GUSP’s low profile has not, however, deterred public interest in Moscow’s secret underground. Since the early 1990s unauthorized exploration of passages was popularized by the group Diggers of the Underground Planet, a loose collection of subterranean explorers formed by Vadim Mikhailov. A tall man with a pale, pockmarked face, Mikhailov began his underground adventure at an early age: His father, a train driver for the Moscow metro, would often take him into the operator’s cabin. When he was 12, Mikhailov and some friends undertook their first journeys into the sprawling mass of tunnels, sewer systems, and natural passages beneath Moscow. It wasn’t long before they made their first major discovery: a Stalin-era underground bunker deep below Leningradsky Prospect.
In the mid-1990s Mikhailov was an international media celebrity. He had become an underground guide whose signature tours ended with his emergence through a tunnel into prominent Moscow locations such as the center of Red Square.
The first disclosures of the underground system by the Russian press came after the Soviet collapse, in the newspaper
Argumenti I Fakti
. The 1992 article prompted a stream of stories about the secret metro underneath Moscow, and overnight Mikhailov found himself the only available expert.
But his group’s activity was not limited to comments and interviews. Soon after the secret underground was revealed, Mikhailov started a campaign against the city government for allowing historically significant city sites to be disturbed by construction projects and for failing to properly maintain the water mains below many of the city’s aging buildings. Mikhailov warned the authorities that many of the buildings, like the famed Durov Animal Theater, which suffered severe structural damage when pipes burst under it, were in danger of collapse.
In 1998 the Moscow authorities started to retaliate: Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, irritated by Mikhailov’s prodding, ordered that the security of underground communications be improved, noting, “The penetration of these underground constructions by extraneous persons, including the so-called Diggers of the Underground Planet, has caused cables to be plundered, and arson attacks to take place. The mass media quite often publish unverified data, causing an unhealthy degree of public agitation.”
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The edict of the mayor stipulated the creation of groups to guard the entries to Moscow’s underground.
Despite his adversarial relationship with Moscow’s authorities, Mikhailov was often called upon when situations required his expertise. The Diggers helped the authorities in a successful manhunt for three convicted murderers who dug their way out of Butyrka Prison, and Mikhailov’s team assisted in the rescue following the 1999 apartment bombings.
But the authorities increased their harassment. In June 2000 Irina Borogan was preparing a story about Moscow State University’s underground for the newspaper
Izvestia
. She was accompanied by Mikhailov beneath the university’s main building on Sparrow Hills in the southwest of Moscow. The building, one of seven huge tiered neoclassical towers built in the Stalin era, was finished in 1953. The central tower is 240 meters tall, 36 stories high, and flanked by four huge wings of student and faculty accommodation. It is said to contain a total of 33 kilometers of corridors and 5,000 rooms. But its most impressive feature is the multilevel labyrinth that lies beneath the building, designed to shelter thousands of teachers and students should a nuclear attack ever occur.
Borogan and Mikhailov climbed down through a fountain near the main entrance to the university, via a ventilation shaft. A number of corridors spread out in all directions. Some of them, Borogan noted, were more than five meters high. According to the Diggers, there is an entrance to the secret metro D-6 in the third level of the bunker. As far as is known, it is the entrance to the D-6’s first line, which was built in the 1950s, and which led from the Kremlin to the government airport Vnukovo-2 via the Russian State (Lenin) Library, past the underground town in Ramenki, Moscow State University, and the Academy of the General Staff. (D-6 was designed to save the Kremlin’s inhabitants in case of attack.)
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Mikhailov admitted to Borogan that his unauthorized visits to areas so close to the most sensitive underground facilities in Russia meant that he was subject to constant pressure from the secret services. Mikhailov told Borogan that the Federal Protective Service, responsible for the safety of the president, had become his main persecutor. He was often detained, interrogated, and threatened with prison terms for his illegal penetration of the secret underground.
Seeking protection, Mikhailov appealed to the Ministry of Emergency Situations, hoping it could shield him from the pressure. In July 2000 it was officially announced that the Diggers movement would be given the status of an associated organization of the ministry. But in the end, the ministry failed to fulfill its promises. Mikhailov found himself in an uneasy position when he was forced to establish unofficial contacts with the secret services in order to guarantee his own security. As a result, since 2000 Mikhailov has almost ceased to accompany foreign journalists to sensitive areas and has refused to make comments about underground, supposedly secret facilities.
In October 2002 Mikhailov’s group was called upon by the FSB during the Nord-Ost hostage crisis. The Diggers helped the antiterrorist Alpha unit to enter the Dubrovka Theater, which had been captured by Chechen terrorists, through the sewage system. Mikhailov later said he was fascinated by the opportunity to work with the secret services. After the crisis ended, Mikhailov told
Izvestia
: “It would be surprising if for twenty-five years of existence, the Diggers movement were not scrutinized by the FSB. It is absolutely correct. Such control over activity near confidential sites is necessary.”
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Mikhailov accused other diggers, not in his group, of conducting “absolutely illegal activity in the city’s systems: They seize state objects, they damage them. . . . These people reveal, first, a lot of false and twisted information about those vaults. And second, there are things that must not be removed because they concern national security. If we’ve been there, we never leak it to the press or on the Internet.”
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By securing the loyalty of Mikhailov’s group, the secret services had eliminated the only possible way that outside activists had of monitoring their underground activity. Soon afterward GUSP and the FSB put pressure on the press. In May 2002 Soldatov published a story in the weekly
Versiya
about the construction of residential apartment complexes on the premises of former FSB special facilities.
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The story was illustrated by a map Soldatov had made based on open sources. The map showed GUSP facilities and those of other secret services in Moscow. Six months later, the FSB brought criminal charges against Soldatov and
Versiya
for revealing state secrets about GUSP’s facilities. After a series of interrogations the charges were dropped in December 2002.
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Meanwhile, GUSP has kept building new facilities. According to independent information, the construction of D-6 continues.
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Since the mid-2000s more than a dozen governors of Russian regions have been given awards by GUSP’s leadership for “assistance in maintenance of special programs.” The list of recipients includes the governors of Omsk, Chelyabinsk, and Kirovsk regions, and the districts of Belgorodskaya Oblast, Karelia, Voronezh, Stavropolye, Krasnoyarsk, and Kaliningrad. GUSP also gave awards to officials from the St. Petersburg government and the president of Russian Railways.
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The only reason for this stream of GUSP awards might be the support provided by regional authorities for maintenance or reconstruction of GUSP’s regional facilities (bunkers and communications). It was also known that in 2006 a GUSP special commission was sent to Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, apparently to check “special sites” located in this region.
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By the mid-2000s, GUSP, the secret service established in true Cold War tradition, had managed to keep the Soviet underground empire intact and top secret. Although the service was designed to function independently from the FSB, the latter appears to have had a decisive role in running the organization. Two of the last directors came from top positions in the FSB—Victor Zorin was the head of the FSB counterterrorism department, and Alexander Tsarenko headed its Moscow department prior to being sent to GUSP. It is not possible to establish whether Tsarenko left the FSB or whether he is subordinated to the FSB director. In the years after his appointment in 2000, Tsarenko continued to be called a “colonel general of the FSB” in media reports.
14
By the end of the decade, the FSB followed GUSP’s example and returned to the Soviet practice, with a few state security facilities made known to the public while the exact location of the others is kept secret.
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LEFORTOVO PRISON
C
AREFULLY UNMAPPED, notorious for a history of ruthless attitudes toward its inmates and a legacy of torture, Lefortovo is the only Russian prison not to have had its full history unveiled. Formerly a KGB prison, Lefortovo has since been handed down to the FSB. Given its hateful past, it’s hardly surprising that its name alone can strike fear into a Russian citizen’s heart.
The week after one of the biggest terrorist attacks in recent Russian history, when Chechens had seized a theater and held the audience hostage, the authors were preparing an article highly critical of the Russian response: The authorities had stormed the Nord-Ost theater, spraying fentanyl gas throughout the hall, with disastrous results.
One evening that week, on November 1, 2002, several FSB officers arrived at the newspaper
Versiya
, where Soldatov and Borogan worked, to confiscate Soldatov’s computer and the paper’s server. The article had just that day been sent to the printer. The agents left a summons for Soldatov to appear at the FSB department of military counterintelligence to answer questions about an article he’d written the previous spring. But Soldatov felt certain that what the officers really wanted was to prevent an independent investigation of the theater siege.
After his first interrogation, Soldatov was told he needed to report to the FSB investigative branch on Energeticheskaya Street, a few blocks from Lefortovo Park, named after Franz Lefort, a close associate of Tsar Peter the Great. The author reported to the infamous Lefortovo prison. The prison is difficult to find, hidden behind the gloomy apartment buildings. It is not identified by tourist guides, nor does it appear in books devoted to the city’s history.
The decision to interrogate Soldatov within the confines of the FSB’s intimidating prison was hardly arbitrary. It was not unreasonable to assume that, under pressure, in the claustrophobic environment of a ruthless and much feared prison, subjects would be more likely to divulge information. Those invited for questioning to Lefortovo never knew whether they would be freed or just moved to another part of the same building—to the prison. Psychologically, it has proven to be an effective method of persuasion.
Soldatov walked up to Checkpoint N2, an unremarkable entrance to a yellow brick building. This was the entrance for witnesses in investigations, families, and suspects, but not for prisoners.
Inside, he saw no people, just CCTV cameras. Visitors are ordered to wait in a hall for their guide. Outsiders are only allowed into the prison accompanied by an FSB officer. The visitor cannot see any human faces; instructions are issued over a loudspeaker. The entrance is flanked by two heavy doors that are opened simultaneously.
Walking down the pale blue and beige corridors, Soldatov was led to the third floor. Inside, it felt like a rabbit warren—and it was impossible to ascertain just where one was. White paper veils the office windows, which face an interior rectangular court.
On the day Soldatov went to Lefortovo, he was led to the small study of a young FSB investigator. The investigator started a belabored process of filling out a form on Soldatov’s identity. Anxious, Soldatov wanted to answer the investigator’s questions as quickly as possible and get out of there. But the investigator would not be hurried. In a few days, Soldatov was followed by Borogan, and the interrogators repeated the same slow, agonizing process.
During the Soviet years, when it had been run by the KGB, Lefortovo induced fear and trembling in the populace. Today, it remains at the heart of the FSB’s empire, a symbol of the security agency’s power.
1
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hulking prison was at the center of a struggle for control—a battle the FSB eventually won, but far from openly, in a contest of strength among Russia’s security services.
WHILE ALL OF Moscow’s main prisons have been documented by historians or experts—even the internal jail in the FSB’s Lubyanka headquarters—this is not the case with Lefortovo. Even the prison’s design remains a mystery: Nobody knows exactly why architect P. N. Kozlov in 1881 chose to build the military prison in the form of the letter “K.” (Some speculated it might be in honor of the Russian empress Catherine II the Great—Katerina, in Russian.) Historically, Lefortovo has had close ties with the regime. It is the jail typically used to hold the political enemies of a regime, by Soviet and Russian rulers alike.
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