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Declassified Bunker of the USSR
- fasouto 15y agoI 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?feat=directlink http://picasaweb.google.com/102604524089774844957/Shelter?fe...
- kia 15y agoThere is a lot of this stuff under Moscow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-2
- ffffruit 15y agoThis is also mentioned in Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033_(book) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033_(book) Amazing science fiction book.
- gbog 15y agoSame under Beijing. There is a parking done in an old military zone, the doors are 50cm thick and the height seem to allow tanks go. Its is said there are many such tunnels under. They feared Russians, in fact. I wonder why they don't open them to cars or build the subway there.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- joska 15y agoJust wonder if the Russian engineers are building structures like these in the Middle East. There were rumours the Saudies had build a whole city underground. It's also known many Russian engineers work on the Iranian nuclear projects... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Saudi_Arabia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Saudi_Arabia
- click170 15y agoOh oh! Put a datacenter in there!
- nikcub 15y ago10 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.
- mkuhn 15y agoQuite a few that store data and operate servers in old Swiss Bunkers did. See e.g. http://www.swissfortknox.com/ http://www.swissfortknox.com/
- kls 15y agoTo my knowledge, Iron Mountain is still going very strong, there are a lot of fortune 500's that use them. http://www.ironmountain.com http://www.ironmountain.com
- justincormack 15y agoAnd the bunker datacentre in the UK http://www.thebunker.net/ http://www.thebunker.net/
- Swizec 15y agoHow 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 15y agoRemember 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 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 15y agoThe 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.
- kabdib 15y agoNSFW ads at the bottom.
- adriand 15y agoI 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 15y agoArguably 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 15y ago"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.
- eps 15y agoThe via page gives the exact address - 5й Котельнический переулок, дом 11 - and the first hit in Google is http://bunker42.com/ http://bunker42.com/
- crb 15y ago"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."
- crb 15y agoThere 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://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvedon_Hatch_Secret_Nuclear_Bunker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvedon_Hatch_Secret_Nuclear_B... 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/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/halfbyte/2671279410/
- cbr 15y agoThe 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 15y agoYes, 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 15y ago"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 15y agoFascinating - 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...
- tawman 15y agoGeneral "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!
- genieyclo 15y agoNon blogspam original link: http://moscow-walks.livejournal.com/918332.html http://moscow-walks.livejournal.com/918332.html It's not good when blogspam from englishrussia.com is on the HN frontpage for hours.
- jeroen 15y agoenglishrussia.com has English text. Better than Russian text for most of us.
- sosuke 15y agoIt would be nice if they linked to their sources without passing it through what looks like a stumbleupon type service. In this case they link to http://2leep.com/bar.php?url=http://moscow-walks.livejournal.com/918332.html http://2leep.com/bar.php?url=http://moscow-walks.livejournal... as the source.
- gcb 15y agoi barely saw english on that page.
- illicium 15y agoUnforunately, 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 15y agoThere 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&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmoscow-walks.livejournal.com%2F918332.html http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...
- smacktoward 15y agoIf 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 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/brier1.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/july/25/bri... 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 15y agoThat'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 15y agoIt's likely that, being 30 years old, it was outdated and replaced by a newer secret structure anyway.
- gwern 15y agoLike the OP article speculates that structure was.
- smacktoward 15y agoI 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.
- cstross 15y agoHere's the former Scottish wartime government command bunker, in Fife: http://www.secretbunker.co.uk/explore_the_bunker.asp 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 15y agoAnd there is one in Kelvedon Hatch outside London (accessible by underground + town bus): http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/ http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/.
- unicodefreak 15y agoLots of similar stuff here http://lana-sator.livejournal.com/ http://lana-sator.livejournal.com/
- edwardog 15y agoThe [Deifenbunker](http://www.diefenbunker.ca/ 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.
- X-Istence 15y agoI 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 15y agoYou can play strikeball in this one!
- abdulhaq 15y agoHalfway 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.