The road to the Pochtovy Yashchik is never signposted. If a Pochtovy Yashchik is located outside the city, you will find a dense forest around it that looks entirely natural. One of the Nizhny Novgorod Pochtovy Yashchiks is located in the selo of Kuzentsovo in Chkalovsky District, but the turnoff to the selo is also unmarked. However, about ten kilometers toward the regional center there is another selo called Kuznetsovo — complete with a colorful road sign.

Pochtovy Yashchik <such-and-such number> — the colloquial name for restricted Russian enterprises: secret research institutes and military factories.

A characteristic meme of the Soviet era.

Pochtovy Yashchiks were widespread in the Gorky, which ultimately led to it being declared a "closed city" during the Soviet period. This is a distinctive feature of the city: such enterprises were placed within the city itself and in towns across the Region, and those cities were closed in their entirety — because the nuclear and missile industries required complex cooperation with dozens of enterprises. Usually, at least in the Moscow suburbs and border regions of the USSR such as Crimea, Pochtovy Yashchiks were located outside cities. For the Nizhny Novgorod Region, such placement was more the exception than the rule.

The classic Pochtovy Yashchik was not only an industrial or scientific phenomenon but also a cultural and demographic one. Serving the utilitarian goals of "the factory proletariat's victory" often involved not so much inventing new designs as — given the specific circumstances in which the central authorities operated at any given time —:

  • Producing working prototypes based on materials obtained from the West.
  • Cultivating an atmosphere of mystery and higher purpose in the locality where they were based.
  • Securing the loyalty of the "educated class," who found employment at the Pochtovy Yashchik and signed non-disclosure agreements. Quite often the only truly significant secret of the Yashchik was the ordinary inefficiency common to corporations of that kind, compounded by the difficulty of organizing supply chains and holding contractor enterprises accountable within the more than peculiar Soviet economy.

Curiously, Pochtovy Yashchiks are difficult to regard as an external, grafted-on phenomenon, since they broadly replicated the socioeconomic function of Russian monasteries — which can be seen as a clear positive outcome of the formation of a unified state: they offered shelter (and the opportunity to work on somewhat more favorable material terms) to people who did not fit into the rigid northern society with its hyperactualized value of material survival and its correspondingly "penny-pinching" and primitivist model of leadership.