The Mayak Chemical Combine was one of the most secretive places in the Soviet Union. It was built in the southern Urals, close to Kyshtym. The facility produced weapons-grade plutonium and other radioactive isotopes for the Soviet nuclear military programme. Fugitives from behind the Iron Curtain mentioned the site, usually due to accidents and peculiar, unexplained observations. Such reports were often treated in the West as exaggerated or fictional, as they spoke of large-scale disasters, deportations and vast landscape transformations. This paper aims to present the research potential of declassified Cold War intelligence records for archaeological landscape studies of off-limits military sites. To outline a somewhat broader perspective, I will combine those sources with contemporary historical knowledge and modern remote sensing data. The analysis will be focused on the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] satellite imagery (CORONA and GAMBIT) from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s. The discussed sources recorded outcomes of nuclear disasters, hundreds of square kilometres of uninhabited wasteland, abandoned villages, disappearing lakes, dying forests, diverted rivers, and other features related to this clandestine plutonium facility.

玛雅克_化学联合基地是苏联最神秘的地方之一。它建在乌拉尔南部，靠近克什蒂姆。该设施为苏联核军事计划生产武器级钚和其他放射性同位素。铁幕后的逃犯提到了这个地点，通常是由于意外和奇怪的、无法解释的观察结果。这些报道在西方经常被视为夸大或虚构，因为它们谈到了大规模的灾难、驱逐和巨大的景观变化。本文旨在介绍解密冷战情报记录在军事禁地考古景观研究中的研究潜力。为了勾勒出更广阔的视野，我将把这些资料与当代历史知识和现代遥感数据结合起来。分析将集中在 1960 年代至 1970 年代初的中央情报局 [CIA] 卫星图像（CORONA 和 GAMBIT）。讨论的来源记录了核灾难、数百平方公里无人居住的荒地、废弃的村庄、消失的湖泊、死亡的森林、改道的河流以及与这个秘密钚设施相关的其他特征的结果。