Russia has 44 secret cities with 1.5 million people that don't appear on public maps

Russia maintains forty-four officially acknowledged closed cities with one point five million residents—settlements that don't appear on public maps. According to Boing Boing, seventy-five percent are administered by the Ministry of Defense, with the rest run by Rosatom, the state nuclear agency. These restricted-access cities, officially called "closed administrative-territorial formations" or ZATO, were built around military and nuclear sites during the Cold War and remain largely off-limits to outsiders.

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