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Fascinating. Any idea what the suffix numbers stand for for these cities?
I followed a chain of linked articles from OP and eventually found an explanation on an article for Ozyorsk[1]:

> Until 1994, it was known as Chelyabinsk-65, and even earlier, as Chelyabinsk-40 (the digits are the last digits of the postal code, and the name is that of the nearest big city; which was a common practice of giving names to closed towns).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk,_Chelyabinsk_Oblast

Most of these cities (e.g. Zheleznogorsk [1]) seem to have a stylized atom as part of their coat of arms. I wonder if it was common practice in the USSR to incorporate similar symbols into the coat of arms of other newly founded industrial cities?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheleznogorsk,_Krasnoyarsk_Krai

Yeah, it was quite common:

http://bit.ly/14HIT5f

I think, it was really fun. Sadly, it seems that nowdays, our (Russian) government favors religiouis symols over indistrial/sientific ones..

You have not approached that which could be touchedl and a blazing fire and gloomy darkness and storm 19and a trumpet blast and a voice speaking words such that those who heard begged that no message be further addressed to them,m 20for they could not bear to hear the command: “If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.”n 21Indeed, so fearful was the spectacle that Moses said, “I am terrified and trembling.”o 22No, you have approached Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and countless angels in festal gathering,p 23and the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, and God the judge of all, and the spirits of the just made perfect,q

----

God says... persuasions wholly 10 injury breasts invests wasting that's_for_me_to_know submit sad fun lingered divinations binary vows retired noted broad chose meek additions justifieth acquire kindly letters front Cuba Innocency GUTENBERG-TM workmaster others murder copied profound streets inspiration setting solicited figurative solicited destroyers expounded hallowed Israel difficulty openest removal vagrant fence Instructor createth //www lure Project's essence ensnaring farness Accept to-day closed privacy baby loads stormy

They're commonly known as "closed cities". You can read up more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city
Yeah, I have never heard the Atomgrad word, though some people can probably use it.

Btw, cities like that are also commonly called "scinetific cities" ("naukograds"), though "naukograds" are not necessarily closed and don't have to do nuclear physics research.

grad means town/city
The page the original link pointed to was just redirected to the "closed cities". Original page this post linked to: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atomgrad&oldid=545...
I merged the two pages, mainly because of znowi's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843809

The "Closed City" article has significantly more information that the Atomgrad article did, and is a more useful resource.

Was that really necessary?

This results in actual information loss, since the closed cities page does not have the same detail about this particular part. And also, now the original post makes no sense, since the word "atomgrad" is not even present on the closed cities page.

> This results in actual information loss

The "History" subsection of the "Closed city" article acutally contains more information on such cities that the "Atomgrad" article did. The list of "atomgrads" in the original article were already included in the list of Russian closed cities.

If there are additional important details that you feel are missing from the "Closed city" article, please feel free to add them.

> now the original post makes no sense

I make edits on Wikipedia in order to make Wikipedia a better resource, not to make it more consistent with Hacker News posts. I am not a HN editor, so I cannot edit this post's title to "Closed Cities". I think the added information from the "Closed city" article more than makes up for any confusion that people who click on the link from HN but fail to read this comment thread, the notification at the top of the "Closed city" article that they have been redirected from the "Atomgrads" article, or the edit history of either article.