Was there a generalissimo's bunker near Yaroslavl?
This story began in the last century, when a pigsty was built near the village of Mikhailovskoye (now the village of Mikhailovsky) of the Nekrasovsky district of the Yaroslavl region. Built and built. The female workers then really liked the incomprehensible shaft, which runs vertically downward (as it turned out much later - the ventilation shaft). It was convenient to empty the buckets with the vital activity of pigs and pigs there: there was no need to take it anywhere, since such a "hole" is right in the pigsty.
Mysterious dungeon
And soon, not far from this structure, on the high bank of the Volga, they also discovered a deep adit. Having accidentally heard about strange mines, a former local geologist Valery Murashov became interested in the find and decided to explore them with volunteers. As they examined the adit, the enthusiasts noticed that the walls were lined with brickwork. And soon the excavations had to be interrupted altogether when a concrete slab blocked their way down.
Local residents of old people and old women told that in the 1930s there was a forbidden zone, the entrance to which was blocked by a "thorn" in several rows. As it turned out later, the convicts who had been transferred here from the Volga forced labor camp worked hard at the secret facility. And when most of the earthwork was completed, more experienced and qualified Moscow metro builders arrived in their place.
At one time, the territory above the bunker was examined by journalists who came here - correspondents of a local newspaper. One of them, Vyacheslav Yurasov, told me in a conversation with me that their guide through the once secret territory was an employee of the Krasny Kholm sanatorium, on the territory of which (or rather, under it), in fact, the bunker is located. Nurse Zinaida Grigorievna Prokazova showed reporters what was left of the underground shelter. According to her, the entrances to it were subsequently blown up. The researchers saw the funnels covered with earth and the heads left here and there - ventilation shafts that go out.
Zinaida Grigorievna's mother-in-law, Maria Arsentievna, together with her husband, Alexander Alexandrovich, worked during the war at this secret facility: she was a laundress, and he was a mechanic-repairman. That is why their teenage son, the husband of Prokazova, Leonid Aleksandrovich, was always allowed into the bunker.
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According to his recollections, everything inside was trimmed with gray mirrored marble, powerful columns were striking in their monumentality. And footsteps were inaudible because of the soft red carpets that ran along a long corridor to a large, well-lit hall. It was he who later showed his wife the entrances to the dungeon littered with earth, as well as the heads - concrete ventilation pipes going out. Leonid Aleksandrovich also told his wife that he saw how the furniture brought in large green boxes, intended for the interior decoration of the bunker, was unloaded.
A small plane flew right at us from the Volga bank
Boris Belugin, who was born back in 1929, left one more testimony. The pensioner recalled how once he and his friend Yevgeny Chablin, while still boys, went on the Volga in the early morning for a fishing trip to the area of Lopatinskaya dacha. It was not yet dawn, but the banks were clearly visible. And suddenly, according to him, a small plane flew out of the cliff from the side of the "Red Hill" right at them. Moreover, he almost touched the boat in which the young fishermen were sitting. The guys even thought that he was about to fall, catching on tops of trees on the opposite bank of the Volga. Boris Fedorovich drew in detail a diagram on which he depicted the boat and the place from which the plane took off.
Incidentally, this confirms the testimony of some old-timers that a small, well-camouflaged water channel was pierced directly to the bunker from the Volga, through which the soil removed during construction was taken out at night. Maybe the plane that appeared as if out of nowhere was a seaplane? Neither the first nor the second was supposed to know, much less to chat. And on the instructions of adults, the boys quickly "forgot" about what they saw with their own eyes.
Nevertheless, the former director of the Krasny Kholm sanatorium, Aleksey Burtsev, having familiarized himself with Belugin's scheme in detail, confirmed with an absolutely serious air that everything in the drawing coincides to the smallest detail with what actually takes place. Even the direction that Boris Fedorovich depicted in the form of a dotted line, most likely points to the place where one should, if necessary, look for the generalissimo's underground shelter.
Following another version and the testimony of eyewitnesses from among the same old-timers, the soil taken out of the thickness of the bunker under construction was taken out under cover of night by trolleys along a narrow-gauge railway laid along a horizontal shaft directly to the pier, where the earth was unloaded onto a barge and transported to the Uglich region, where until now you can see hills of unknown origin along the banks of the Volga.
Underground airfield
By the way, as far as the plane is concerned, there is also a quite plausible version in the form of memories of Valery Alexandrovich Morozov, who, along with his peers, was a frequent guest at the Rest House (sanatorium "Krasny Holm"), where the hospital was located during the war. The teenagers not only listened to the stories of the wounded, but also communicated with the girls who were there as air defense observers. Ignoring the boys, the girls called the attendant of the underground airfield to inform about the approaching German bombers. And at the same time they chatted with familiar pilot officers, making arrangements for meetings in the village where the girls were quartered. Valery Alexandrovich himself saw these pilots - with some of them he even managed to talk.
This is the airfield from which Soviet fighters or small communications planes could take off, one of which, quite possibly, Belugin and Chablin saw as teenagers. Meanwhile, according to Morozov, despite the testimony of some old-timers about the blowing up of the entrances to the bunker, already in the post-war years, the hum of a working diesel engine was heard from time to time from under the ground, and a barely noticeable smoke rose to the sky from the ventilation heads. But this is not a madman's delirium: together with him, these noises and smoke were heard and observed by at least two more people - his sister, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, and her son (Morozov's nephew) Pyotr Fedorovich.
There is even evidence of the functioning of the secret facility in the later Soviet era. For example, in a confidential conversation with me, one of the officials of the administration of the Nekrasovsky rural settlement (Mikhailovsky village) said that there was once a post with special communications, where KGB officers were on duty, a communications operator was sitting, and so on. True, the head of the settlement administration Leonid Borisovich Pochekailo, for example, believes that information about the bunker should be treated with caution.
The fact is that nearby, according to him, during the war there was a reconnaissance school, from which scouts were sent to the rear of the Germans. “Can you imagine if any of them fell into the hands of the Nazis and could not stand the torture by the Gestapo! If such unfavorable circumstances developed, he could have leaked information about the bunker to the Germans. So think for yourself - could such a classified object be built next to the intelligence school,”sums up Leonid Borisovich.
However, there is no smoke without fire. According to eyewitnesses of those events, the construction of the bunker, which began in the thirties, was accelerated some time after the start of the war. This "acceleration" happened, as it became clear from the declassified documents, according to the decree of the State Defense Committee (State Defense Committee) No. 945 of November 22, 1941, signed by the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. By the way, Yaroslavl was not in the last place in the list of "spare" cities to which the Headquarters was supposed to be transferred (as it would be fair in accordance with the Russian alphabet), but in the first. And as far as we know, in those years there were no trifles in such cases (and lists). This means that this issue was really considered at the highest level.
Vitaly Karyukov