popularize the Akhal-Teke in North America, "so that American snobs start saying to one another, 'What, you still have not bought an Akhal-Teke?'" For now, though, he has sold off most of the farm equipment. His telephone has been turned off for nonpayment. His six employees, his family, and his 200 Akhal-Teke are living in the castle, gates closed tight against the creditors.

The moral of this story, then, is that ambition can trap you - indeed, that if science was among the Soviet Union's greatest ambitions, then the science towns were its best-built traps. As these things go, of course, it is better to be trapped in a castle, like Tito Pontecorvo, than in barracks, like the builders of Protvino's ill-fated accelerator tunnel. When miners and construction workers were called in from all over the country, some of them were temporarily settled in barracks on the outskirts of Protvino. In the years since the money stopped, the 200-family barracks settlement has turned into a town of its own, rife with the complaints, the smells, and the rumors bred by hopelessness and poverty.

As soon as I declare myself as a journalist, the women of this shanty town flock to me and interrupt one another with complaints. "Our children have to travel to school in another town." "The sewers leak everywhere!" "The rats are as big as a soccer ball!" "We were tricked!"

True, they were tricked. They were lured here with high salaries - about the same as a physics PhD's then - and the promise of an apartment in a few years. When the construction came to a standstill, all hope for an apartment vanished. A couple of years ago the local sanitary commission deemed the shanty town unsuitable for living. Some of the wives in the town formed an activist group, and last summer they finally succeeded: they obtained permanent residence registration stamps for all the barracks' residents. Now they have more rights, including the right to stay indefinitely in a place unsuitable for living, playing the raggedy ghosts of Protvino's ambition.

The town retaliates by putting on an aggressively happy face. Protvino is holding a town-anthem contest, in which the front-runner is local celebrity poet Alexandra Kurbakova.

In a scene too heavily symbolic for even the most exploitative of journalists, Kurbakova greets me from her bed in a cramped first-floor studio apartment in the "saw building" by saying she doesn't have long to live. Reclining beneath a wall of portraits of great Russian poets - Alexander Pushkin, Sergei Yesenin, and Kurbakova herself - she performs her hymn to Protvino, a waltz that I present here in my own faithful translation:

Where the scientists are free Like the birds in the trees, Hear the sounds of science In the forest's green silence. You can feel antimatter And the scientists had better Take you down the stairs To the tunnel that's theirs.

Kurbakova's husband, also a local poet, has lit candles and cranked up a crackly mono tape recorder for this performance. I sort through my embarrassment at being the recipient of this ritual, my disgust at this filthy little apartment, my squeamishness at the sight of Kurbakova, who really does not look like she has much time left - and discover that I am not only touched, but also vaguely envious.

There was a time, albeit when I was 9, when I would have been willing to be shot in the butt with a salt bullet just to stake out a place in the science-town mythology. How glamorous it is to be going out as a science town's tragic living classic.

That's the thing about science towns: their projects are so grand they are absurd, their residents are so stubborn they have tunnel vision, their artists are so gloriously provincial they are pathetic, but somehow, even now, the total is different than the sum of its parts.