The Doomed City (Russian: Град обреченный) is a 1972 science fiction novel by Soviet writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
The title originates from an artwork by Nicholas Roerich which "astonished [the authors] a while ago with its gloomy beauty and the feeling of hopelessness radiating from it.
Apparently, the experiment runs out of control, the City is shaken by a social unrest and an egalitarian system of job rotations is replaced by a dictatorship.
He struggles to find his identity and his place in the strange city, at first being a vehement opponent of the dictatorship, and later becoming a leading adviser of the dictator.
They encounter deserted cities and ruins of Earth cultures that show that the mysterious world is very old and humans have inhabited it for a long time.
The authors had initially hoped that by submitting the draft to publishing houses the people who read it would make copies and the novel might find readers through samizdat.