It is hailed as the creation of a forcibly exiled German genius banished to Siberia by Stalin during the Second World War.
Gustav Backmann and other exiled labourers – women as well as men – spent years digging through the rock-solid permafrost soil in Novy Port to build a vast natural freezer.
Its purpose was to store mountains of Arctic fish before processing and export to Europe.
The 75,000 square feet of tunnels and chambers maintain a constant temperature of -12C to -14C all year round.
THE SIBERIAN TIMES
Exiled labourers built a vast permafrost facility in Siberia
Under Backmann’s watchful eye, day and night shifts of 15 to 20 men carved spacious horizontal shafts in permafrost soil as tough as rock,
Still in use, it remains the world’s largest permafrost storage facility built by manual labour.
Tunnels in the complex – with permafrost walls, floors and ceilings – are up to 460 ft long.
Backmann, then 30, was exiled along with other ethnic Germans during the Siege of Leningrad amid fears they would side with the Nazis aiming to storm the city.
From a well-to-do German family under the tsars, he was set to work first as an ordinary worker in a fish plant but later his brains were deployed by the communists as the architect and chief builder of this vast subterranean ice palace in the 1950s.
But now his creation – shown in these remarkable pictures – is in danger of collapse due in part to the warming Arctic arctic waters which are eroding the entrances.
Funds to save it are now “urgent” as some passageways are collapsing but the cash strapped regional authorities in northern Siberia have no spare money even though the labyrinth is listed as a regional monument.
Local TV Vesti Yamal has warned that the icy warren at the mouth of the Ob River – the seventh longest – “will either be washed away, or it’ll melt.
“The unique permafrost storage … is on the verge of destruction.”
THE SIBERIAN TIMES
The permafrost natural freezer is the largest of its kind on the planet
THE SIBERIAN TIMES
Novy Port is in the bowels of Siberia, which is why Backmann was banished there
Local officials have vowed for a decade that funds would be found to save the local monument but local cash-strapped budgets can afford no more than annual cleaning of the tunnels.
Under Backmann’s “watchful eye, day and night shifts of 15 to 20 men carved spacious horizontal shafts in permafrost soil as tough as rock,” reported The Siberian Times, highlighting the plight of the manmade cave complex.
“Ice picks went blunt from constantly hammering the hard permafrost.”
Local historian Andrey Ogorodnikov explained: “People worked in three shifts and spent ten years pecking through permafrost.
“Everyone was involved, women and men alike.”
The Siberian Times
Exiled german Gustav Backmann led the massive engineering work
The work was completed in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death.
Antonina Teymi, a fish processing specialist, said: “The average temperature inside is about -12C.
“Fish is kept here in a perfect condition.”
Backmann’s father Jullius had been a glass factory owner, and also a noted entomologist.
THE SIBERIAN TIMES
The tunnels, in Novy Port, are now at risk of thawing
After the Russian Revolution, he was assigned to work in the Zoological Museum in Leningrad where his collection of insects was stored.
His widow, two sons and daughter Margit were all exiled to Siberia because of their German ethnicity.
Margit was a hydro biologist working at Lake Baikal.
In 1967, Gustav Backmann was finally permitted to leave the Arctic and went to live in Kherson, Ukraine.