Secret City

Hey, true weirdos at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. What would you trade for a better life for yourself for your family? Would you agree to a job that paid really well can load it with perks and promised you a place in history of taking that job meant having your identity erased. If taking that job meant you could never quit, never leave, never even travel outside the boundaries of your new home. boundaries made of barbed wire and patrolled by guards with guns. Your children will grow up here. They'll follow in your footsteps. They'll do the same work you do. And like you will live out their entire lives in this place. Your choice to come here will change your family for generations. But you believe you believe with everything you have, that your work here just might save the world or end it. So what's your answer?

The program of closed or secret cities began early in Joseph Stalin's regime. When the Nazis invaded Russia in June 1941. Stalin wasn't about to admit that having executed roughly 30,000 members of his own military in the Great Purge was a terrible idea. But the diabolical dictator also wasn't inclined to make an invasion easy for the Nazis. Stalin ordered hundreds of Soviet factories to be taken completely apart and relocated to Siberia, far from the front and the threat of German military action. The workers sent to these secret science towns were completely isolated, cut off from their former lives and the world. They were housed in what were called administrative units, apartments, schools, restaurants, shops, power plants, even theaters, all constructed using slave workers imprisoned in the system of forced labor camps, known as the Soviet Gulag. These towns had no names, only geographic coordinates, which were useless anyway, since they were all fake and constantly changing. High perimeters 24 seven, no one was permitted to leave. No one was permitted to visit. Only a tiny handful of high level security officials in the NKVD. That's the precursor to today's KGB even knew the location of the science towns. Now, don't be giving Stalin credit for thinking on his nasty feet as the Nazis marched in. Stalin had plenty of experience in constructing secret cities. His first was called Magnitogorsk. When the first laborers arrived there in the 1920s, they found a few ragged tents and a handful of dilapidated shacks awaiting them. The area itself was forbidding, isolated and scoured by bone chilling winds, crouched in the shadows of Mount Magnitnaya, the so called Magnetic Mountain. It got that name, thanks to the insane amount of iron ore hidden in its depths. So much iron ore, the compasses were useless there.

And even birds detoured around it. A spooky sort of place, a truly weird geological anomaly. The kind of place that sparks stories and legends. This frigid backwater was the centerpiece of Stalin's first five year plan. Workers there existed in chaos struggling under the harshest conditions. Materials were inadequate, infrastructure was non existent. And why did it seem like there was always something on fire? Not surprisingly, tens of thousands of people bolted, leaving the job unfinished. So Stalin moved to his plan B. The next wave of laborers were mostly peasants who'd been brutally tossed off their own land and threatened with death. They called these people special resettlers. But the correct term is prisoners. They were hauled off their farms, taken from their homes to build Stalin's Magnitogorsk metallurgical complex. This was to be one of the largest steel plants in the world. And I am not at all kidding when I tell you that the entire plan from the steelworks to the city was designed to replicate Gary, Indiana with a Pittsburgh thrown in only better. This was more than a push to build a steel mill. It was a massive attempt to shove the Soviet Union out of the agrarian age and into the industrial age in one go. And the price of accelerating that was staggering.

Living conditions in Magnitogorsk were miserable and inhumane. Workers live mostly in tents only permitted inside the slightly less flimsy dirt floored wooden barracks during the coldest parts of winter, with blizzards howling, and the most sweltering weeks of summer battered by dust storms. They were tormented by bedbugs and lice all year round. There was zero medical care available on site. Typhus and malaria burned through the population. Scarlet fever was epidemic. What little food was available lacks sufficient calories to sustain the workers and the quality was wretched. These cold hungry slave laborers were working against deadlines so unrealistic, that it's actually fair to call them insane. In the first five years of construction, more than 10,000 people died of starvation, hypothermia, and sickness. And with each new sunrise, a cart would stop in front of the barracks, the driver calling out, Hey, do you have any dead today? The children were the first to die, then the elderly.

As always, you wouldn't have known any of this from listening to the relentlessly upbeat anthems the party commissioned. Songs that celebrated zealous communist youth eager to build the world's first socialist steel city with their own bare hands. That was the propaganda being served to the masses, while the laborers at Magnitogorsk slowly starved to death, hidden from view, and almost hidden from history.

Almost. The secret city of Magnitogorsk built on suffering was the embodiment of Stalin's revolution, the heart of his country of steel. With the metal flowing out of Magnitogorsk, Stalin would crush Western capitalism. But you know what he didn't tell his people? That he was forced to hire fat cat American capitalists and a possible Nazi to help get the The American firm Arthur McKee Company was hired in 1930 to design the Soviet steelworks and train its engineers and how to operate it. Stalin also brought in German architect Ernst May to design the ultimate egalitarian city for the workers of the Soviet Union's metallic utopia. And let this be our daily reminder that politicians are happy hypocrites when it serves their interests. And also, people will sell out any and all principles if the price is right. Try not to be shocked by this part. All that speed and brutality and corner cutting resulted in a steel plant getting built, just not built correctly. On January 31, 1932, blast furnace number one exploded. And the best that can be said about that is the temperature that morning was more than 20 below zero. So the disaster at least gave the surviving workers a chance to warm their hands. Eventually, though, they got it right. And today the city of Magnitogorsk is still a major steel town.

Next, the city of Sarov was a spiritual place before Stalin came to power. It was famous for Seraphim, a priest in pre revolution Russia, who chose the solitary life of a hermit. For 25 years, Seraphim lived in a cabin in the forest outside the Sarov monastery. He was attacked one afternoon while chopping firewood. The gang of thieves were furious at finding no money in the man's simple shelter. And they beat him nearly to death with the handle of his own axe. Seraphim attended the trial of the men and begged the judge to show them mercy. Despite damage to his spine that left him hunched and in great pain, Seraphim spent 1000 nights kneeling in prayer on a rock, his arms outstretched to heaven. The Eastern Orthodox Church declared it a miracle, followed by more miracles, healings and prophecy. In January 1833, at age 78, death found Seraphim on his knees in worship. And in July 1903, he was canonized as a saint. Seraphim preached, acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you 1000s will be saved. And spoiler alert, what the Soviet Union did to St. Seraphim will blow your mind. Now the birthplace of a saint often becomes a holy site, a place of pilgrimage for the faithful, but not in this case. Sarov the town found it hundreds of years ago around a monastery, a place of great religious and cultural importance to members of the Russian Orthodox Church, no longer welcomed believers. Sarov was given a new name, and a much darker purpose. And by 1946, Sarov no longer existed. Officially, that is, it was wiped off the maps, the unclassified maps that is, the once bucolic religious community was now a closed city under the control of the Soviet government. It was called base 112 for a time, and then site 550. And then they called it and then Kremlev. And finally, Arzamas 75. And then Sarov birthplace of St. Seraphim the Joyful got yet another new name and this one stuck. Arzamas 16. One of 10 secret atomic cities in the Soviet Union, construction of Arzamas 16 was under the authority of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. In 1946, the Soviet government surrounded the city with barbed wire and armed guards. It was now to be a center for the research and development of nuclear weapons. There were few outside telephone lines, little no contact with the outside world for the workers who've been brought in under the most dire threats of secrecy. Those workers had a new name for their new home. 285 acres surrounded by dense forest. They called it the forbidden zone. They've been recruited for their scientific expertise, incentivized with promises of comfort, all the privileges of being in an elite class at a time when their fellow citizens were suffering hunger and hardship, which was not so bad for the civilian recruits. But again, most of the labor force consisted of prisoners. 1008 prisoners, according to a headcount taken on July 1st, 1947. 9044 men and 1054 women. No new comforts for them. No privileges, however small. They were human firewood valued only for their labor, used up and then discarded. So in February 1947, the town of Sarov was officially erased, removed from the maps and the region was declared a closed restricted zone that was sealed off, disappeared, unreachable. Research and design labs were up and running. Construction of the first plant to produce atom

bombs in the USSR was underway. And at the same time, they were building underground facilities made of reinforced concrete to store the bombs. Leading the Soviet effort in Arzamas 16 to build an atomic bomb was physicist Igor Voisilievich Kurchatov, aka the Russian Oppenheimer. Kurchatov had some help. The Soviets had spies embedded in the American Manhattan Project. A plot twist the Americans weren't expecting.

They believed the Soviets were a good five plus years behind in developing their own bomb. The Americans should have looked a little more closely at a German theoretical physicist working at laboratory named Klaus Fuchs. His work was super instrumental in the development of both nuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb. Fuchs passed detailed information on the Fat Man bomb to the Soviets, who immediately set about creating one just like it. When the Soviets tested their creation on August 29, 1949. The world was shocked. The President of the United States Harry S. Truman was shocked, and then shocked again, when five months later, Klaus Fuchs confessed in a British courtroom that he had been sharing atomic secrets for seven years. Fuchs did nine years for the crime and then headed to East Germany, where he served as deputy director of their Central Institute for Nuclear Physics until his very pleasant and peaceful retirement in 1979. Being a treacherous bastard and different to watching the world burn played out pretty nicely for Klaus Fuchs, didn't it? Not so much for the world. By 1951, Soviet workers at Arzamas-16 had created 29 atomic bombs. It was all such fun that Arzamas-16 got the nickname Los Arzamas. In addition to the bomb the Soviets tested in August 1941, which was nicknamed Joe One by the Americans, this secret city produced the RDS-6S hydrogen bomb, which detonated with the force of 400 kilotons of TNT, the RDS-37 two-stage hydrogen bomb, equivalent to 1.6 megatons of TNT, and the AN-602 Tsar Bomba, which is an unsettlingly cute little name for the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever created and tested. When it was dropped by air over the frozen Arctic island Novaya Zemlya, a camera operator on the ground described it like this.

Fireball of enormous size rose and grew. It grew larger and larger. When it reached enormous size, it went up behind it like a funnel, the whole earth seemed to be drawn in. The sight was fantastic, unreal, and the fireball looked like some other planet. It was an unearthly spectacle. When a nuclear weapon is detonated, the heat vaporizes the casing of the bomb. That's what causes the intense blinding flash of light. In the Tsar Bomba test, that flash lasted for more than a minute. Next came the fireball, expanding to almost six miles in diameter, big enough to swallow most of Manhattan. Then the mushroom cloud, rising 42 miles high with a diameter of 60 miles. And all of that in far less time than it takes to bake a frozen pizza. For perspective, the Tsar Bomba was 3,300 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. And that one killed 70,000 or more people. Telling you that, just in case you were thinking that the Soviet nuclear workers at Arzamas-16 were just dicking around and slamming shots of vodka. And speaking of those workers, numbering approximately 25,000 people, many lived their entire lives inside the barbed wire boundaries of their secret city. Their identities had been erased from the official census. No record of their existence would ever be found. Scientists were made to write every report by hand, since the Soviet authorities believed that typists and clerks could not be trusted. Informers were everywhere. It was impossible to know who among your neighbors was a government plant. But the big paychecks, far higher than could be earned anywhere else in the Soviet Union, and the material comforts provided, helped them make peace with life in what was, in essence, a military prison. There were good schools for their children, theaters and cinemas, shops that carried the kind of food and luxury goods that were unobtainable for most citizens of the USSR. All meant to ensure their loyalty, their compliance, and their silence. Between the scientists, their families, and all the people needed to keep a small city running, roughly 80,000 people called Arzamas-16 home. 80,000 people who had never ever existed, according to the records. Now a number of Soviet physicists at Arzamas-16 were Jewish, which is similar to America's Los Alamos. Because the secret cities and the nuclear weapons projects offered a kind of protection to Jewish scientists during the period 1948 to 1953. In the USSR, Stalin, like most authoritarians do, had become increasingly paranoid. That's a direct result, as history keeps patiently showing us, of controlling the population through fear, division, hatred of the other, and violence. Stalin's paranoia morphed into an anti-science and anti-Semitic persecution complex for the ages.

If this sounds uncomfortably familiar, as in like, what's happening today, that's because it is. Ding, ding, ding, nailed it. So, with secret cities like Arzamas-16 offering a safe, well, safer haven for Jews, nuclear physicist Yakov Zel'dovich signed on. He'd been evacuated, along with the entire faculty of the Institute of Chemical Physics from St. Petersburg in 1941, to escape the German invasion. Then he ran into some trouble in Moscow, which sent him packing for Arzamas-16, where he soon became the first head of the project's theoretical division. There he collaborated with another leading Jewish scientist, Yuli Borosevich Kartan, who in 1946, was named scientific director of the whole enterprise. The physicist Andrei Sakharov, who later regretted his own involvement in the USSR's nuclear program, becoming the most famous dissident in Soviet history, and the winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, also joined the work in Arzamas-16. Zel'dovich gave Sakharov a heads up. This sounds like a spy movie, saying this about Kartan.

There are secrets everywhere here. And the less you know that doesn't concern you, the better off you'll be. Kartan has taken on the burden of knowing it all. Meanwhile, head of the Soviet secret police, Lavrentiya Berea, ordered another secret city to be built. This one would be home to a plutonium production plant, very similar to the one located in Hanford, Washington State, USA. This city was first called Chelyabinsk-40, then later Chelyabinsk-40. You'll also see it called the Kishtim complex. Unlike Arzamas-16, which commandeered St. Seraphim's birthplace of Sarov, Chelyabinsk-40 was built from scratch. It was founded in 1947 on the banks of Lake Erish. The proximity to water was necessary, because that water would function as a coolant for the planned nuclear reactors, and as a place to dump nuclear waste. As with Magnitogorsk and Arzamas-16, the Soviets were in a great big hurry to get the place built and operational. More than 40,000 Gulag prisoners and prisoners of war were transported and put to work. They managed to get five reactors up and running with the usual complete disregard for worker or environmental safety.

Zero thought was given to how radioactive waste ought to be handled. The only priority was optimizing plutonium production to match and then exceed what the US had already accomplished, which is why, early on, radioactive waste was dumped into a nearby river, where it eventually made its way to the Arctic Ocean. The first production reactor at Chelyabinsk-40 went operational in June 1948, and the first batch of plutonium was produced at the radiochemical plant in February of that same year. Now plutonium production generates tons of contaminated waste. The cooling system used at Chelyabinsk-40 was an open cycle system, meaning that radioactive wastewater flowed directly into the lake. When Lake Irzh became too contaminated, the waste was dumped into nearby Lake Karachay, which rapidly became the most contaminated place on earth. Now eventually the forced laborers, oops, I meant to say dedicated comrades, were made to construct another kind of storage facility. This one dug 27 feet underground. The nuclear waste was to be stored in huge steel tanks bolted to heavy concrete bases, because by this point, it was well understood that this highly radioactive waste heated itself up, thanks to the process of radioactive decay. And that meant each tank of waste had to surrounded by a cooling system made up of 20 tanks of water.

All the science added up, at least on paper. The critical mistake that they made didn't happen in construction. And you can't blame the workers. Starving, hopeless people with zero training in nuclear physics, who are toiling under the threat of literal murder, don't dare question authority. They do what they're told. So they shoveled and they carried and welded, and they obeyed, not realizing that what they were building 27 feet below the surface was its own kind of bomb. Ever heard the old saying, a job half done is as good as none? Well, the laborers had done their part working at breakneck speeds under dangerous conditions. They weren't to blame for the fatal flaw that only revealed itself once the tanks were filled. The crap monitoring system, a critical design error that led to catastrophe. On September 29, 1957, the cooling system around one of the underground storage tanks failed, but no one realized it. At 4.22 that afternoon, that tank exploded with the force of 70 or more tons of dynamite, an explosion so powerful that it tore off the 160-ton concrete slab that covered the area and released about 10% of the stored radioactive waste into the air.

When the dust settled, it settled on the bodies of the people who lived at Chelyabinsk-40. It settled on the streets, the shops, and the schools attended by the children of the workers. It collected on their clothing and in their hair. They tracked it from one place to the next on the soles of their shoes. It sifted into the wheels of cars, trucks, buses spreading to every corner of the secret city. A cloud of invisible radioactive particles spent the next 10 or so hours traveling northeast from the site of the explosion, covering a distance of more than 200 miles. And then the fallout from that cloud floated to earth, contaminating anywhere from 300 to 800 square miles. That ambiguous number comes from how you define contaminated. Not that it mattered, because no one would ever know. More than a quarter million people lived in the contaminated zone. Their fields were poisoned. So were the pastures where their livestock grazed, and the forest, and every single body of water. But that explosion was as big a secret as the city itself. It took a week for Soviet authorities to grudgingly accept that the civilian population in the contaminated zone would have to be evacuated. And so they were.

10,000 people at first, and no reason given. But this is the kind of secret that's even harder to keep than the existence of entire cities. A report came out of Denmark suggesting that there had been some sort of catastrophic accident in the Soviet Union that had resulted in heavy fallout. The American press was all over it, but speculated that the fallout was the result of a test of dirty weapons, and not an accident at all. By April 1958, the Associated Press was reporting that the Kremlin was trying to tamp down panic in the USSR over heavy fallout by calling a halt to all nuclear weapons testing. Meanwhile, workers in Chelyabinsk 65 were excavating contaminated soil by hand and piling it into enormous mounds. These graveyards of the earth, as they called them, were fenced off, but the workers themselves were covered in that toxic dirt. The people could neither see nor taste the cesium-137 and the strontium-90 in the air and the water. They had no way of knowing that cesium finds the body's soft tissue, that strontium deposits in the bones. Hospitals in the region were filling up with the sick, but no one knew that the mystery illness afflicting so many people was actually radiation poisoning. They didn't know why their skin was sloughing off in sheets, why their hair was coming out in clumps. They were weak from diarrhea and vomiting, bleeding from their mouths and their rectums. Exact numbers of how many were sick, how many died, are all but impossible to come by. Estimates suggest more than 60 cases of acute radiation poisoning and at minimum 200 deaths. And now, keeping the secret city housing the secret nuclear reactors, a secret, became exponentially more difficult when the radioactive fallout was so high that neighboring countries were reporting the spike. The Soviet authorities drew a circle around the affected region and gave it a new administrative title, the East Urals Radioactive Trace, EURT for short. 21,400 people were inside that circle and few were unscathed. Yet, there was still no official acknowledgement of the accident and there wouldn't be, not for another 30 years. The records regarding this disaster, a combination of technical errors, massive misjudgments, and appalling work conditions were thoroughly sealed and concealed. That was something the Soviets knew how to do, better than anyone. The truth finally came out in 1987, one year after the devastating nuclear accident at Chernobyl.

It took Chernobyl to knock Chelyabinsk-40 off the leader board as the worst nuclear disaster in history. After the accident in 1957, residents were convinced that more deaths, seemingly unrelated to the explosion, were being caused by radiation. How else to explain why otherwise healthy people were now terribly sick, wasting away with bruised flesh and bleeding gums? 32 years after the fact, a man named Evgeny Mikerin, who was one of the plant managers at the time of the accident, said that the only real saving grace on that awful day was the temperature. It was unseasonably cold and most windows in the city happened to be closed. A lucky break that offered city residents some small bit of protection, but the same couldn't be said for the surrounding countryside, which took the brunt of the disaster, as did the farmers and peasants who relied on that soil and those crops for their very survival. In 1999, Vladislav Lerin, a researcher and writer, attempted to track down and interview retired workers from Chelyabinsk-40. It was difficult. The habit of secrecy had been ingrained in them for decades. They were more afraid of the KGB than they were of radiation. And even though the USSR was dissolved and the accident at Chelyabinsk-40 had been public knowledge since 1987, these people were still so cowed, still so frightened to But a few dug deep and came forward. Like Viktor Sladkov, who began work at the plutonium production plant in 1947 and remained there for almost 50 years. He said that no one was warned about the effects of radiation exposure. He said they didn't even know what radioactivity was. Spills were cleaned up by hand with washcloths that were reused.

Sometimes they had rubber gloves, sometimes not. Sladkov confessed that there had been multiple accidents on site. At the plant where he worked, there were hundreds of nuclear accidents. Hundreds. Many with the most extreme and dire consequences. Look at the official record, he said. It's all lies and cover-ups. The official record can't possibly account for the thousands of veteran workers suffering from diseases caused by exposure to radiation. Plant managers and inspectors knew better than to tell the truth. They hid most of the accidents from both the heads of the nuclear industry and from the government. It was the only way to avoid punishment under that regime. A woman named Fina Kuznetsova, who'd worked her way up to the position of deputy head of radiological measurement at Plant 25. From the first day of operations until 1956, said that initially there were no safety measures at all. A spill on an upper level of the plant trickled down, contaminating everything below it, and that was bad enough. What made it all worse was the pace they were forced to keep. A constant, hurried rush. Add in the conditions of strictest secrecy where it was forbidden to even take notes. No warnings were allowed to be posted. The entire endeavor was so classified that workers were required to hold all information in their memories alone, which created an atmosphere of pressure and panic. Had a step been forgotten? But most tragic of all, Kuznetsova said, was how costly and valuable all the was. More valuable in a poor country than the people who operated it. It was the people who were expendable, not the machines. If you follow the safety rules, you couldn't meet your work quota. You were under greater pressure than if you were in a labor camp. On the other hand, if you violated the safety rules, you risked losing not only your bonus money, but your life. For years, we worked in these conditions, and I do not know who was guilty. Most of the people who worked with me have passed away. I'm alive thanks only to my optimism.

Another veteran, Inna Razmahova, who began working at Chelyabinsk 65 in 1948, describes 16-hour days that left workers so exhausted that they made mistake after mistake. She tried to manage the plant for worker safety, but quickly learned that worker safety didn't mean the same thing to her bosses. Those days were long, exhausting, and dangerous, so I tried my best to manage safety. When the soldiers had received the maximum allowable dose, of course I stopped their work. The next morning, though, my chief was so angry. He explained to me that the maximum dose applied only to plant personnel. Soldiers, he said, could receive more, and prisoners, much more. Why? Because they would leave after they had finished serving their time, and nowhere would the doses they received be reported. Razmahova recounted workers dumping contaminated radioactive waste into toilets. She described teams separating out uranium from radioactive solutions with wooden spoons. She said that the work was so dangerous, that people were coughing up blood, that people disappeared from the job and were never seen again, that there were so many deaths, almost all at such a young age, that it was impossible to call it natural or random. The only thing that mattered at Chelyabinsk 65 was helping the Soviet Union win the nuclear race. Another worker at Plant 25, named Vorik Dvoryankin, told a story that really sums it up. Once an assistant was filtering plutonium from solvent when the glass retort exploded, his face badly cut, and plutonium got into his blood. Other assistants helped him wash away the blood and solvent, but the head of the division didn't like that. He told us we had to collect all the blood and water so we could recover all the plutonium. Is it a surprise that the three closed secret cities of Magnitogorsk, Arzamas 16, and Chelyabinsk 65 still exist? Two of the three are still closed, but no longer all that secret, even if most of the secrets those places keep are unlikely to ever be told. Closed or open, hidden or not, each city has to wrestle with its own dark past, its own troubled legacy. Today, Magnitogorsk has a population of nearly half a million people. Once called the socialist city of steel, it was open to foreign visitors in 1989 during Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika movement. It's still very much in the metal business, home to the largest iron and steel works in Russia, though most of the once-rich natural resources in the region have already been mined. Materials are now imported from Kazakhstan. Investment dollars, as well as many of the workers in Magnitogorsk, now come from China. Sinosteel Engineering and Technology Company is in the business of constructing a new plant there at a cost of roughly $840 million. The area is heavily polluted.

About 650 tons of industrial waste get dumped into the environment every year. In 2015, even the Russian government declared it the third most polluted city in the country. The air is contaminated with lead, sulfur, and other heavy metals. An acrid yellow smog hangs over the region. The incidence of birth defects has doubled in the last 40-plus years, and one troubling statistic indicates that only one child in 20 born in Magnitogorsk is free of health issues and allergies. Hospitals and clinics are filled with the here. Lung cancer stalks the inhabitants. As one local put it, the steelworks eat people alive. Yet this pollution doesn't seem to be a huge concern for many. The environmental toxins are slow killers, so very patient, that it's easy to ignore the threat until it's too late. And even now, there are those who still cling to the old Soviet ideals, those who still value work for the good of the state above all else, above even their own safety and well-being. But the city can lay claim to two universities, both specializing in the kind of training and degrees that best serve the steelworks. The jobs pay well, and the local hockey team, the Metalurg, has won the national championship three times. The prisoners and slave laborers who huddled in torn tents and nearly starved to death building the place would be amazed to see it now, with streetlights, neon, and chemical fires flickering.

And they would be awed by the magnetic mountain, awed by its absence, that is. The iron ore that made it such an unsettling anomaly has all been mined. The mountain is no more. Arzamas 16 became an official sister city to Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1993. Two years later, Boris Yeltsin, then President of Russia, gave in to pressure and officially restored the city's original name, Sarov. Today, Sarov is the center of Russia's nuclear research, research on fundamental and applied physics and a center for recycling of radioactive materials. Put more simply, Sarov exists to protect the motherland, to ensure the reliability of Russian nuclear weapons and to sustain the country's nuclear shield. And unlike Magnitogorsk, it's still tightly closed and super hard to get to, even if you manage to get the necessary security clearance to visit.

You'll have to take an overnight train from Moscow, a train that starts out running with an electric engine, and then is taken apart and reassembled several times throughout the before ending up with a diesel engine. The last leg of that journey isn't even available to the public. Only visitors with special government authority ever see the inside of the Sarov train station. Tourists are strictly prohibited. And you can't just show up in Sarov looking for a job, even though unskilled and low paid workers are as needed there as anywhere.

Those positions are filled by carefully vetted people from the surrounding area. These workers are permitted to enter Sarov at 6am and must be gone by 10pm if they don't want to get into serious trouble. And it goes without saying that if they want to remain employed, they see nothing and they say nothing. And remember St. Seraphim? He was probably delighted to see the name of his birthplace restored. But being declared the patron saint of nuclear weapons. Only God knows when he made that. The city once called Chelyabinsk-40 has a new name too, Ozyorsk. It's still a nuclear center, though only one plant is active in producing fissile material. Most of the work today there involves reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, including spent fuel from decommissioned nuclear submarines. It may no longer be a secret, but there's still plenty of secrecy surrounding it. In 2017, unusually high levels of radiation were detected in the area. At the same time, a man-made radioactive isotope called ruthenium-106 was spreading in an invisible cloud over Europe. Something that had last been detected when the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded. It looks like few lessons were learned after the 1957 disaster. At Chelyabinsk-40 they still dump low-level nuclear waste into the nearby Ticha River. They still dump mid-level nuclear waste into Lake Karachay. And it's still a closed city, thanks to the extreme security measures needed to safeguard the nuclear materials shipped in for its 15,000 workers to process. They can't leave. And for the most part, they don't want to. The residents of Ozyorsk were polled first in 1989, and then again in 1999, as to whether or not the city should be opened. The vote both times was an overwhelming no. More than half the nuclear scientists and residents said they would leave if the city was open. They took pride in their work for their government, pride in the fact that they were trusted with the most important state secrets. And there was something else they didn't want to give up. Access to the best of everything, at little to no cost. This was true before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and remains true today, even if some residents call Ozyorsk the graveyard of the earth. Here in the USA, we had our own secret cities, places designated to support the top secret Manhattan Project. Los Alamos, New Mexico, Richland, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. All three were closed during the Manhattan Project. One difference though, between the closed American and the closed Soviet cities is this. People stationed in Los Alamos, Richland or Oak Ridge didn't find themselves scrubbed from the census. They didn't cease to exist in the system.

When their work or their tour of duty was completed, they were free to leave. Their children and family members were free to leave. They weren't asked to trade their freedom and the freedom of their families for a bigger apartment, or more and better food. But like their Soviet counterparts, they risk exposure to radiation, whether they understood that or not. And they had to keep the biggest and heaviest of secrets, the kind of secrets with the power to end the world.

Now, we must be ready for a new danger, the atomic bomb. First, you have to know what happens when an atomic bomb explodes. You must get ready. It looks something like this. There is a bright flash, brighter than the sun, brighter than anything you've ever seen. If you are not ready, and did not know what to do, it could hurt you in different ways. It could knock you down hard, or throw you against a tree or a wall. It is such a big explosion.

It can smash in buildings and knock signboards over and break windows all over town. First, you duck. Then, you cover. You duck and cover tight. Duck and cover under the table. It's a bomb. Duck and cover. He did what we all must learn to do. You and you and you and you. Duck and cover. Remember what to do, friends. Now tell me right out loud. What are you supposed to do when you see the flash? Duck and cover.

Next time on True Weird Stuff, she just loved babies. If there was anything she loved more than babies, it would have to be money. I guess that's why she started selling babies. Some of those babies turned out to be famous grownups. Your mind is blown. Next time on True Weird Stuff, The Baby Broker. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Stacey Robertson, Ashley Palmer Fischer, and Kary "Doc" Bowser. Sherry, may I give you a round of applause for dealing with all these Russian city names. You did great with that. You did.

Let me thank you. Let me apologize to any listeners of Russian derivation. It's just really hard. Because the you know how some some languages like Spanish, Italian, a lot of the vowel sounds are the same across the languages, right? The vowel sounds and the and what the consonants do when they bump up next to each other in Russian is unbelievable. By the time I would practice these Russian words and place names, and I don't think I worked that hard on the SAT as I did on Lake Ersk, Lake Ersk, Lake Ersk. It was just absolutely, absolutely nuts. So thank you. I appreciate that.

If you ever watch there's a TV show called Abandoned. I know you watch it. Oh, I live for it. And they I mean, you have these cities and these were dealing primarily with plutonium. But the Russians set up other cities in other places that are now abandoned. And they're fascinating. So if you ever have a chance to watch that you get a sense of you kind of get a sense of what these cities were like they were closed communities a lot of times in really desolate places. But they did have all of the amenities you would have in a city as you mentioned before, like movie theaters and all that kind of stuff. But it's haunting to see them now that after the Soviet Union fell and that they were abandoned completely.

There's a couple of things about this whole subject that are nightmarish for me. So the first thing is the number of people who lived their entire lives behind those barbed wires. Because if you were you know, like when you're a kid, you go where your parents take you, right? Right. So, you know, mom, dad, new job, and then you know, you go to school there and you get a job and you fall in love and you have a family. And for a lot of those people, it was definitely a golden cage. And there were ways in which that was really beneficial. Like we just touched on it ever so slightly. But the number of Jewish scientists that were able to find safe haven in the Manhattan Project and the Soviet nuclear project, they disappeared, they literally disappeared behind these walls, which protected them from the Nazis. So you could say, well, that I you know, that was a good thing. But the idea as an, you know, we piss and moan, and God knows we have a lot of problems as a country and as a society. But but none of us can really fathom what it would be like to be told, Do you like Des Moines, you can never leave. Can I go up? No, no vacation, no Grand Canyon for you. You're in Des Moines now and your children's children are also going to be in Des Moines. That's kind of alien to our experience. So that's the first nightmarish thing. And then the second is this. I don't think anybody has any idea how much nuclear contamination has been in our environment for more than 50 years. Like, it's just really terrifying.

The haphazard way that all of that stuff was handled. And y'all, it's so half assed. And this isn't even like me with my American jingoism coming for the Ruskies. Listen to me. These three cities were built by starving prisoners, with not one clue about how to build a nuclear reactor. They were just following orders. And Stalin and then the Soviet leadership that followed Joseph Stalin, they didn't want to hear they get off your bullshit. They don't want to hear about time and deadlines and materials and starving dying workers. These things were slapped together in the most reckless and hurried way imaginable. And is you know what the miracle here is, is that there were more and worse accidents than there were.

Yeah, seriously, but there was certainly they had enough that happened through the course of time. I thought it was funny that one of the cities was modeled after Gary, Indiana. Have you ever been to Gary, Indiana? I have. I've been to Gary, Indiana. I have. I got lost once off the interstate in Gary, Indiana. And it seemed like I felt like I was in some sort of Mad Max world because it was I mean, the city is in ruin. I mean, I guess parts of it they've refurbished some, but for the most part, Gary, Indiana is an awful place.

Well, they built I mean, when I came across that little historical fun fact, oh, the giggles I had because I was picturing the meeting, you know, in some windowless gray room at the NKVD in Moscow in the 19 like 1938. Yes, this is Gary, this is the utopia on which we will model our atomic city. Well, the other one was modeled on Richland, Washington. So, you know, we could do a whole maybe, maybe we should do an episode on Richland, Washington. So if you remember from the true word stuff, episode human product 12, right? The plutonium 239 that was used in those disastrous, illegal, horrifying human experiments in the United States during the Manhattan Project came from the reactor at Hanford, Hanford, Washington state. Wow, they the government went in, and they built an entire community for the people that were going to work in that part of the Manhattan Project, their, their families, their children, all of it. And it was closed. You know, it was like a military base, you could not get in or out without proper credentials and clearances and all that. And then of course, you know, with time, now people live there. And it's just this historic, and that's what they call it the historic community of Richland. Now it's just a regular place. But it was our it was as close as we got to a truly closed city. I think it was even more closed than Oak Ridge. And Los Alamos, Los Alamos was very close, but it was a complete Los Alamos was a research like it was, it was, it was like, not a place like it, they didn't build a town, right, the way that they did at Chelyabinsk or Arzamas 16. But the Washington State, that community is really, really cool and really interesting. And I, I think that the people who live there know the whole story. But I think most of us have no idea.

I had none. I had no idea that. So like, we have our version of it. But it's super different. Because say what you want about us, and we're, we're divided and insane. And we're just out of our minds at the moment. But we are not wired to fall in line the way the people of the Soviet Union were wired to fall in line. And you really saw that after World War Two, when they and through like, into perestroika, right? The collapse of the USSR and Russia becoming Russia again, they gave the people in these closed cities every opportunity. And most of them were like, No, I'm good.

It's fine. Stockholm syndrome. Yeah, we're good here. We like it. The Russians have a terrible history with nuclear things. I mean, you you touched on Chernobyl. But what what happened there with the Russians, the Soviet Union Russians is terrible, because they kind of left that mess after the the fall of communism in Russia. Yeah, I mean, the thing about Chernobyl, we were talking about this the other day, but the international community kind of had to bond because it is still an unsafe place. It's still a mess there.

And they're fighting the war over there. And that has become a pawn in the war as well. So they have a terrible history with their handling of nuclear materials. Well, one thing if you're going to take away anything from this episode, here's what it should be. All of the facilities in the former Soviet Union that are part of that country's nuclear program, were built by starving, sickly prisoners at an incredibly fast pace with every possible corner being cut. So it's all a shit. It's all a shit show. And I'm sorry, but it is. So you have to know that, like to be surprised at some of the technical and construction and design flaws of Chernobyl is to be a beautiful, innocent child because the whole system is kludged together. And this made me I mean, I was almost weepy. So the the accident at Chelyabinsk 65, which was the worst nuclear accident in human history until Chernobyl, which just narrowly edged it out. You need to know that because it was so extreme. If you go back and take yourself back in time, and the closest we have to time travel is to go back in time through American media. What were what were they saying about it on the radio? What were newspapers printing? What did Life magazine have to say, right? When you when you jump into that time machine, and you go back to the accident, which was September 1957 at Chelyabinsk 65, you go to the of 1957 into the summer of 1958. And the innocence brings you to your to tears. Because this was the this was America's response to reports coming out of Denmark, that there were these huge spikes in radiation, that fallout was being detected all the way across Europe, right? America was like Japers. That's not swell. I bet it was. No, I'm serious. That's not swell. I bet they I bet they tested a dirty bomb. It is whatever the government knew, whatever the FBI or the CIA, whatever they knew, was not trickling down to the American people who basically had no idea that this nuclear catastrophe, which had fouled the earth for generations for hundreds and hundreds of miles, fouled the rivers which were flowing into the oceans. No clue that that was a thing that was happening right then and there. And the spikes in the EURT, that zone that the Soviets created around that accident. Oh my god, the spikes in child mortality, leukemia, thyroid cancers. Whoa, if there's one thing to know about radiation, it's this, it is looking for your thyroid, man. It is unbelievable. And, and the Soviet government was so good at suppressing information and deleting facts, that even today, you're, there's so much difficulty trying to get accurate numbers. Because how do you measure the mortality of a population that was erased from existence when it walked through the gates? Do you see the problem? And that part about how they weren't allowed to have office staff, they couldn't have secretaries or typists or

clerks, because the the precursor to the KGB, the NKVD did thought those people were just ripe to be compromised by the Americans. You know, we would, we would get in there and turn a typist into a spy or whatever. So the scientists had to, everybody who worked on the plant, had to memorize it. They're not wrong. We might have done that. So we would have I mean, I've read Tom's books, I know how we roll. They're paranoid, but with good reason.

I want you to imagine that you're working 18 hour days, and you're hungry. And you're tired. And you are required to maintain the safe operation of a nuclear reactor only in your head. You're going to make mistakes, human beings, human beings, you know, as you said, with the slave labor, if there's no incentive to do a good job, you're not going to do a good job. And if you're exhausted, you can only do but so much.

And that's what was happening. That accident in 1957 was the result of tired, overworked people trying to hold together pretty half assed operations that had been built by starving frightened people. Okay. And all of it had to be in their heads. So if you want if you watch the Chernobyl documentary on or not that it wasn't a documentary, it was a miniseries. And it's a you've seen any of the documentaries on Fukushima or Three Mile Island. Folks, if you've watched the Simpsons, okay, you know how complicated a nuclear power plant is. Do you really think that you can safely operate one without a single checklist and writing? No. So that accident that accident? I don't know that it would have been prevented because they didn't have adequate monitoring on the underground tanks. And so maybe that accident was fated to be. So let's talk about this for a second. It's really, really hard when you are dealing with that period of history. And you're dealing with the Soviet nuclear program. It's really hard to find people that will talk like really hard. And I said to Max, a couple of weeks ago, I'm so frustrated. I can't find people like there. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people in these stories. Where Where are they? Well, they're too afraid to talk. Or they're dead. Or they're dead. And so we found a handful that you heard in this episode. We want to thank all of our voice actors for participating. We found a handful. And that handful of people were embedded in some reports that have been done on the Russian nuclear programs after the Soviet Union fell. Most of the people involved declined to speak to the researchers. They were like, huh, I'm not talking. No, sir, buddy, I'm not having the KGB at my door. A handful of very brave people came forward and spoke.

And, and what they had to say was pretty damning, like Devorah Yankin talking about how they got in trouble, because instead of cleaning the blood and plutonium off this person in that accident, they were supposed to harvest the blood so that they could extract the plutonium from it to use it again. What? Yeah. Yeah. That's what Mr. Devorah Yankin said.

And then you heard what you heard what one of the women said that the safe radiation dose was different depending on your job title. If you were working on the science side of it, it was one number. Soldiers could get more and prisoners could get even more because they didn't give a damn about soldiers and prisoners. So those people deserve to be recognized for the extreme courage they had and being willing to say those words out loud and attach their names to it.

The thing that was interesting about this to me is, were they aware, were the scientists and the Soviet officials aware of the significance and the dangers of treating all of this nuclear waste so haphazardly? Because certainly you would, yeah, because you would think they would want the preservation of their country, you know, most of the citizens. So you think that it wasn't just recklessness, they just didn't know.

In the early days, and I think it was, oh, which unbarely pronounceable Russian name said that we didn't know what radiation was, we were cleaning it up with bare hands. Sometimes we use gloves, like they would mop up a spill of radioactive liquid with a washcloth, rinse it out in the sink, bare hands, rinse it out in the sink and then reuse that washcloth because they had no comprehension of how dangerous that material was and the impact it would have on their bodies and the bodies of everyone around them. They didn't know in the beginning, to be fair. And you know what? Neither did America. Because if you listen to Human Product 12, part of the reason that the American government during the Manhattan Project was performing illegal human experimentation, involving you know, radioactive materials like plutonium 239, is because they, they were like, what does this do? It was literally that simple. Like, what do you think it is? I don't know what do you think it is. And they were doing those experiments. Because Robert Oppenheimer said, we need to know what the safe parameters are, because we need to get these bombs built. And we can't afford anybody working at Los Alamos to get sick or die. Right.

So we need to know how to protect the people working on Fat Man and Little Boy here at Los Alamos. And if we have to, you know, if we have to kill some regular civilians, oh, well, so be it freedom, everybody. So we can't we can't go, oh, the filthy Soviet Union, because we were doing the same thing, just in, you know, in our own American way, but you were doing the same thing.

Didn't Madam Curie die from her exposure to radium? I mean, you would think that they would at least have some idea that this was very toxic. Well, they definitely had some idea. But again, to go back to Robert Oppenheimer, who is the reason we had the unethical human experiments, he knew that it was bad. But what he wanted to know, like a good scientist was, how bad how much and for how long. So that was the reason for the experimentation on human beings here in the United States. And I have no doubt, no doubt at all that the Soviet Union was also conducting very similar human experiments. That, let me see if I can find that. I mean, it was hard enough finding, you know, Rosmahov to talk about her experience at Chelyabinsk-40. I can't imagine that it's easy to get your hands on declassified Soviet human experimentation data. But you know, they were doing it, right, Max?

Right. Oh, sure. Absolutely. They were. So how does it I mean, your parents were like, Max's parents lived for over 100 years, they almost signed the Declaration of Independence. 1950, September 1957. And an accident on the order of Chernobyl is happening and nobody in the world knows. Yeah. Like, where were your parents in 1957? How old would they have been?

They would have been in their 30s. They would have been in their mid 30s. And they were probably at that time, you know, you know, my mother would have had two children by then. And my father was, you know, he was working for AT&T. And I'm sure that they had no idea. You know, I mean, they had, they weren't aware. Nobody did.

You know, what, what really was going on. And, and the thing about it is, because it was such a new thing, and it was still new, then, it's such a, well, radiation, what is it? Can you smell it? Can you taste it? Can you? What's it look like? What's it feel like, you know, and and so it is, it's a, it's a weird thing to try to describe. It's, it's, it doesn't fit in a lot of other neat boxes, like so many other elements.

Well, and you have to remember, too, that the accident happened in 1957. But it was not publicly acknowledged until 1987. And I want to say that it was in, you said it was in Denmark where they they noticed the the spike in radiation. Yeah, I think that's where they noticed the spike in radiation when Chernobyl happened, because they weren't very forthcoming with that information right away.

So, and you know, they had to with Chernobyl, they tried, they tried to keep it quiet in the, in the immediate aftermath. But there were things when, when Chernobyl went, that didn't exist in 1957. You can't keep a secret like that. Now we have too many eyes in the sky. Too much data. You just can't, too much flow of information. You can't keep a secret that big.

Yeah, anymore. Like it's shocking to think that they kept till you've been 65 secret for 80 years. And if you want to learn more about that, and you're googling it, it's often referred to as the Kishtim incident for the region, which is K-H-Y-S-H-T-Y-M, Kishtim. So you'll see it's sometimes referred to as the Kishtim accident or the Kishtim incident. That's the other fun thing about stories out of the Soviet Union and Russia. Not only do the cities change names over and over and over again, but there's sometimes because one like Chelyabinsk had like, I don't know, six names, right?

And Sarov, where poor St. Serafim, the patron saint of nuclear weapons, Max. He was known as Serafim the joyful and now he's the patron saint of nuclear weapons. The man was an hermit and a pacifist and someone who just wanted to spend every minute of his life contemplating God and in prayer and they made him the patron saint of nuclear weapons. Sarov had a million names too. So it's really tricky because you're having to remember Oh, yeah, they also called this, this, this, this and this. So this actually means that and this means the other and it is kind of fascinating to think that here we are almost 80 years after the bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that nobody has used them since then. It's, it's kind of astonishing when you think that that's 80 years with all of the disasters that have happened with the nuclear power plants and and the other things you were talking about, but but we have not had anybody who is in a military way has used nuclear weapons. I mean, that's fascinating.

What's so scary now? So like my older brother was obsessed with, I think because he was around for and paying attention. I think he was, he was around for a lot of that Cold War duck and cover stuff, which you heard in the episode, as though climbing under your desk is going to shield you from a nuclear bomb. Sherry, the fallout shelter that was near where we lived. So this was the place we needed to go to in case the bombs dropped was in the basement of the library. Now, that was our that was going to be our safe place. As a child, we Oh, that's where you go, right? I but but here's the thing about that. How could everybody from the city I lived in end up in that library basement? You know what I mean? I mean, totally. Although I'm sitting here thinking, well, I had to spend 60 years underground. The library isn't awesome.

But it's just there was this whole thing of and there was signs. I know there were signs that would say fallout shelter. Right. And that was okay. You knew you go there. But I remember, I don't know where I learned it. I went to school near there. So I suppose they told us there that that's where you would go. Should this happen? I have no idea how big of a space it was. I have no idea if they had enough bathrooms or food or what they had there.

Yeah, what are we what are we looking at these in these fallout shelters? And, and the idea I don't think people realize how long you would have to stay underground in the event of a full scale nuclear attack. So we just recently and I was at what episode was that in? Because I went looking what is the latest information on how long it would take to annihilate the world? Oh, in our Georgia Guidestones episode? Yeah. A full scale nuclear attack will kill three quarters of all people on earth in one hour and 10 minutes. Yeah. And then it everything's poisoned for a long time after that. And that's not even getting into nuclear winter, which was my brother, my big brother's favorite scary bedtime story. What was going to What was going to happen to us in nuclear winter? And he used to tell me this was this was my comforting tuck in tale. And at the end of it, he would say, and that Sherry is why you need to hope to be evaporated in the blast. Okay, good night.

It's interesting when I talked to my father was in Japan during after World War Two. And so he toured one of the sites, I want to say it was Nagasaki. But he toured that area. And then he toured other areas that had not had nuclear bombs dropped and just were firebombed. And he said, Yeah, I couldn't tell the difference. He said, in looking at it, I couldn't tell the difference between the two. Because that I think that tells you the ferocity of the bombing that was going on with the conventional weapons in in other areas towards the end of World War Two.

It the whole, the whole nuclear arms race, which I think really traumatized my brother and everyone his in his age that and a little older that did those duck and cover drills in school and sang the duck and cover songs. The the fireball. So there'd be the blast, the blinding light, which didn't you find it like, like, I was super interested to learn that the light comes from the bomb casing vaporizing.

That was interesting. I didn't know that. But the fact that it illuminated for as long as it did was something that I the Tsar Bomba. Yeah, the Tsar Bomba is a world annihilating weapon. That for a minute, so there's the blast, the shockwave, the light, the fireball, the mushroom cloud. It, it's beyond imagining how terrible these weapons are, and how quickly, like, as you heard in this episode, it didn't take the USSR long to stockpile 29 atomic bombs in a in a facility built by starving people with typhus, like it did not take long to do. And so you know, as the, as you know, the Russians piled up their nuclear weapons, and we piled up our nuclear weapons.

And then we created something called mutually assured destruction that was supposed to help keep the world safe, because nobody's going to push the button knowing that if you push the button, you're destroyed too, right? So that makes sense for a lot of older baby boomers. That's the world they grew up in. But we have a new variable now, that I know I don't like to think of it. But we have these small nation states. And we have these terror organizations that would love to join the big boys and girls at the big table of having nuclear access to nuclear weapons. And that, that's where, like, I lose sleep, like my brother lost sleep over the US and Russia, sending the intercontinental ballistic missiles at each other. And I lose sleep over some small outlier that gets their hands on a nuclear weapon. And maybe it's not the Tsar Bomba. And they it's not a world ender. But damn, there's no such thing as like a good nuclear strike. Despite what some of my bros on the artists formerly known as Twitter like to yank out of their mouth holes. There's no really like, good outcome once nuclear weapons are in the mix.

No. So, on that happy note, on that happy note, but let me say that Magnitogorsk, which is such a polluted place, I mean, it's an environmental disaster. But they do have a hell of a hockey team. And a couple of really good schools, if you want to be a metals engineer, a metallurgist, kind of an engineering sort of person. And it's open, you know, you can go visit it, if you want to. And the people can come and go freely. Tsarev and the other one are closed. Still, but you can go to Magnitogorsk and, and the people that live there are fully aware, they are fully aware of how filthy the air is, how dangerous the environment is. And the piece that they've made with it, because it's easy to find people who will talk about Magnitogorsk because it's not, you know, it's not a closed operation anymore. The way they make peace with it is this, something's got to kill you, this is going to kill me slow. And in the meantime, I've got this great job. And I'm able to provide for my family. So that's as close as we get to like candid disclosure for any of those three places. So if you had to pick one max, and it's 1940. And you can choose between the Magnetic Mountain, which can we just pause for a second, the mountain had so much iron ore, the compasses went haywire, and birds wouldn't fly over it.

That's how we get crazy legends and fairy tales, isn't it? Of haunted places? Isn't that cool? Yeah, not fun. Okay. So it's 1940. And you have your choice, you can go to the Magnetic Mountain. And you can build the Soviet City of Steel. You can go to the artist formerly known as Sarov, the birthplace of St. Seraphim. And you can work in the nuclear top secret nuclear program there. Or you can go to Chelyabinsk 19, where they're mopping up radioactive waste with their bare hands and about to unleash on the world a Chernobyl level disaster, even though they don't know it. Now that you've heard the story of all three places, which one would you have taken?

I guess the Magnetic Mountain. But now remember, when you when when I showed up at your door as a part of the secret police with Lavrentiy Bureev, their their head, and offered you your choice of these three jobs, you don't know about you don't know about bad outcomes. You've got Magnetic Mountain, you have Sarov, and you have Chelyabinsk.

Um, I'll still go with Magnetic Mountain. Well, you made a good choice. Because like I said, they have a hell of a hockey team and a couple of sushi restaurants. It's not the worst. Do you think the sushi is any good? I wouldn't eat the local fish. Let me say that. The rivers are befouled. So I would be very careful about the local seafood. But if they're flying it in frozen, maybe.

Alright, so next time on True Weird Stuff, um, you've seen the movie Mommy Dearest, right? Yes. Yeah. And you know, the story of Mommy Dearest, Joan Crawford adopted Christine and Christopher, and, and then proceeded to like terrorize them. And according to Christine, you know, beat them with hangers and just every known cliche from the movie, right? Wow. It turns out that not too long ago, there were no real laws regulating adoption in the United States of America. It was kind of a flee for all situation. And we had orphanages in this country. And we have what were called Children's Home Societies. And these were agencies that were looking to place children into homes. Wow. Wow. One of the most infamous stories in the history of America is the story of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. And a woman named Georgia Tann, who was in the baby selling business. And she was selling babies for in our in our money over $100,000 each. She had a big operation in Hollywood in California, she had a big operation in New York City. And it is believed that she sold Joan Crawford, the two children that became infamous in the mommy dearest movie. And it's also believed that the wrestler Ric Flair was one of the broker Georgia Tann. Yeah. And we know Rick personally. And that is a that is a man who's been through it and then some.

And it is believed that he was one of the babies that was sold sold. And just so we're clear, how do you get a big supply of babies to sell? Isn't that the million dollar question that you're going to have to do some kind of underhanded stuff that you might have to go so far as to tell a poverty stricken new mother. Oh, we're so sorry to tell you the baby died in the nursery when the baby didn't die at all. There are so many crazy stories, including advertising children in newspapers, and running Christmas sales on babies. That is a thing that was happening right here in good old USA. And we've got the story for you on the next true, weird stuff.

And if you listen to us on Apple podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review true weird stuff, hit our website true weird stuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff.com and follow true weird stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True weird stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me Sheri Lynch, along with my year director Max. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

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