Фонд «Тайна» · Дело № 5 · Объекты

Beneath Soviet cities lay command posts, submarine pens, shelters and document vaults, known only by numbers and hidden even from the people living above them.

Contents
Command bunkers, underground bases, metros, archives
Period
1941–present

Objects, not places

In Soviet usage a secret site was an object, an объект, and it was usually known by a number rather than a name. The submarine base at Balaklava was Object 825 GTS.[6] The command post under Moscow’s Taganka district went through the designations An‑02, FS‑293, FS‑572 and GO‑42.[3] The number told outsiders nothing, which was the point.

Many of these objects have since been declassified and turned into museums. Others have never been officially acknowledged at all.

At a glance

ObjectWhat it wasStatus
Stalin’s bunker, SamaraReserve wartime headquarters, 1942Declassified 1990[1]Museum
GO-42, TagankaReserve command post, 1950sDeclassified 2006[3][5]Museum
Object 825 GTSUnderground submarine base, BalaklavaIn service until 1993[8]Museum
Bunker-703Foreign Ministry document vaultDeclassified 2018[18]Museum
Metro-2 (D-6)Secret government metro under Moscow[16]Unacknowledged

Command bunkers

In 1942, with Kuybyshev chosen as the wartime reserve capital, a reserve headquarters for Stalin was dug 37 metres beneath the Communist Party building in Kuybyshev, today’s Samara.[1] Moscow metro tunnellers and Donbas miners built it, copying the design of a metro station.[1] Foreign embassies stood nearby, yet according to the museum’s curator nobody noticed the construction.[2] Stalin never used it; he stayed in Moscow throughout the war.[2] The bunker stayed a state secret until it was declassified in 1990.[1][2]

In Moscow itself, a command post was built 65 metres under the Taganka district, covering some 7,000 square metres.[3] It was built between 1952 and 1956, and most people living above it had no idea tunnels were being dug under their buildings.[4] It stayed classified until 2006, when it opened as the Bunker-42 Cold War museum.[5]

A submarine base inside a mountain

Under Mount Tavros at Balaklava in Crimea, the Soviet navy hollowed out a base for Whiskey- and Romeo-class submarines, with a central water channel 602 metres long.[6] It was built to survive a direct hit from a 100-kiloton nuclear bomb.[7] Construction ran from 1957 to 1961, and the excavated rock was carried away at night on barges and dumped at sea.[8]

The town around it was closed: even relatives of the workers needed paperwork for a short visit.[9] By one account, Balaklava was removed from official maps once construction began.[10] The base worked until 1993, the last submarine left in 1996, and Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence opened it as a museum in 2003.[8]

Metros built for war

Soviet metros were designed as shelters as well as transport. Moscow’s system was engineered against nuclear attack, with reinforced tunnels and blast doors that can seal a station against pressure and fallout.[11] Arbatskaya was built large and deep precisely because it was meant to serve as a bomb shelter,[13] and Park Pobedy lies 84 metres down, the deepest station in Moscow.[12]

Kyiv’s metro was built the same way, with stations designed to double as shelters against an attack from NATO.[14] Arsenalna, at 105.5 metres, is one of the deepest stations in the world.[15] In 2022 the stations were used exactly as designed, but against a different enemy: on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s underground stations sheltered around 40,000 people.[14] The head of the Kyiv metro said the system had always had two functions, transport and civil defence.[14]

Beneath the public metro in Moscow is said to lie a second one. Metro-2, also called D-6, is the informal name for a deep network believed to link government sites, and it has never been officially acknowledged.[16] Russian journalists report that neither the security service nor the Moscow Metro will confirm or deny it.[16] Its best-known documentation came from outside Russia: a 1991 US Defense Department report, Military Forces in Transition, which devoted several pages to a secret government underground in Moscow.[17]

Archives underground

The Soviet state protected its papers as carefully as its leaders. Bunker-703, 43 metres under central Moscow near Paveletskaya station, held the special archive of the Soviet Foreign Ministry.[18][20] It was designed by Moscow metro engineers in the late 1940s, and until 2018 it appeared on the city map as an ordinary building.[19] For more than half a century it stored state documents, by different accounts between 120 and 200 tonnes of them,[20][23] including the reserve copies of the papers defining the country’s borders and diplomatic relations.[22]

Hermetic doors and automatic valves were meant to seal the archive completely in a nuclear strike, and a whole room of equipment kept the documents at 18°C and about 50% humidity.[21] It was not war but water that ended its career: the bunker was declassified in 2018 after leaks, and the ministry quietly moved the documents .[23]

Sources

  1. “Stalin’s bunker, Samara.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
  2. “Secret for 50 Years, Stalin’s Wartime Bunker Is Now a Tourist Stop.” The Christian Science Monitor, 9 September 1993. www.csmonitor.com
  3. “Tagansky Protected Command Point.” Military History Wiki. military-history.fandom.com
  4. “Soviet bunker 42 on Taganka.” Bridge to Moscow. bridgetomoscow.com
  5. “Bunker-42 Cold War Museum at Taganka.” Tripadvisor (attraction description). www.tripadvisor.com
  6. “Naval museum complex Balaklava.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
  7. “Naval museum complex Balaklava.” Military History Wiki. military-history.fandom.com
  8. “The Naval Museum Complex in Balaklava, Crimea.” The Vintage News, 17 March 2016. www.thevintagenews.com
  9. “Object 825: A secret Soviet nuclear submarine base.” Abandoned Spaces. www.abandonedspaces.com
  10. “Balaklava Submarine Base, Crimea’s Secret Soviet Sub Complex.” Dark Tourists. darktourists.com
  11. “Moscow Is Ready for a Nuclear War (As in Lots of Bunkers for the Population).” The National Interest. nationalinterest.org
  12. “Park Pobedy (Moscow Metro).” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
  13. “Arbatskaya (Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line).” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
  14. “Kyiv’s Metro Is a Symbol of the City’s Resilience.” Foreign Policy, 12 November 2022. foreignpolicy.com
  15. “Fallout shelter.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
  16. “Metro-2.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
  17. “Metro-2.” Wikiwand. www.wikiwand.com
  18. Бункер 703 (official museum site). bunker703.ru
  19. “Бункер-703 в Москве — экскурсии в секретный спецархив МИД СССР.” Putevka.com. www.putevka.com
  20. “Бункер-703 МИД СССР в Москве.” Moskultura. moskultura.ru
  21. “Бункер-703.” Ya Moscow. yamoscow.ru
  22. “Бункер-703. Защищенное хранилище особо важных документов Министерства иностранных дел.” Drugie Mesta, 2022. dmesta.com
  23. “Бункер Сталина и секретная библиотека МИДа: вся правда о подземных сооружениях.” Komsomolskaya Pravda. www.kp.ru