ABSTRACT
This book has sought to come to grips with the history of nuclear energy in the Soviet Union and its successor states, with its far reaches into Central Europe, from the early days of tentative nuclear research to today’s strained and ambiguous situation. This history has in no way reached its end. In the 2020s, the quest for a “nuclear renaissance” is omnipresent in both Russia and in some Central European countries. So are the terrible environmental and health legacies of the Soviet nuclear archipelago. And as this book goes to publication, Russia’s military seizure of nuclear power plants in Ukraine is making headlines, along with renewed, existential fears of a coming nuclear war. This is a situation that early nuclear visionaries like Vladimir Vernadsky, Igor Kurchatov, and Nikolai Dollezhal could hardly have anticipated, but for which they laid the foundation.
