
Declassified Bunker of the USSR - VeXocide
http://englishrussia.com/2011/11/18/declassified-bunker-of-the-ussr/
======
adriand
I love this line: "Now a museum of cold war is organized in the bunker where
one can try on respirators, protective gear, hold different guns, etc."

You know, the usual sort of museum experience.

As interesting as this is, it's also tragic if you think about the vast
resources humankind has spent on building terrible weapons and defenses
against those weapons. Imagine how much farther we would be ahead as a society
if what was spent on the cold war was spent on solving the world's real
problems instead - climate change, poverty, hunger, and so on.

Even more tragic is that this expenditure continues, particularly by the
United States, even though the cold war is over. Those of us who thought the
end of the cold war meant we could move on from spending trillions on weapons
were obviously rather naive.

~~~
DuncanIdaho
Arguably the nuclear weapons have prevented continuation of WW2, where USSR
and US would duke it out in the 50's and 60's.

Just wanted to point out that world of geopolitics and strategy is way more
nuanced than an average person believes.

~~~
arethuza
"nuclear weapons have prevented continuation of WW2"

I would tend to agree with that. However, the levels of weaponry that were
deployed were arguably far higher than was actually required to achieve
effective mutual deterrence - by a huge factor. If you actually read the
details of what would have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis or Able Archer
83 had ended as shooting wars then prepare to have your blood run cold and we
_did_ get very close to indeed to shooting wars - particularly in the case of
Cuba.

Somewhat ironically, given that I am British, a child of the 70s/80s and not a
Conservative, one of the actual heroes of the Cold War was actually Reagan -
not for his "Evil Empire" rhetoric but because he actually had the decency to
believe that your average Soviet citizen was just as decent as your average
America, Brit or German. He was, by all accounts, so shocked when he heared
intelligence reports of how terrified the Soviet leadership were of a possible
NATO first strike that he deciced to open up a dialogue with the Soviets. For
most of the Cold War it was the _Soviets_ who were afraid of NATO - perhaps
justifiably so as I am not aware of any military leaders in the Warsaw Pact
who actively tried to start a nuclear war, which is not something we can say
about the West.

~~~
arethuza
The BBC drama "Threads" still scares me 25+ years after I first saw it:

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/>

One thing to note about this drama, where over 90% of the UK population are
eventually killed, is that it is based on an official exercise called Square
Leg that was generally regarded as being rather _optimistic_ , a real attack
by the Soviets would probably have been far worse:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Leg>

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genieyclo
Non blogspam original link: <http://moscow-walks.livejournal.com/918332.html>

It's not good when blogspam from englishrussia.com is on the HN frontpage for
hours.

~~~
jeroen
englishrussia.com has English text. Better than Russian text for most of us.

~~~
illicium
Unforunately, EnglishRussia is badly translated and sometimes editorialized.
Take the following line, for example: "The narrow corridor is curved so that a
shock wave won’t penetrate the inside of the building."

The original Russian is "Только одна из стен - полукруглая. Это неспроста,
стена является фрагментом стенки круглой шахты уходящей далеко под землю",
which directly translates to "one of the walls is curved, and for a good
reason: it's part of the round shaft that descends deep underground". No
mention of a shockwave.

~~~
gus_massa
There is some comment about the shockwave in photo 4:

4\. Узкий коридор входа имеет несколько поворотов, задача которых - погасить
ударную волну даже при открытых дверях и недопустить попадания внутрь
проникающей радиации. В "доме" всего 1 коридор, вот его план

I don’t know Russian, but with Google translation and a little of hand
editing:

4\. A narrow corridor the entrance has a few turns, whose main task is to
extinguish a shock wave even when the doors are open and disallow the
propagation of ionizing radiation.

They probably mix the captions of the photos creatively :).

Complete autotranslation:
[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmoscow-
walks.livejournal.com%2F918332.html)

------
fasouto
I spend one summer living in a bunker in Switzerland while I was working for
CERN. Despite de absence of windows it was a great experience :D

Some photos of the bunker
[http://picasaweb.google.com/102604524089774844957/Shelter?fe...](http://picasaweb.google.com/102604524089774844957/Shelter?feat=directlink)

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smacktoward
If you want to visit a similar facility in the US, there's one at the
Greenbrier resort in West Virginia:

<http://www.greenbrier.com/play-here/the-bunker.aspx>

The Greenbrier bunker was built in the late 1950s/early 1960s as the emergency
relocation point for the U.S. Congress in the event of a nuclear war. Its
existence was kept secret until 1992, when a Washington Post story revealed
it:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/local/daily/july/25/bri...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/local/daily/july/25/brier1.htm)

There are other similar facilities from the same era now known to the public,
like Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, Mount Weather in Virginia, and Raven Rock
("Site R") in Pennsylvania, but since those all still have some operational
role they offer less access to the public than the Greenbrier bunker (which
was decommissioned after the Post story) does.

~~~
avar
That's amazing. A facility with 1600 employees that needed untold resources to
construct is decommissioned as useless because the Washington Post writes an
article about it.

They're of course within their rights to do so, but it's sad to think that all
the work needed for the facility went to waste and its employees were laid off
just because someone wrote an article on it.

~~~
jarek
It's likely that, being 30 years old, it was outdated and replaced by a newer
secret structure anyway.

~~~
smacktoward
I would actually doubt that, myself. The costs of building those structures
were enormous, and by 1970 or so hydrogen bombs had become powerful enough and
ICBMs accurate enough that it was pretty much impossible to build something
that would survive a direct hit. Once that point is reached the only
protection that the site has is its secrecy, and it costs the enemy less to
hire spies and launch satellites than it does to build a new mountain. It's a
losing race.

Facilities like these are a remnant of the civil-defense mentality of the
1950s. When the weapons were Hiroshima-style atomic bombs and the guidance
systems were a guy 20,000 feet up looking down a bombsight, it was possible to
build buildings that could survive an attack. Once you have hydrogen bombs and
reasonably sophisticated inertial guidance systems, though, that possibility
evaporates.

~~~
arethuza
"impossible to build something that would survive a direct hit."

The Soviets had versions of the their enormous SS-18/R-36 missile with a
single 25Mt warhead - these were presumably aimed at hardened sites like NORAD
and Raven Rock:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_%28missile%29>

The thriller "Arc Light" has scenes describing what would have happened to
Cheyenne Mountain if it had been hit by multiple SS-18s:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_Light>

------
Swizec
How did they even build this thing? The house looks like it's from the 19th
century so it doesn't look like it was torn down and built again around the
bunker.

Did they hollow out an old building and put a bunker in there? How did nobody
notice?

How do you even build something 18 storeys deep without breaking the confines
of a two storey house with your equipment?

This thing opens up so many questions!

~~~
geuis
Remember that it opens, at one point, into the subway. Its just a supposition,
but I could imagine this thing being built during the construction of the
subway tunnel. It would be relatively easy to disguise all the equipment going
in and dirt coming out in the process.

Looking at the history of the Metro construction, the bunker construction
dates to roughly the time of the 4th stage of the Metro construction.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro>

Again, its a supposition and the address of the bunker would be needed to
compare to the location of the Metro built during the 4th stage.

~~~
eps
The timeframe is off. The bunker is in the vicinity of Taganskaya station (the
one on the "ring") which was opened in 1950. The bunker was built between '58
and '63 - so not only it was built much later, it also took much longer than a
typical subway construction project.

~~~
flexd
Still since there is access to the subway they could have moved stuff out
through the subway system at night?

~~~
eps
That's clever, but Moscow subway is open between 4:45am and 1:00am. That
doesn't seem to give much time to move out a lot of dirt, not quickly.

~~~
bdunbar
_That's clever, but Moscow subway is open between 4:45am and 1:00am_

Even back then? Even so, I bet the authorities could simply close the system
down early, close off stations as needed.

Still, I suspect the builders were not worried about subway patrons seeing
trainloads of excavated dirt.

They were worried about overhead satellites.

------
cstross
Here's the former Scottish wartime government command bunker, in Fife:
<http://www.secretbunker.co.uk/explore_the_bunker.asp>

Open for visitors -- I can highly recommend it as a day out (an hour's drive
from Edinburgh).

~~~
vilhelm_s
And there is one in Kelvedon Hatch outside London (accessible by underground +
town bus): <http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/>.

------
kia
There is a lot of this stuff under Moscow:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-2>

~~~
ffffruit
This is also mentioned in Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033_(book)> Amazing science fiction book.

------
X-Istence
I would really like someone to take one of these facilities and turn it into a
paintball play area/tournament. It would be a blast!

~~~
raquo
You can play strikeball in this one!

------
cbr
The blue flat panel displays in the first picture and farther down are
confusing. They're clearly not original, only a few years old. Perhaps the
museum people did some reconstruction? I wonder what else we're seeing is
reconstruction of what they thought a soviet bunker should look like.

~~~
gregschlom
Yes, those are LG monitors, and you can see a PC workstation under the desk.

Too bad they replaced whatever was there with those monitors

~~~
azov
"Whatever was there" was removed before the bunker was declassified.

As far as I understand from the original text (english translation on the
blogspam site is incomplete at best), the monitors were installed by the
company who now manages the bunker and are apparently used for simulation of
nuclear strike on NY, one of the exhibits in Cold War Museum.

~~~
slipperyp
Fascinating - one of the most interesting things to me is the characterization
of the US soldier on the picture translated (on englishrussia) as "If you
forgot where our borders start, we'll help you to land!"

Also the pictures toward the end which, if I'm not mistaken, might have been
used as maps and textures in Fallout 3...

------
crb
There is a similar facility in England, also now a museum-of-sorts of the cold
war: "the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker".

<http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvedon_Hatch_Secret_Nuclear_B...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvedon_Hatch_Secret_Nuclear_Bunker)

It's a fun visit, but probably a little less authentic than this museum, as it
was emptied when it was decommissioned, and it's been largely re-stocked with
surplus, based on what people who worked there said that it used to look like.

The local street signs are amusing:
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/halfbyte/2671279410/>

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click170
Oh oh! Put a datacenter in there!

~~~
nikcub
10 years ago during the dot com bubble there were tons of companies that
bought up old missile silo's and turned them into datacenters. I don't think
any of them survived.

~~~
kls
To my knowledge, Iron Mountain is still going very strong, there are a lot of
fortune 500's that use them. <http://www.ironmountain.com>

------
eps
The _via_ page gives the exact address - 5й Котельнический переулок, дом 11 -
and the first hit in Google is <http://bunker42.com/>

~~~
crb
"In the center of Moscow at 65 meters underground there is an unique object
which territory contains a perfectly equipped conference-hall, a _karaoke-bar_
and an interactive museum."

------
edwardog
The [Deifenbunker](<http://www.diefenbunker.ca/>) near Ottawa, Canada is a
similar declassified setup that’s well worth exploring.

Looking around the C&C rooms that had “X millions of casualties” on maps of
blast epicentres really makes you think about what living during the Cold War
must have felt like.

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unicodefreak
Lots of similar stuff here <http://lana-sator.livejournal.com/>

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abdulhaq
Halfway down there is a picture of a bookcase with a map of Russia next to it.
The map is oriented at 90 degrees to 'normal' and has Western Russia at the
top and Eastern Russia at the bottom.

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kabdib
NSFW ads at the bottom.

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tawman
General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!

