I wonder where is Putin's bunker now? Is he alone in the country? Or is it all already in the past and everyone realized that the bunkers will not save anyone (given that most of the Soviet-era buildings are abandoned)? Or, on the contrary, are they building something super modern?
In the Republic of Belarus, in the Svisloch region, near the village of Khrustovo, there is an unusual artifact of the Soviet era. If you go deeper into the forest along one of the country roads, along which there are concrete blocks, sooner or later you will run into the remains of an army fence. It is behind it that one of the most secret (once) objects of the Cold War is located. This complex is called "Object 1161" and at one time was the command post of the organization of the Warsaw Pact in the Western theater of military operations.
See how it looked …
Two years ago. Grodno region, Svisloch region. Belovezhskaya Pushcha is nearby. The local road is crossed by a high-voltage line. A broken country road runs along it in the field. In some places on the road you come across the remains of concrete slabs. The power line ends with a small substation, and the road leads further into the forest. In the woods along the road, you can see the remains of the concrete fence, which used to fence off military camps. How many such plundered towns are there in the forests of Belarus! The road goes along the fence. Suddenly ahead, in the thick of a deserted forest, the gaze rests on a huge metal hangar. Its dimensions are striking: length - 200 meters, width - 50 meters, height - 24 meters.
In many places, the metal walls of the hangar have been disassembled. Through one such opening we drive inside. We find ourselves on an abandoned construction site between two concrete structures protruding from the ground, resembling huge washers. Two gantry cranes froze above them. An open elevator car stopped at one of the shafts leading into the depths. Around everything resembles a zone from "Stalker". The thickness of reinforced concrete is beyond doubt that this is a military structure. In such an empty huge hangar in the middle of a long-abandoned construction site, you feel uncomfortable.
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A temporary staircase leads down to one of the concrete washers. Illuminating the path with lanterns, trying to step along the edges of the rotten wooden steps, we go down. All floors are similar: reinforced concrete walls are painted with red primer, some offices, sometimes relatively spacious halls come across. Walking with a flashlight through monotonous corridors and rooms resembles an old computer shooting game with boring graphics. Sometimes you come across hermetic doors. The thresholds of the doorways are located at a half-meter height - communications should have passed under the raised floor. Remnants of water pumps and ventilation systems have been preserved in some places.
After examining one floor, we go down below. There is a room on each floor. The countdown is from the surface of the earth. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … I never went down so deep in Belarus. 6, 7 … I begin to experience psychological discomfort. Sometimes it seems that it becomes difficult to breathe due to the possible accumulation of toxic methane at depth, but in reality the air here is quite clean. From the 8th floor, "permafrost" begins - ice all around. Finally, the last, 9th floor. Here is the kingdom of eternal ice that does not melt even in the summer heat. Carefully begin the ascent back.
The official name of this building, "widely known in narrow circles", "Object 1161". This is probably the most grandiose underground structure in Belarus.
Construction of the "Object 1161" began back in 1985 as a protected command post of the Warsaw Pact countries.
Then in the Belarusian forests near Belovezhskaya Pushcha military officers-sailors appeared. It was they, who had experience in constructing shelters in the rocks for nuclear submarines in the Severomorsk region, who supervised the construction of the secret facility on the spot. The military unit of military builders was directly subordinate to Moscow.
The location was chosen near the western border of the USSR, in the forest. The nearest village is at least 5 km away. Nearby are the Svisloch and Volkovysk railway stations. Moreover, at that time there was a large army oil depot in Svisloch, where fuel for equipment was supplied via a pipeline from a giant army oil depot in Zhabinka. (These structures have now been completely looted.)
To make it impossible to see the object under construction from satellites, a building of a camouflage shelter was erected above it.
At the same time, the supply of a 110 kV power transmission line to the facility and the construction of a powerful substation began. Also, a military town was being built near the secret facility.
The secrecy regime was such that even the local authorities had no idea about the building under construction.
By the way, when this construction began, they began to build a tunnel under the English Channel in Western Europe. And the pits of both structures were made using the same technology - a round pit in diameter was reinforced from below with concrete slabs as it was dug into the depths. This technology allowed the construction to be carried out very compactly.
The protected command post is built in the form of two barrels that go to a depth of 45 meters. The diameter of the barrels is 35 meters. Each barrel has 9 floors. The barrels are connected by passages every three floors. The top of the barrels is protected by two three-meter layers of reinforced concrete, the space between which is filled with a soft filler to absorb the energy of the explosion when it hits the upper slab. This will not protect against a direct hit of an atomic weapon, but the structure will withstand a close atomic explosion. So, the floors of the structure can easily tolerate an offset of up to half a meter.
Along the perimeter of the command post there are 6 missile-like silos. Two of them are for retractable antennas. If a nearby atomic explosion sweeps away all the antennas on the surface, then new antenna masts will move out of these mines to a height of 40 meters. The rest of the mines are for the supply of communications and emergency exits of people. The main antenna field was to be built a few kilometers from the facility. Autonomous power supply to the command post was carried out from diesel generators. On the last ninth floor in one of the premises, according to the project, there was a morgue with a refrigerator.
One "barrel" was built as a living quarters, the second as a worker. Full autonomy of the facility, excluding air for diesel generators - a day.
The leadership of the USSR sought to build as many such command posts as possible so that the enemy did not know exactly where to direct the main blow. Similar structures are known in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Moldova. Some of these structures were built in the form of one "barrel".
The cost of the Belarusian underground structure was comparable to the cost of 32 standard four-entrance buildings. That is, a whole microdistrict.
One of the documents found in the bunker
The construction of the underground structure and residential buildings of the military camp had already been completed, the installation of communication and control systems began, and cables began to be laid to other objects, as came the end of 1991, when the USSR was completely destroyed nearby in Belovezhskaya Pushcha.
The fate of the secret object was sealed …
August 2009. Construction engineer Konstantin Kokhnovsky, who worked at this facility, acted as a tour guide through the bunker.
Nikolai Aksamit, deputy of the Supreme Soviet of Belarus of the 12th convocation from the city of Volkovysk, recalls how his childhood friend, civil engineer Konstantin Kokhnovsky, approached him in the spring with information that there is a very interesting and very expensive building in his district. Let's go look. The road led to a military town full of cable drums of various diameters. The largest drums with cable were 5 meters in diameter. Boxes with some kind of equipment were piled up next to the cables.
Since the collapse of the USSR, funding for the construction was stopped, and the Moscow command simply forgot about this military unit. A drunken ensign with several soldiers with an ax chopped a copper cable and immediately burned the insulation at the stake. In response to the remark of Nikolai Aksamit, who was in the rank of major and dressed in the appropriate uniform, the ensign, profusely inserting mat into his speech, suggested joining his occupation, saying that there is a lot of copper here - enough for the major.
But most of all, the deputy was struck by the soldiers, most of whom were from the Central Asian republics. The soldiers, who were forgotten by the command, were forced to dig dugouts in the forest and cook their own food on fires.
Almost finished residential buildings of a military town, an almost built gigantic underground command post, covered by a huge hangar, hundreds of reels of valuable cable, containers with expensive, modern equipment at that time. And among this - abandoned by the command, dirty, unshaven, in tattered uniforms, who survived the winter in dugouts, like partisans of the last war, soldiers who survived by being able to sell a piece of copper cable burned at the stake.
It soon turned out that many far from ordinary people were applying for object 1161. More precisely, the underground structure built in a deep forest was of little interest to them. Copper communication cables and other equipment were of value, for example, 2 diesel generators of 750 kW each, each of which would be enough to provide a good village with electricity. The equipment of the bunker was produced not only in the USSR, but also in the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and other countries of the Warsaw Pact.
By the time construction ceased, even “luxury items” such as carpets for generals' quarters had been brought there. Oddly enough, these "luxury items" turned out to be the greatest secret - Nikolai Aksamit, having received practically all the documentation on the property brought to the bunker at the request of a deputy, was unable to get a list of these very general household items. They were sold by the military in the first place. However, "luxury items" were a trifle compared to the rest of the property.
Quite a lot of influential contenders were found for expensive copper cables and other equipment. The most important of them is the leadership of the 15th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR, which oversaw the construction of all such facilities on the territory of the USSR, therefore, had detailed information about them, in contrast to the local authorities.
Since, according to an interstate agreement, this bunker became the property of Belarus, the leadership of the former 15th department of the KGB of the USSR had to "take in" some officials and military personnel of the newly independent Belarus.
One of the attempts to "privatize" this building was described in 1992 in the newspaper "Kommersant". Then a small firm "Vospak" was created, the founders of which were Kuzmichev, who taught scientific communism at one of the universities in Minsk, the son of the chairman of the Minsk City Executive Committee and other similar personalities. This company, for a symbolic amount, about a thousandth of the real value, acquired a gigantic structure, moreover, with all the imported property. Allegedly - under the storage of apples. And a symbolic amount for the purchase of the bunker was given - on very favorable terms - by a Moscow bank.
Very interesting, according to Nikolai Aksamit, was the behavior of the head of the Grodno region Dmitry Artimenya. At that time, there was no cellular communication in Belarus yet, but there was still a shortage of telephone cables. The head of the region responded not entirely censorship to the proposal of Nikolai Aksamit on the use of bunker cables for telephoning the Grodno region, advising Aksamit not to meddle in other people's business.
Another time, the military tried to secretly remove the valuables. In 1993, a convoy of about 30 army trucks came to the site with instructions from the acting chief of the General Staff of the Ministry of Defense of Belarus Ilyinov to remove security and ensure the loading of the remaining property.
Nikolai Aksamit then managed to obtain response measures from Mecheslav Grib, who headed the commission of the Supreme Council on Defense, and his representatives were forced from Minsk to get to the bunker by helicopter and stop the removal of property.
During the subsequent proceedings, General Ilyinov could not explain why he wanted to remove the property from the facility, referring only to the request of Nikolai Kostikov, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Belarus Vyacheslav Kebich.
Under the Supreme Council, a commission was created on this object, which, among others, included a military prosecutor. The deputies held several meetings on the property of the bunker.
Since information about the object and its contents became known to the top leadership of Belarus and the deputies of the Supreme Soviet, the Moscow claimants for this property had to retreat. In 1993, the final decision was made that the property of the object will remain in Belarus. And in the same year, the head of the Grodno region, Artimenya, was shot at his home. This crime has not yet been solved.
All valuable property was removed, and the hangar with an underground structure began to be guarded by non-departmental security forces. Gradually, local authorities dismantled the unnecessary concrete road. The slabs with which it was covered were in size remarkably suited to the ceilings of garages. The powerful equipment of the power transmission line substation was replaced with a simpler one, which is used to supply power to the surrounding villages.
Several watchmen, on duty in shifts in a small shed near the hangar, ensured the relative safety of the abandoned facility. Although there was almost nothing to plunder there. Sometimes the watchmen allowed the rare curious to wander around the abandoned command post. Then powerful searchlights were lit under the roof of the hangar without windows.
Although the protection was financed from the district budget, the leadership of the Svisloch district turned out to be unnecessary such a giant underground structure. But at low cost, the underground command post could become a tourist attraction not only of the region, but of the whole country. And how popular it could be today, when there is so much talk about the end of the world!
It can be assumed that there are interested people in the abandonment and further destruction of the object - those who are involved in the looting of the most protected structure in Belarus. For example, according to Nikolai Aksamit, Sergei Portsak, who at that time lived in Volkovysk and worked on the construction of the facility as the head of a special department with the rank of major, should know where the general's household items disappeared.
In the bunker, information was brought to the attention of the top leadership of Belarus at that time - Stanislav Shushkevich and Vyacheslav Kebich. Eduard Shirkovsky, the then KGB chairman, the former chief of the military counterintelligence Kez, the former chief of counterintelligence in the Grodno region, Yuri Perevalov, the former defense minister Pyotr Chaus, and the former Belarusian defense minister Anatoly Kostenko can tell a lot of interesting things about the bunker.
Another former head of the Ministry of Defense, Pavel Kozlovsky, told the author of this material back in 2006 about this bunker as an interesting abandoned facility that is worth seeing. But about the fate of the property brought into this bunker, Kozlovsky did not want to tell anything. Although it is known that the ex-minister more than once visited the secret facility specifically on property issues.
In 2009, under the pretext of a lack of funds, allegedly due to the economic crisis at the end of 2008, the regional authorities removed security from the facility. The spring thaw had hardly ended when the locals rushed here behind the sheet metal of the hangar walls. They came with a portable power generator, to which they connected a "grinder", and they cut off sheets of high-quality corrugated iron. Later, the iron was transported by tractors.
Those who destroyed the hangar reasoned logically: “Since the security has been recently eliminated, it means that the state does not need the facility. Do not waste the good. Moreover, the object did not have information about its ownership.
In general, this is a standard practice for the destruction of many properties. Security is removed first. The object is vigorously destroyed in the process of looting. Then, as a rule, an accident occurs at the plundered object - someone is killed or maimed. Most often they are curious teenagers or looters. Then the local authorities take measures - "in order to prevent accidents" the object is hastily destroyed.
The Belarusian military does not need this protected command post in such a place. “If we needed it, I wouldn't be in such a state,” the military explains.
An appeal to the chairman of the Writers' Union of Belarus Nikolai Cherginets, who is close to the one who can solve any issue in this country, helped to stop the looting - very quickly the object began to be guarded in turn by militiamen of the Svisloch and Volkovysk regions.
It is possible to use the underground structure as a storage, for example, a reserve stock of food and other vital items. The protected structure will withstand any natural and man-made disaster. It is rather difficult to destroy such an object without atomic weapons.
Better yet, use this unfinished command post as a tourist destination. Until recently, local residents often brought their children and grandchildren there: "Look, until they destroyed what they knew how to build during the USSR." Indeed, "independent" Belarus is unlikely to be able to build something similar now and in the foreseeable future.
Tourists constantly come to the nearby Belovezhskaya Pushcha. Many of them would be interested in visiting the underground structure, where one can feel the power of the once great empire of the USSR. To begin with, you can easily organize at least one excursion route through the underground facility by laying the appropriate flooring with lighting.
The director of the Belovezhskaya Pushcha nature reserve Nikolai Bambiza is in favor of reorganizing the abandoned command post into a tourist site. He is supported by the head of the historical and memorial complex "Stalin's Line", director of the charitable foundation for helping internationalist soldiers "Memory of Afgan" Alexander Metla.
In Belarus, as it turns out, nobody needs the most secure facility. It is easier to bury it than to repurpose.
In 2010-2011, the builders of the Volkovysk SMT-32 OJSC demolished the remains of the camouflage building above the bunker, concreted the entrances to it and covered them with earth, planting birch trees.