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 Below ground is the place to be in Latvia as the country opens up its main nuclear bunker to visitors.
WORDS BY JUSTIN WALLEY
When Latvia became independent in 1991, Ligatne’s top-secret nuclear fallout shelter, hidden away in rural countryside 75 kilometres south-east of capital Riga, remained a secret defence object. Indeed, it was only finally revealed when its one-metre-thick doors were opened to an unsuspecting Latvian public 12 years later. You might wonder how a nuclear bunker could remain top secret for more than a decade after the fall of the soviet empire, but Ligatne’s covert construction under the site of a hotel and rehab clinic in the middle of nowhere left the site’s protruding ventilation shafts as the only clues.
This obscurity becomes obvious when, after several kilometres’ drive through a valley of pine forests and peculiar cave formations, you reach the gates of the current rehabilitation complex. An exclusive pass will allow you to be among some of the first westerners to be granted access to the bunker below.
After being led along the corridors of the clinic—a mix of Soviet kitsch and modern spa— we disappear through a small side door next to a kiosk and march down an inconspicuous stairwell. This seems like the last place one would expect to find a nuclear fallout shelter, which is no doubt the whole point.
“Give code and password!” our guide barks at one woman, as he points to a telephone on the wall adjacent to a heavy door. The woman laughs, but the guide doesn’t look too amused. “I say give code and password!” he repeats in a heavy eastern European accent.
 The code gets given then there is a short pause before a one-metre-thick door swings open to reveal a man wearing what looks like a radiation suit. Mister Radiation barks out muffled orders to the rest of the group to move away from the entrance. Without question we all do as we are told. Nine metres underground, with more than five metres of that made up of top-grade industrial concrete, you don’t want to disrespect Mister Rads. Unwelcoming icebox corridors stretch before us to the first of 90 rooms in the vast facility.
“Without communication there is no order. Without order there is no communication,” Mister Radiation shouts. It sounds like Orwellian doublespeak but is actually a direct translation of a huge sign on the wall, written in Russian, in what was once the communications room.
Time clearly stopped here 20 years ago. The minimalist furniture and technical posters on the walls remain frozen at the height of the Cold War, while strange items of memorabilia, the extraordinary and the banal, lie around the room.
 Until the ’90s, telephone numbers used here were not available to the outside world. If anybody was short-sighted enough to accidently dial them, they were told the number didn’t exist. Unfortunate misdiallers were rumoured to have later been ‘disappeared’ for the crime of attempting to phone the ‘non-existent’ number in the first place.
FALLOUT FUN
"IN A ROOM FILLED WITH BUSTS OF LENIN, GHERKINS AND SALTED FISH ARE WASHED DOWN WITH GENEROUS MEASURES OF VODKA"
Anybody who wanted to work at the ‘Pension’, as it was referred to at the time, had their CV scrutinised by the intelligence services. Someone known to have relatives abroad was a definite no-no, while, very often, whole families were employed, including a husband, wife and child, bringing new meaning to the term ‘nuclear family’. Once the assessment was completed an individual’s suitability for the job was marked simply ‘+’ or ‘-’.
 The next section of the bunker is the former civil defence operator’s room whose mind-numbingly exciting duty was to monitor a panel, which displayed all the main towns in Latvia.
In one such room there are a series of colour codes similar to those used by the American and British governments today warning of potential terror attacks. Soviet Ministers would have used the intricately detailed maps to plan their country’s contingencies accordingly.
Even now, the Latvian Ministry of Defence prohibits the taking of photographs in some rooms. Paranoia—or perhaps the fact that every detail of the country’s civil defence network and its water and electricity supplies are contained here—might explain this.
The spooky, cavernous corridors and now-deserted rooms were built in this location because it was deemed far enough away from Riga to be ‘relatively’ safe, and near enough for the facility to function and support the capital. Even so, the fallout shelter was designed to protect its occupants from exposure to harmful fallout from beta particles and gamma rays until radioactivity had decayed to a safer level.
Almost two decades on from the end of the Cold War, citizens of the east (and a handful from the west) unite and hang out in this nuclear bunker, surrounded by portraits of Lenin, swigging perfectly chilled shots of petroleum-like vodka while they party to the same—now slightly warped—vinyl tunes that Brezhnev tapped his toes to back in the day.
 The concept of a party in a nuclear bunker might be hard to grasp but it’s even harder to come to terms with when it’s in full swing, hanging around in former top-secret nuclear facilities on the wrong side of what was once the Iron Curtain, scaring ourselves half to death by alarmingly realistic nuclear attack drills.
In a room filled with busts of Lenin and Latvian Soviet Union flags, gherkins and salted fish are washed down with generous measures of vodka. It is all very, very bizarre.
A trip to Ligatne allows visitors to travel back in time and experience this untouched and most secretive of soviet facilities almost as it was at the time of the Cold War. Just make sure you don’t upset Mister Radiation.
Gimme shelter
Tailored ‘nuclear bunker’ weekend packages can be organised incorporating accommodation, transfers and daytime activities from €99 per person. Nuclear bunker day-trips start from €29 per person. Contact Out There at www.out-there.eu or Tel. +371 6748 2443
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