In 1948, a top-secret biological weapons laboratory, nicknamed Aralsk-7, was established here. Until its closure in the 1990s, the laboratory tested some of the deadliest pathogens known to man, including plague, anthrax, smallpox, brucellosis, tularemia, botulinum and Venezuelan equine encephalitis.
Balaklava at one time worked at the base; even family members could not visit the town of Balaklava without a good reason and proper identification. The base remained operational after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 until 1993 when the decommissioning process started.
The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989.
About 40 miles outside of Moscow, in a secluded forest near a quiet town, sits a maze of towering Tesla Coil looking generators and conduits that seem anything but terrestrial. This lightning machine, the only of its kind, now sits abandoned. Built in the 1970s by the Russia’s military to test aircraft and vehicles’ ability…
The research and development carried out in Peenemünde was not only crucial to the course of WWII, but impacted the future of weapons of mass destruction, as well as space travel.
Juragua Nuclear Power Plant was a nuclear power plant under construction in Cuba when a suspension of construction was announced in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the termination of Soviet economic aid to Cuba.
Built in the 1970s, this air base in Mongolia had a 2-mile-long runway and was seen as a frontline for any possible conflict with China.
Metro-2 in Moscow, Russia, is the informal name for a purported secret underground metro system which parallels the public Moscow Metro. The system was supposedly built, or at least started, during the time of Joseph Stalin and was codenamed D-6 by the KGB.
In the Soviet time, Kharkov was one of the most important scientific and research centers of the country.
Riese is the code name for a construction project of Nazi Germany in 1943–1945, consisting of seven underground structures located in the Owl Mountains and Ksiaz Castle.
The Derweze Crater, also known as the Door to Hell, is a natural gas field in Derweze (also spelled Darvaze, meaning “gate”), Ahal Province, Turkmenistan. The Door to Hell is noted for its natural gas fire which has been burning continuously since it was lit by Soviet petrochemical scientists in 1971.
Prora, also known as the Colossus of Prora, is an enormous building complex on the island of Rügen, Germany, that was built by Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1939 as a beach resort of the Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude or KdF) project.
In the remote Yakutia region of Siberia, more than a hundred kilometers inside the Arctic Circle, lies the small town of Verkhoyansk. Winter temperature here regularly drops to minus fifty degree Celsius. It’s so cold that “no one can stay outside for more than 15 minutes”. The only way to protect oneself from the bitter cold is to wrap themselves up in skins and furs of animals, and keep moving.
Located just over eight hundred kilometers away from the North Pole, the community of Alert, on the northeastern tip of Ellesmere Island, in Nunavut, Canada, is the most northerly permanent settlement in the world.
Checkpoint Charlie was the name given by the Western Allies to the best-known Berlin Wall crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War.
About 25 miles south of Berlin lies the small town of Wunsdorf, home to about six thousand inhabitants. But less than thirty years ago it had a population of sixty thousand, of which fifty thousand were soldiers of the Red Army. They lived inside one of the biggest military bases in Europe and the biggest…
Situated high up in the Balkan Peninsula, at an altitude of 1441m, the Buzludzha monument was built in 1981 – when it served as the symbolic headquarters of Bulgarian communism.
Janowska was a Nazi German labor, transit and concentration camp established September 1941 in occupied Poland on the outskirts of Lwów (Poland, today Lviv in Ukraine).
The Mir mine, also called the Mirny mine, is an open pit diamond mine located in Mirny, Sakha Republic, in the Siberian region of eastern Russia. The mine is >525 meters (1,722 ft) deep (4th in the world) and has a diameter of 1,200 m (3,900 ft), and is one of the largest excavated holes in the world.
The Borovsko Bridge is an unfinished highway bridge near Borovsko , part of Bernartice municipality, Central Bohemian Region, Czech Republic. It is commonly known as the “Czech Avignon” or “Hitler’s Bridge”.
