Alyona NEFEDOVA

"Night and silence given for ages, Rain or maybe it is snowing, Anyway, I am warmed up with endless hope, I see a city far away which doesn't exist..."

These words from Alexander Krivoshapko's song, performed by Igor Kornelyuk, were quite an accurate description of the city you see here just a few dozens of years ago. One could see this place with their eyes, but it didn't exist. There was no single hint of its presence on the maps, on the road signs, and on one of the Moscow railway station's (from which a train departed to this city) schedule. On the platform, the citizens somehow managed to recognize "their" people. From time to time, you could hear questions like “Are you going to the City? or "Are you from the City?" If in response you heard a confused “from which?” or received a puzzled stare, it meant that the person was not from there, from “a city which does not exist.”

Years passed; many things have changed. The city has regained its historical name -- it was at least the sixth switch in less than 70 years. Now it exists on maps and in navigators, we can hear about it from the TV screens and read about it on the Internet. Sarov -- the city which didn't exist -- is located in the Nizhny Novgorod region, at the intersection of two rivers, Satis and Sarovka, hidden from wondering eyes in the dense forests of the Mordovian nature reserve.

Nevertheless, for many people a virtual visit is still the only available option to get there, as Sarov, one of the main nuclear centers in Russia, remains being inaccessible for wondering eyes.

There are many closed cities in our country. But is there at least one similar to Sarov? I am not sure. Here, the past and the future merge together. On the one hand, it is a huge temple complex, which is now getting reconstructed, with a goal of returning it to the state in which it was several centuries ago; on the other hand, it is the Russian Federal Nuclear Center, which concentrates on one of the most advanced and secretive fields of science.

According to the historical evidence, Serafim Sarovskiy, a very significant figure for orthodox Christians, lived and prayed in this city. Many people, both poor and rich, went to him for advice and healing. As legends go, even the tsar, Alexander the First, asked him for help.

There is also the famous Sarov Monastery, created by the decree of Peter the Great in 1706. The Monastery, just like the rest of the city, has its own secrets. A lot of people in Sarov, and I'm not an exception, have often heard from their grandparents stories about secret underground tunnels leading to the neighboring cities and connecting men and women convents. Moreover, Sarov's dungeons are not simply underground streets; they also contain a lot of monks' cells and even a church.

People still haven't found the main treasury of the monastery, which was supposed to be under the altar of the underground church. There is not much understanding of the origin of the caves either: some believe that they were created by nature; others - that they are the heritage of the times of the Mongol-Tatar Horde. The exploration of these underground caves is very complicated because, due to the specifics of the city, they were walled up at a certain point. Individual parts are still getting accidentally discovered during the construction work, and historians continue examining this subject. I have always dreamt to go down there myself, to solve one of the endless underground mysteries, or even just take part in the archaeological work. Maybe, if at some point I end up becoming a nuclear physicist and working in the city, this naive childhood dream - to see the Sarov dungeons will come true.

Talking about Sarov, one cannot but mention Near and Far Deserts. They are the largest natural monuments in the city, which beautifully combine untouched nature and places of worship associated with the name of Seraphim Sarovskiy. The forest that surrounds the Far Desert is a natural temple itself. It has a huge rock, on which Seraphim Sarovskiy prayed for a thousand nights in a row about the fate of Russia, talked with those who needed his advice and help, and interacted with wild animals, which were not afraid of him at all, that is why he is often portrayed next to a huge bear.

There is also an underground non-freezing spring, the water of which is considered healing. Partially, it is attributed to the fact that having bathed in it, the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna was able to give birth to the long-awaited heir. Religious people from various

parts of the world hope to get there and to drink some water. Due to Sarov being a closed city, you will never find a large crowd of people near the spring. The nature is preserved in its original form, exactly as it was several hundreds of years ago. Here you can calmly sit, listen to the sound of the forest, the songs of the birds, and the murmur of water; feel this clean fresh air, thinking about various things. This was the place, where my mom tried to teach me to listen to myself - not an easy task for a small child, but gradually I learned this.

It wouldn't be quite right to talk about Sarov only as of the city of Seraphim Sarovskiy though, as it obviously wasn't the reason why at a certain point it disappeared from all of the maps and turned into one of the most secret places in the country -- kind of a ghost town.

After Bolsheviks coming to the power, the temples and the whole Monastery area were partially destroyed and redecorated into schools, theaters, etc. Right before the WWII, there was a machine-building plant in Sarov, at which at the end of 1942 they began to produce sets of parts for M-13 shells for "Katyusha" rockets. In 1946, a top-secret facility for the production of a new type of weapon was created on the basis of that plant, and the first Soviet atomic and hydrogen bombs, RDS-1 and RDS-6, subsequently appeared there. Since this moment, the village of Sarov became closed for entry and exit. It disappeared from all maps and was renamed to the Moscow-Center 300 (Wikipedia knows all Sarov's names except for this one), later also becoming Gorkiy-130 (Nizhniy Novgorod, the biggest city nearby, was called Gorkiy at that point), Kremlyov, Arzamas-75, and Arzamas-16. As for the last two, Arzamas is the city which was relatively nearby (exactly 75 km), but 75 in the new Sarov’s name was just a random coincidence, which people were terrified by when it was noticed, and after 5 years of the city being called Arzamas-75, it turned into Arzamas16.

Here are a few facts I find interesting about the life in the city at those times.

- While now the citizens can exit their hometown almost whenever they want, back then, they also had to request a permission. To get to the food market right outside of the city you could wait for about a month.

- Before the school excursions to other Russian cities, children were thoroughly instructed about what they were allowed to tell about the city; how they should have answered related questions, and whom to they could show their passports (not even to the general policemen).

- The first new name of the city, Moscow-Center 300, turned out to be very confusing. At this time, college graduates couldn't choose the place of work and were assigned one. So many times, after finding out that their distribution was Moscow-Center 300, people got very excited - everyone thought they were going to the capital of Russia or to its suburbs. Not exactly the case.

- There still are debates on how much of communism was created in Russia. While it's generally a complicated matter, Sarov probably was one of a few places where communism has been (almost) a real thing. For instance, even in the times of crisis and a huge deficit of goods in most places, there was a great availability of them here.

Nowadays, the restrictions are eased, yet still no one can enter the city without a solid reason and approval of permission. Getting there is also an adventure on its own, as you can’t buy the train tickets to Sarov on the Internet. While a train going there exists, officially its route is Moscow-Bereschino: this is the one you buy tickets for, and only in the train itself, if you actually want to go to Sarov, you buy an extra ticket, directly from conductor.

You would never see a lot of people in the streets, whether on the edge or in the very center of the town. The mysterious atmosphere is fully present inside the barbed wire. It’s very quiet there. People suddenly appear on the horizon and quickly vanish into the air. There is much less of a small talk going on than in an average Russian town of the same size. Citizens are used to the “don’t ask” culture. In the USSR time, even children often didn’t know what their parents did at their work.

Also, in Soviet times, there was no crime in Sarov. At all. The reason for that was not so much the general level of culture of a small scientific town, but rather the strictness of the laws. Everything was very simple - if you had any criminal record, even a small one, like getting into a drunk fight - the way back to the city back was prohibited for you. Such people either left for good or settled in the nearby villages. After perestroika, some of

them have returned to their permanent residence, but, despite this, the level of crime in the city is much lower than it is on average.

Eternal life and instant death – the two opposite sides are now intertwined in this city, creating the world's first scientific-spiritual center. Go there if you ever have a chance. And if no… go to google maps.