At 7:00 a.m. on 29 August 1949 a plutonium bomb on a steel tower exploded on the steppe of Kazakhstan. RDS-1 ended the American atomic monopoly four years after Hiroshima, and the people who built it had been told what failure would cost.
For decades the Soviet Union sprayed anthrax, plague and tularemia over animals tied to stakes on a remote island in the Aral Sea. Then the sea drained away, the island joined the mainland, and the pits where the leftover spores were buried became an international problem.
Kadykchan in Russia's far north-east was dug out of the permafrost by Gulag prisoners in 1943 to feed a power station. Then a mine explosion and a state decision left its flats empty and its streets silent.
Beneath Moscow there is said to be a second, secret metro for the country's leaders. Parts of the story are documented, and the rest is rumour that nobody in power will confirm.
On the steppe of Astrakhan Oblast, Kapustin Yar launched the Soviet Union's first ballistic missile in 1947 and went on to test its rockets, nuclear warheads and satellite launchers. It is still a military range.
Founded by Swedes in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927, Pyramiden was a showcase mining town on Spitsbergen with more than a thousand residents. Mining ended on 31 March 1998, the people left within months, and the cold has kept the town almost as they left it.
In the forests of western Latvia, a closed Soviet town of thousands grew up around radars that watched for missiles coming from the West. The Russians left in 1998, the unfinished giant radar was blown up in 1995, and the empty town is now a training ground for soldiers.
Deep in a forest in north-west Lithuania, about 10,000 Soviet soldiers built an underground base for four nuclear missiles aimed at Western Europe. It was one of the first of its kind, was kept secret for years and was abandoned in 1978. Today one of its silos is a museum.
On the steppe of eastern Kazakhstan the Soviet Union fired its first atomic bomb in 1949 and went on to test more than 450 nuclear devices over 40 years, in an area chosen because Lavrentiy Beria called it uninhabited. It was closed in 1991, and a 17-year operation was needed to secure the plutonium left behind.
Built on a river island in the 1830s and 1840s, the fortress at Brest hosted the treaty that took Russia out of the First World War, held Polish opposition leaders in the 1930s, and was attacked in the first hour of Operation Barbarossa. Its ruins now stand inside a vast Soviet-era memorial complex.
