KANE & CO EYE LIFT-OFF IN RUSSIA’S SPACE CAPITAL
THE brown door has no handle and is so anonymous that even now visitors miss it and have to be directed back up the side street. the locals thought for years that it was the back entrance to a nondescript tenement block. It was in 1991 that they learned it was a nuclear bunker, built as Joseph Stalin’s last refuge.
Rarely has the bunker known a week like this one. Mexicans and Brazilians were queuing down the street on Monday and there will be English and Swedes at the door this weekend as Samara — a former ‘closed’ city, designated Russia’s capital in 1941 when Moscow was under threat by Germany — tries to make a tourist industry out of its communist past.
the bunker reveals the extraordinary work undertaken to ensure that Stalin would be comfortable during a nuclear meltdown, or Hitler’s annexation of Russia.
Bunkers built for Churchill, Roosevelt and Hitler were all 20m or so below ground. Stalin’s was double that. the complex, 192 steps down, included fake windows with curtains drawn to make him feel at home. there are high ceiling arches to make it feel spacious, a lift and an exact replica of his office at the Kremlin. With Stalin, you attended to the small details or paid with your life.
the big mystery is whether the man in question ever actually went down into the place. tour guide Natalya Vavilova says not. But that won’t be holding anyone back as the host city — which had no tourist attraction of any description as recently as 2006 — tries to persuade foreigners to visit. It sorely needs them, given that on average only 60 people visit the bunker each week.
there are considerably more at another place where Stalin’s presence is felt: the Space Museum across town which reveals Samara’s role at the centre of Russia’s attempt to put a man on the moon and enabled Yuri Gagarin to reach outer space in 1961. It is still the country’s space capital.
Naturally, there’s huge local pride in Gagarin and his Sputnik craft. But the irreverence with which they tell the space race story is impressive — and not in keeping with the popular view of the nation’s people.
‘Yes, Gagarin probably did take tots of vodka into outer space with him,’ says guide Elena Kuzina. ‘ this is the symbol of the Russian man!’
He orbited the Earth in a rocket originally used to spy on the West. ‘They just took the cameras out and put him in,’ Ms Kuzina adds.
Russia has Stalin to thank for competing in the space race, she insists. ‘He managed to motivate the country,’ she says. ‘He went to Germany after the war and took documents which helped our scientists to develop our rockets.’
There’s a moral ambiguity, here. Stalin was responsible for the death of an estimated 15 million Russians during his campaign of terror against those he thought opposed him. The de- Stalinisation process which followed his death in 1953 was recognition of the brutality. Yet as Russia has struggled with state corruption, huge inequalities of wealth and a lack of national identity, some sentimentalise him now. His portrait hangs in some hotels again.
Translator Leyli Miftakhova insists Stalin was a force for good, even though he expelled her great grandfather, a Samara Muslim leader, to Tayshet, Siberia, for 10 years. ‘It is the way it was. There was a war on and they did these things. We have to be tolerant of our past,’ she says.
Samara doesn’t seem too worried about any moral dilemmas behind its tourism. It’s arguably done more than any other host city to make its place appeal to visiting fans.
England supporters will find a large part of the old town entirely closed to traffic, allowing them to stroll through the wide avenues lined by wooden and art nouveau buildings.
It won’t be easy getting the place on the tourist map. It’s remote — 650 miles east from Moscow.
But Anton Belyayev, front man for the popular Russian indie band Therr Maitz, tells
Sportsmail that the longerterm benefits of the country hosting the World Cup are more deep-rooted than individual tourism attractions.
‘The World Cup is vital to show that we (in Russia) can communicate,’ he says. ‘It can break stereotypes (about us). We are ordinary people, too.’
The Space Museum certainly reflects that. There’s a humanity about the Gagarin story it tells.
He feared for his life when he re-entered the earth’s atmosphere and saw flames out of his rocket window. And he liked to eat cottage cheese with jam while up there.
‘You talk about politics,’ says Ms Kuzina. ‘But it’s about humanity, really. Yuri Gagarin was funny, brave, afraid sometimes. He was human. He did incredible things.’