Moscow Belt of Soviet Science Cities: Design and Organization of the Area

The article deals with the history of the design and construction of academic cities of science in the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s. Their intensive construction took place during a chronologically short historical period – the years of the sixth five-year plan that became the only seven-year plan in the Soviet history. During this time, the task was set to move large-scale research and design organizations from the metropolitan centers to the periphery. A special case of the transfer of research institutions outside the capital was the Moscow belt of scientific centers. Their construction was initiated by the need to intensify fundamental research in strategically important fields of science, building restrictions in Moscow, the confidential and experimental character of the research carried out in them. They differed from the Siberian centers (Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk) that were being built at the same time by their specialization, the semisecret nature of their research, closer ties with the USSR Academy of Sciences, and finally they were less prioritized in terms of construction according to the political leaders’ opinions. Nevertheless, the speed of the construction of research institutes and the opening of research centers there in the shortest possible time gave the desired “achievement effect”. The research is based on materials from the collections of the Russian State Archives of Modern History and the State Archives of the Russian Federation. They are introduced into the scholarly discourse for the first time.