Russia: Shelters on the Other Side

With broad sarcasm, Pravda Columnist S. Vishnevsky dismissed the budding U.S. atom-bomb shelter program. “If we could only open the eyes of those moles.” he wrote recently, “they would surely see that there is no sense in hiding underground. But moles are unseeing creatures and moles of bourgeois origin suffer from class blindness.” The sneer was less than convincing, for the writer must have known what most of the U.S. does not: the Soviet Union has been at work for more than a decade on a shelter program of its own, spending an estimated $500 million a year (current U.S. figure: $16,500,000) on civil defense training courses for 22 million Soviet citizens, equipping bomb shelters for more than 30% of the population.

Russian preoccupation with civil defense is nothing like the current U.S. wave of concern about shelters. Unlike the U.S., the Soviet Union started its civil defense program long ago, has proceeded routinely without public debate or fanfare. No new shelter construction is seen; there are few civil defense posters and no air-raid drills in the largest cities.

All this has led many Western observers in Moscow to conclude that Russia has little, if any, civil defense planning, such a view is sharply questioned in a forthcoming book, Civil Defense in the Soviet Union, by Rand Corp. Analyst Leon Gouré.

Unmarked Concrete. Moscow-born Gouré, 39, son of an economist who fled Russia in 1923, joined the U.S. Army as a counterintelligence agent in World War II, has worked as a Russian expert ever since. Last year he spent a month touring nine Soviet cities. Says he: “The Soviets’ is not a crash program. It has never been tied to a crisis like ours, so naturally it is not a Number One subject of conversation.”

The lack of a crisis atmosphere, plus Russian reliance on the fact that the U.S. will not engage in a surprise attack, thinks Gouré, accounts for the absence of bomb shelter signs on buildings. “Because they believe they will have more time before attack than we,” he says, “they have planned for putting up such signs during a long-range alert. The shelters are there, but they aren’t posted. During my trip, I asked a man in Stalingrad about a vented block of unmarked concrete sticking out of the sidewalk. ‘Ah,’ he said with a shrug, ‘it’s a shelter exit,’ as if to say—so what’s unusual about that.”

Documentary Evidence. Gouré also spotted what he thinks are signs of retractable, blastproof doors to station entrances of the 43-mile-long Moscow subway, whose circular, concrete tunnels could house one million people—20% of the city’s population. (Leningrad has about eight miles of subway, and the first stage of the Kiev subway has six miles of track.) But mostly, Gouré’s evidence for a thoroughly planned Russian civil defense effort is the torrent of pamphlets, charts and decrees issued to the public through DOSAAF (All-Union Voluntary Society for the Promotion of the Army, Aviation and Navy), a 22 million-member organization that also gives training in shooting, parachute jumping and other paramilitary sports.

How seriously the Russians take such paper planning is debatable: the newspaper Sovetskii Patriot reports that some trainees attended civil defense meetings “with bored expressions and sat next to the exit,” while others jolted instructors by arguing, “There is no place to hide from an atomic explosion anyway.” But bored or not, by next year DOSAAF members and others will have attended 64 hours of courses, half of them spent in such practical matters as operating shelter equipment, first aid, fallout decontamination procedures. Children between 12 and 16 get similar training in schools.

People & Cattle. In contrast to the U.S., reports Gouré, “the great majority of shelters, especially the permanent kind, are public.” The author does not report having seen the interior of public shelters, but he says that published specifications include a reinforced-concrete, fireproof area of a basement that can be hermetically sealed, strong enough to withstand the collapse of the office or apartment building above, equipped with food, ventilating and sanitary facilities. At least until 1958, all shelter building plans were theoretically subject to approval by civil defense officials. Supposedly, suburban residents of one-or two-family homes can build their own shelters at their own expense, following recommended government specifications, but they would undoubtedly find it difficult to buy materials or hire labor.

In rural areas, says Gouré, the Soviets expect enough forewarning of war to eliminate the need for shelters until a “threatening situation” alert. Only then would rudimentary shelters be constructed—zigzag trenches framed with timber or other handy material and covered with 2 to 4 ft. of earth topped by a layer of hard clay. Each shelter would require a maximum of 250 man-hours to build, could seat 60 people on simple benches.

A recent civil defense pamphlet prescribes proper care and feeding of cattle and other farm animals housed in their own dugouts during atomic attack. The booklet, Radioactive Cloud and Defense from It, describes how to protect a livestock shelter from fallout contamination by covering ventilation outlets, blocking all crevices with planks, plywood, tin plates, and “in the ultimate case—straw.” Another pamphlet shows a prostrate figure escaping the full force of shock waves, while a chart explains carefully how to cut and fold material to make fallout protection capes or leggings. Russian plans stress gas masks, partly as a limited protection against fallout, and partly because civil defense officials apparently have never got over the notion that gas or bacteriological warfare may still be waged.

Worth the Effort. Another comparatively late development is a discussion of evacuating urban centers under a system devised by a newly formed Transport Service of the nationwide civil defense organization. Given sufficient warning, a pamphlet says, city dwellers will turn off their stoves and electric lights, take with them gas masks, bedding, matches, soap, food, a pocket knife, travel by bus or rail to an intermediate staging area before moving farther into the countryside. “Soviet civil defense,” says Gouré, “thus seems to be tailored, at least for the present, to the assumption that a war might well begin under relatively favorable circumstances.”

Public apathy and official mismanagement have plagued the program, says Gouré’s documented report. But even if much of the program is more on paper than in concrete, he concludes, “the Soviet leaders believe it to be worth further efforts and continued investments.”