The Wandering Scot

Urals to the Front in Victory Park (53.407248,58.992398) is a giant WWII monument showing a steelworker handing an enormous sword to a Soviet soldier. The monument is on the European bank of the Ural River and provides a good view over to the Steelworks on the Asian side.

The Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Kombine Museum at Pushkin Prospkt 19 (53.394086,59.061326) (8-12 + 1-5) covers the history of the plant construction, its WWII contributions, and its more modern history. There are some small dioramas and a giant scale model of today’s steelworks. But pride of place is taken by several large models of the latest ultra-modern sections of the plant, with animated equipment and with moving lights or metal foil representing moving steel.

The fine Local Lore Museum at Ul. Soviet Army 51-A (53.392004,58.988903) is dedicated to the city’s history, from the Kazakh and Tsarist periods, through the crash industrialization era, and into the Soviet glory years. This includes a fine selection of Soviet posters exhorting steelworkers to new heroism.

There is also a small City History Museum at Ul. Soviet 145/3 (53.39584,58.963577) but that is mostly a subset of the MMK and Local Lore museums and can be skipped.

Two smaller monuments are the Tent Monument at 53.426009, 58.997673 commemorating the incredibly harsh initial living conditions in tents on the frozen steppes; and a Socialist Realism statue of a Heroic Steelworker at 53.437145, 58.981434, in front of the train station.

There is a hilltop viewpoint at 53.385607, 59.055632 at the south end of Ul. Kirova, which provides good vistas over the factory area.

The symbolic Factory Gates at 53.41524,59.05416 feature a blackened but resolute Lenin fronting a series of bas-reliefs of striving steelworkers.  The statue of Stalin used to stand here.

Practicalities: I stayed at the very pleasant Hotel Laguna at 9 Ul. Naberegnaya, which includes an indoor water park and a good sushi restaurant. I’d recommend Coffee House at 37 Pr. Lenina as a relaxing place to gorge on lattes, cakes and muffins.

The main tunnels provided 7000 sq meters of space, 65 meters under Moscow’s Taganskaya Hill. You enter through a fake building on the surface, which provides four meters of protective concrete around the bunker entrance. The deep tunnels are further shielded with a meter of concrete and four inches of steel. It was built in the 1950s and was an active Soviet nuclear-era installation, functioning as a hardened command and communication center for the Moscow military leadership. A prototype of the bunker design was tested at Semipalatinsk and after various domestic animals inside survived a large nearby nuclear blast, the design was approved for Moscow.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the bunker was kept on high alert with 650 military staff in full lock-down for ten days. Ten days that might have changed the world…

The tour starts by descending the 288 stairs from the entrance to the main bunker core. Then we watched a short introductory film, explaining the nuclear arms race from a Russian/Soviet perspective and describing the motivation for the bunker. It was very interesting to hear that alternative perspective, where the Soviet Union is at risk, but the Cuban Missile Crisis still a potential catastrophe for both sides. It was also interesting to hear our guide’s overtly pro-Soviet perspective, including such phrases as “… until our country was destroyed in 1991 …”.

The bunker occupies four giant tunnels, which are cross-linked and also have service connections into the Moscow Metro system. In most places the tunnels are split into two stories, but there are occasional full double-height sections. Unlike the Stalin bunker, this feels like a real hardened war bunker, full of steel and concrete. It’s great!

The canteen and living areas have been converted into a modern restaurant and conference center for special events.  (The perfect place for a wedding!)

As part of the museum, they have a pair of missile silo control panels, imported from a real Soviet ICBM site. Once again I managed to get one of the command chairs as we simulated a launch. The procedure is a little more complicated than at the Titan silo. We had to each simultaneously turn a control key, then enter the launch codes, then each of us simultaneously push a button and turn a key. Unlike the Titan silo, the Soviet crews had the launch codes in a safe and could in theory launch independently. It was fascinating to emulate a Soviet launch, though a little less spooky than doing it in a real missile silo.