Ghost city on the Kurils

The life of a military town on the island of Iturup. Photo station Oleg Klimov

Military town of Mountain in the Gulf of Karlya in the Kuril Islands was built in the early 1980s and was inhabited by the families of military personnel of the artillery, helicopter and fighter regiments deployed near it. It is still believed that the bay of the killer whale on the island of Iturup is the place "most favorable for the landing of the probable enemy." However, in the 1990s, two regiments were disbanded, part of the housing stock and administrative buildings were empty and were plundered. The 1994 earthquake finally destroyed the infrastructure of the town.

The bay of the killer whale, previously called the Hitokapper bay, is also known in world history. It was from here that Japanese aircraft carriers with airplanes on board went to attack Pearl Harbor. They did not return back. In 1945, according to the Potsdam Agreement, the island of Iturup transferred to the jurisdiction of the USSR, and the Japanese population was repatriated.

Today, the inhabitants of Mountain often call their town a ghost, and the sailors are a fat-morgana, in honor of the sea fairy, which, according to legend, lives at the bottom of the ocean and deceives travelers with ghostly visions. According to the data on December 1, 2015, 635 people live in the mountain, of which 128 children live. At the end of last year, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that new military towns would be built on Iturup. In December 2015, the photographer Oleg Klimov , who watched the life of the “ghost” city and talked with local residents, visited Mountain.

“It is very difficult to see a destroyed city from your window every day. It destroys you from the inside and even in the morning I want to get drunk. Therefore, my wife and I go to breakfast ashore, look at the sea and drink coffee from the thermos, and not vodka from the bottle, ”the owner of the apartment explained.

It’s really difficult to see a ghost city. There are two roads to him: “by tide”, if you drive along the seashore during the Ocean tide, and the “strategic” is a strategic road built by the military, but it can only be driven on the tank along it. If there is no tank, it is better to choose the path "according to the tide." Here, however, it is also risky - you can drown the car in the runaway wave from the ocean or, worse, drown yourself.

Military town of Mountain became a “ghost” in July 2005, when Sergey Ivanov, at that time, the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation, flew with a helicopter check towards the Bureurestnik airfield. When he saw the destroyed residential buildings from a bird's eye view, he asked: "What is this ghost city?" Someone from the military environment for obvious reasons replied: "No one lives there." Since then, the town as a “settlement” has disappeared from all military-strategic maps, and the land and the remaining buildings are still listed as the Ministry of Defense. Only people are no longer listed, although they live there.

The now retarded captain N, still living in Gorny, had a chance to see the Minister of Defense only once during all military service. He remembered him with such a story. Sergei Ivanov suggested that the regiment commander organize for fighters of the URCOMAL Service of the Internet cafe at the Bureveznik airfield, "so that soldiers could write emails home." “Then I thought,” the captain recalls, “that the minister was not even from Moscow, but from the moon fell to us. In vain, we did not show him our ghost city then. ”

“When in the mid-1990s I came here a lieutenant,” says a military pensioner at the age of 38, “at first I thought that it was a“ military training ground ”, where they prepared special forces for a war in Chechnya, and not my new place of residence. Seriously. I looked around as bewitched and thought, if there is such a landfill, then what should be the regiment! The first to understand everything was the wife. She cried. " In the former military town in office apartments, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation live mainly by military pensioners, operating officers of the Russian army, their young wives and young children. The number of military personnel here is a military secret, but 635 people have 635 people on medical records, 128 children, including infants.

In the mountain shops are private. Enterprising residents equip grocery and other shops in empty neighboring apartments so as not to go far to work. Therefore, as they say here, if the store is “closed on a shovel”, then you need to knock on the next door, where the owner or mistress lives, and say what you want to buy. Window frames are considered a special shortage in the town. They are not where people do not live. As soon as one leave, those who remain in the mountain take window frames for themselves. If “plastic windows” were purchased in the apartment, then the owners, before leaving, sell them. Apartments cannot be sold or buy, they are the property of the Ministry of Defense, so people do not sell each other apartments, but “apartment renovation”.

Despite the fact that the military town does not formally exist, the Ministry of Defense is forced to continue to heat part of the buildings, since military personnel and their families simply have nowhere else to live. After the arrival of the Minister of Defense for Iturup in 2005, houses in which no one lived, were “recognized as emergency” and mined. But only a school and the House of Culture managed to blow up - they turned into ruins. The new school was opened in the former building of the military barracks. Residential buildings, seismically stable, could not completely destroy, but as a result of a “small war”, a kind of kindergarten teacher was wounded by a fragment of glass, after which “military operations” had to be stopped.

Who was occupied by the island of Iturup, never officially specified; But everyone knows that the Japanese occupied all our islands. In what battles did the Red Army heroically liberated the island of Iturup? This is also never said, because the island of Iturup was handed over to the Japanese without a single shot.

Since there is practically nothing to buy from clothes (except for tracksuits and camouflage) in Mountain, then, according to residents, online shopping is popular in the ghost city-the delivery of goods from China. The ordered goods come to the island by a ship at best in a few months, and the price of delivery costs exceeds the price of the goods. But residents are trying to make one order “in a fold”, which costs cheaper; If some kind of purchased thing does not fit the size of one, it is offered to another.

The chairman of the collection of the Kuril city district Tatyana Belousova believes that the situation in the mountain is very difficult, “suspended”: “Municipal institutions are operating there, but their premises belong to the military. We have no right to do anything in them, improve, repair. There is, for example, the regional program “Warm windows”, on it we could replace windows with modern double -glazed windows in kindergarten. But we have no right to improve other people's property, this is a violation of the law. ” Roads in the mountain winter are not cleaned from snow. Often, after typhoon, it is impossible to even get out of the entrance. Residents have to jump out of the window of the second floor with shovels and clear the doors littered with snow. The height of snowdrifts reaches more than three meters. If it is unsuccessful to put the car near the house, then it is difficult to find it under the snowdrifts, but it’s even more difficult to dig up and go somewhere. For weeks, the town is completely isolated from the outside world.

Not a single street in the town has its own name, but each house once had a number; True, the numbers are not in order, but scattered randomly. The accidentally hit here will not be able to quickly navigate, despite the fact that all houses are built in rows - like shelves on Red Square.

Kindergarten is the only bright place on the military base. He is loved with love in several apartments of one entrance of a dilapidated house. Its employees, they are the wife of officers and parents of children, did everything possible for children to look like a "happy childhood." But the whole absurdity is that on the eve of the New Year, the Lieutenant Colonel of the Ministry of Emergencies, who arrived with the audit, imposed a fine on the kindergarten “For violation of fire safety”, since the width of the stairs of the residential building ten centimeters less than should be according to fire safety standards in kindergartens.