Unlike in the U.S., preparations for nuclear conflict during the cold war remain tightly held secrets in Russia, a reflection of the military's continued suspicion of the West. But some information can be pieced together. According to several sources, including former KGB officers, the Kremlin and other key buildings in Moscow are still linked by underground rail tunnels to an area about six miles outside the city center called Ramenki, site of a vast subterranean bunker designed for the country's leaders and their families. ( Responsibility for protection of top Kremlin officials rested with the KGB's Ninth Directorate, which delegated tasks to the Defense Ministry. A KGB officer who claimed to have taken part in constructing the Ramenki bunker described it to a Soviet newspaper last year as an underground city about 500 acres in size, built at several levels ranging in depth from 230 ft. to 395 ft. He said the bunker was begun in the second half of the 1960s and completed by the mid-'70s, could shelter as many as 120,000 people, and included food supplies that could last up to 30 years. Quarters for top leaders were comfortably appointed, and movie theaters were built for entertainment. Some 30 miles outside Moscow in Sofrino, an underground broadcast-communications installation built during Nikita Khrushchev's tenure is now outdated and inoperative, according to Igor Malashenko, deputy director of state television and radio. "Because we don't need it anymore, it's been slowly stripped of spare parts," he says. A similar fate befell many of the tens of thousands of civilian bomb shelters built as part of the massive Soviet civil defense program. At a shelter 40 ft. below the main building of Moscow State University, water has flooded some of the rooms, and thieves have stripped the three-tiered bunks of more than half the wooden plank beds, leaving only useless steel frames.
Long before the demise of the Soviet Union, Russians learned to dismiss as absurd the civil defense training courses imposed on them at school and work. They refer to the courses as grob, taken from the first two letters of the words for civil defense -- grazhdanskaya oborona. Translation of grob: coffin. The cynicism was justified. In 1988 an accidental air-raid alert in the industrial city of Perm sent hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for safety. As a test of civil defense, the accident proved a disaster. Perm residents found many shelters locked, flooded or infested with mosquitoes.
How much did Moscow know about U.S. plans to survive a nuclear attack? A former KGB official says spies watched for signs that the U.S. was preparing a nuclear attack by monitoring late-night activity at the Pentagon and keeping track of troop movements. The KGB and GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, also used agents to try to discover the location of the bunkers set aside for U.S. leaders. "We did find out some of the operation code names and hiding places," claims the official. Sometimes the U.S.'s own planning methods tipped off the Soviets. Says the official: "The rehearsals for responding to Russian nuclear attacks helped us a great deal."