Despite the constantly growing literature on the history of the Soviet atomic programme, bottom-up narratives and voices from the Soviet periphery have – ironically – remained peripheral to the discussion. Drawing on a combination of archival material, published memoirs, and oral history interviews, this article examines the GULAG-to-socialist- utopia life cycle of Mailuu-Suu, a Soviet uranium mining town located in the Fergana Valley, in the south of the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic. Between 1945 and 1968, Mailuu-Suu was home to a uranium mining and hydrometallurgical combine, which produced 10,000 tons of yellowcake, a partially refined form of uranium that is used in the preparation of fuel for nuclear reactors and constitutes an intermediate step in the production of nuclear weapons. The closure of the combine brought the town’s transformation to an industrial centre, but, as the article argues, this ‘industrial conversion’ was accompanied by the silencing of the town’s uranium legacy and the rewriting of its history. The article highlights the role that Mailuu-Suu’s mines played in keeping the Soviet atomic programme up and running at a time when known uranium reserves in the Soviet Union were scarce and the country frantically sought uranium for its atomic bomb project. And by pointing out that knowledge about radiation was withheld from miners and other workers, it offers a glimpse into the social, racial, epistemic, and environmental injustices that took place in the Soviet Union during and immediately after WWII and suggests that the authorities were aware of the hazards that living in Mailuu-Suu constituted to its inhabitants. Taking into account that similar processes characterised uranium extraction on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the article introduces ‘uranium industrialism’ as a global temporal and analytical category, which draws attention to the unique characteristics of state-sanctioned industrial uranium mining that make it distinct from other aspects of uranium-fuelled nuclear modernity.