For my new book The Siberia Job, I go pretty deep into Russian research—but these are 5 places I couldn’t go. You won’t be able to go either. But, hey, think how cool it would be if we could.
1. The Buran Hangar
Technically this one’s in Kazakhstan, but it’s under Russian jurisdiction—first you have to go to the Kazakh town of Dermontobe, and walk about 20 miles north across the Kazakh desert, to reach the semi-abandoned outbuildings of the Baikonur Cosmodrome (Russia’s Cape Canaveral). They’re patrolled periodically by Russian State Security, but last year “Bald and Bankrupt” YouTuber Ben Rich succeeded in sneaking into the hangar which contains two mothballed Russian Space Shuttles. He was arrested on his way out and subsequently deported. But what a story!
2. The Kola Superdeep Borehole
On The Kola Peninsula, near Russia’s boarder with Norway, is a hole that the Soviet Union bored into the earth. It’s 9 inches in diameter, and 40,230 feet deep. It’s the deepest hole in the world, and the closest anyone’s ever gotten to seeing what’s on the other side of the Earth’s crust. The Kola Borehole made a lot of fascinating geological discoveries, but was abandoned because, around seven and a half miles under the earth’s surface, the rock was soft and malleable and so hot that it destroyed every drill bit that was thrown at it. These days, the opening of the deepest hole in the world is under a rusted cap in a partially collapsed, abandoned geophysics lab.
3. The Chemical Weapons Research Island in the Dry Aral Sea
The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest lake in the world, just east of the Caspian Sea (which is the largest), but thanks to the Stalin’s “Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature”, it’s spent the last 70 years evaporating, as the rivers that once fed it have been diverted for the irrigation of cotton fields. The name Aral Sea comes from an earlier Turkic name meaning Sea of Islands—there were roughly 1,100 islands in the Aral. Now most of them are hills in a salt-encrusted, highly-toxin-polluted wasteland—including Vozrozheniya Island, the home of the Aralsk-7 Biological Weapons facility, which was abandoned when the Soviet Union collapsed—along with casks of Anthrax and Bubonic Plague and other assorted nightmares.
4. The Kuril Islands
Here’s a fun fact: WW2 never officially ended, because the USSR and Japan never signed a peace treaty. Russia and Japan continue to dispute ownership of a chain of islands which connect Japan’s northern tip to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula; Russia invaded the islands the day the US dropped the second atomic bomb, and refused to return them afterward. The islands are at an important choke point leading into the Sea of Okhotsk, and are surrounded by rich fisheries, major mineral deposits, and possibly an oil field. Getting permission to visit the Kurils is difficult even if you’re a Russian citizen; for an American, at the moment, it’s impossible.
5. The Sevmash Shipyard
Just south of the Kola Peninsula, on the Arctic Sea, is the Sevmash shipyard. It’s the temporary-turned-permanent billet for a bunch of old Soviet nuclear submarines, including two Typhoon-class ICBM subs—the largest submarines ever built, truly remarkable pieces of engineering (and perhaps best known from the fictionalized version in The Hunt For Red October). They’re just sitting there at a disused jetty—you can see them on Google Earth. What I would give for a look inside!
Josh Haven is a novelist who has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard , and Jerusalem Post. THE SIBERIA JOB (Penzler Publishers) will be his fourth book and his second crime thriller. He also writes historical fiction as JH Gelernter published by Norton. Before writing novels, he worked in physics, on the dark matter problem, the lunar orbital velocity problem, and the formation of Saturn’s moon Hyperion. He began his career as a production intern at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
