ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses post-Soviet multi-scalar transformations of the Lithuanian town of Visaginas, built to serve the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP) in the 1970s and 1980s. Currently INPP is decommissioned and in process of being dismantled. The argument is that there is a particular mode of urbanization inherent to Soviet nuclear industry, different from the conventionally discussed features of Soviet industrial modernity in the Baltic States and Eastern Europe. In the particular circumstances of post-World War II Lithuania, the Soviet ‘nuclear’ urbanization mode has been considered an essentially Cold War phenomenon, an essentially imperial phenomenon and an essentially exclusive Soviet welfare phenomenon.
