In his novels he described the dismal life of the city proletariat.
Even during his lifetime, the city was renamed Gorky following his return to the Soviet Union in 1932 on the invitation of Joseph Stalin. The city bore Gorky's name until 1991. His childhood home is preserved as a museum, known as the Kashirin House, after Alexey's grandfather who owned the place.
During much of the Soviet era, the city was closed to foreigners to safeguard the security of Soviet military research and production facilities, even though it was a popular stopping point for Soviet tourists traveling up and down the Volga in tourist boats. Unusually for a Soviet city of that size, even street maps were not available for sale until the mid-1970s.
M�ty�s R�kosi, communist leader of Hungary, died there in 1971. The physicist and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov was exiled there during 1980-1986 to limit his contacts with foreigners.
An end to the "closed" status of the city accompanied the reinstatement of the city's original name in 1990
