Listening to Visaginas: on the rescaling of silences and sounds in a former Soviet nuclear town

ENIn a circular clearing among trees just beyond the tip of Visaginas's butterfly-shaped town plan stands a largely unused area of tarmac.1 This quiet place is remembered fondly by elder residents as the site of dances held in the 1970s during the building of Visaginas and the nearby Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP). Arriving from towns across the Soviet Union's nuclear network, these first inhabitants lived in barracks in a part of the settlement known to this day as the Festivalio gatvė (Festival Street) area, while they worked to build the power station and the dwellings for its employees.2 Today inhabitants invest the dance floor with warm memories of youth and a feeling of community generated through overcoming hardships to build the town and power plant from scratch. The recollections associated with the spot are amplified through the ideological foundations of the project; the nuclear town of Visaginas - or Sniečkus, as it was then known, after the First Secretary of the Lithuanian communist party - would be a settlement in which the 'peaceful atom' enabled a new step towards communist utopia.3.