Hidden behind blue painted gates, a barbed wire fence and three steel doors – each 20 inches thick – the top secret facility, still used for secret Russian telecommunications today, is underneath a village in the Ural Mountains some 37 miles south of Ekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest city.
Built to withstand a nuclear strike from the West, all life support systems in the bunker were “autonomous” inside the bunker set up in 1966 to ensure the Kremlin could continue to function.
Some 230 were deployed at the facility in the Brezhnev era, constantly poised in case of emergencies threatening the Soviet Union’s existence.
Air collected from the outside goes through special filters to prevent contamination and the microclimate is kept at a maximum of 26C.
Valery Demenshin, a senior official with phone giant Rostelecom which now runs the bunker, said: “It all began at the height of Cold War.
“Several large communication nodes like this were built across USSR in the 1960s.”
He revealed the power of the subterranean facility.
He said: “You could also listen to practically every phone in the country from here.”
The purpose was to guard phone communications in the event of atomic attack or major catastrophe, as well as to pump out Communist propaganda broadcasts to the world.
Coding and decoding devices were installed in the complex sunk deep beneath the ground in Shchelkun village.
He said: “There were telephone wires used for passing information of state importance.
“Back in those times all information, including top secret, was passing through these wires.
“There was a coding devices at the entrance and a decoding device at the exit – connected with a copper wire.
“If you connected to such a wire and decoded the code, you could have gained access to all the secret conversations.
“Or you could simply explode such a place and in this case half of the country would have been cut off from communications – for a long time.”
From the outside, it is difficult but not impossible to spot that an underground town was located here, with halls, offices, and long corridors.
The exact underground dimensions and depth remains a state secret.
News agency 66.ru reported in revealing the bunker’s existence: “The seven hectares over which the telecom node is spread looks like grassy hills in summer, and a snowy field in winter.”
“Even so, ventilation shafts and air intakes here and there – as well as barbed wire – raise certain thoughts.
“Initially, there was one building on the ground and another underground which was a lot bigger, housing equipment for signal enhancement.
“By the end of the 1960s this equipment was used for propaganda radio broadcasts to foreign countries, but today they are museum exhibits.”
The report states that some Soviet-era equipment remains and is still used in for military communications.
Today major fibre optic data cables still pass through this Cold War relic.
The report claimed: “Nearly 80 per cent of all telecommunication channels that go to Siberia and the Russian Far East and 100 per cent of those carrying information to China and Taiwan pass through it.”
If a war or a global natural disaster occurred tomorrow, this facility would still play a key role in reconnecting Russia, said the report.