Despite Drone Attacks, Russian Officials Still Classifying Locations of Bomb Shelters

Paul Goble

   Staunton, May 9 – In any country, one can find absurdities which often say a lot about what a particular country is like. Russia is no exception: One of its most absurd features is that the location of bomb shelters in Russian cities is typically classified by the government so that no one except officials knows where they are.

   In a discussion of this and other absurdities he finds in Russia, Moscow journalist Aleksandr Podrabinek says that this phenomenon will likely be viewed by future generations as evidence that their country was once a madhouse (svoboda.org/a/durdom-ili-tsirk-aleksandr-podrabinek-o-volnah-bezumiya-v-rossii/33408337.html).

    He gives as examples of this approach that in Kostroma, officials of the emergency services ministry have classified the location of all 63 bomb shelters; and in Moscow, few of the locations of the 12,000 bomb shelters in the capital are known because officials there have classified them.

    Podrabinek does acknowledge that the situation in Moscow is somewhat better than in many other cities: it has a subway system where many people know to go if bombs fall or drones attack, something that most other Russian cities don’t.  And all this taken together calls attention to a fundamental truth.

    In Putin’s Russia today, he writes, “bomb shelters are built not for the people but for reports to more senior officials and as a military secret because for the authorities, state security and secrets are much more important than the lives of any useless citizens who number in the country about 140 million.”