Russian Antarctica: everything is clear, but not very

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

As you know, Antarctica was discovered by Russian navigators - Captain Thaddeus Bellingshausen (1778-1852) and Lieutenant Mikhail Lazarev (1788-1851), who on the sloops "Vostok" and "Mirny" on January 28, 1820 for the first time in history reached the mysterious land in the Southern Hemisphere …

Russian ships sailed around the Antarctic continent, nine times approaching its shores, thus defining the general outlines of Antarctica. That is, in modern times, it was the Russians who became the discoverers of Antarctica. So what is next…

And then, according to the generally accepted historical version today, large-scale expeditions to the shores of Antarctica were carried out only … 130 years later - already in the 1950s, when the Soviet Antarctic program was launched!

Surprisingly, but true! Russian, Soviet, and then - and again Russian studies of the icy continent raise no less questions (if not more!) Than, say, American or German ones.

From a formal point of view, hundreds and thousands of articles, books, brochures have been written and published about the Antarctic programs of the Soviet Union, and since 1991 - of the Russian Federation, many documentaries have been shot. It seems that there are no secrets and mysteries left. An icy continent, a harsh climate, a land of penguins and extreme cold, polar wintering, etc.

But is everything really so obvious?

A Soviet veteran polar explorer, who chose to remain anonymous, drew my attention to the site of the Smolensk Cemetery in St. Petersburg, where more than a hundred men were buried in the late 1940s (approximately the same period as the time of Admiral Byrd's expedition). Identical gravestones, Slavic surnames and the average age of the deceased suggest war burials. But during these years the USSR, as we know, did not fight with anyone. Here lie polar explorers, explained their surviving colleague, and they spent the winter on the sixth continent.

The secret mission of the USSR in Antarctica (our country officially began research there only in 1956) is linked by an unnamed interlocutor with the name of twice Hero of the Soviet Union Ivan Papanin, at that time the head of naval intelligence. As if the Papaninites, and not the mythical Aryans in thin clothes, gave Admiral Byrd a stern welcome on the "primordially our" territory of the continent opened by our people. It turns out that it was with this skirmish, and not with Churchill's Fulton speech, that the "cold war" between the USSR and the USA began.

This is a quote from an article by Savely Kashnitsky "Secret civilization under the sixth continent" published in the weekly "Argumenty i Fakty" (No. 17 of April 22, 2009).

Another quote:

On a rocky hill, located between two especially large lakes, there is a cemetery for polar explorers. The long-decommissioned Penguin all-terrain vehicle, driven by a mischievous mechanic to the top of the hill, became a monument that was even depicted on a postage stamp. I went up the hill. In terms of memoriality, the cemetery is not inferior to many famous cemeteries in the world - Novodevichy, for example, or even Arlington. I am surprised to see on the grave of the pilot Chilingarov a four-bladed propeller poured into a concrete pedestal and the date of burial: March 1, 1947. But my questions remain unanswered - the current management of Novolazarevskaya has no idea about the activities of the station in that distant year. This, as you can see, is already the business of historians …

The second quote is taken from the memoirs of one of the members of the first Soviet Antarctic expedition - Vladimir Kuznetsov, published in St. Petersburg by the publishing house "Gidrometeoizdat" (citing from the book by A. V. Biryuk "UFO: a secret strike", part 3 "Antarctica", chapter 4 "Station" Novolazarevskaya ").

Alexander Biryuk comments on this paragraph from the memoirs of Vladimir Kuznetsov as follows: A. V. Chilingarov served in the First Ferry Aviation Division during the Great Patriotic War. The division commander was Colonel of the USSR Air Force Ivan Mazuruk (1906-07-07–1989-02-01), who was in charge of the Alsib route from Alaska to the USSR (Krasnoyarsk), through which aircraft supplied to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease was delivered to the Soviet-German front United States.

Four-blade propeller on the grave of A. V. Chilingarov, buried on March 1, 1947, could only belong to the P-63 Kingcobra aircraft, which were supplied from the USA to the USSR under the Lend-Lease in 1944-1945. But how did the Kingcobra end up in Antarctica in 1947, if Soviet exploration of Antarctica began only in 1956?

In 2005, the Moscow publishing house "Algorithm" published a book by Olga Greig, which was called "Secret Antarctica, or Russian intelligence at the South Pole." The quintessence of this book is as follows: since 1820, Russia, with insignificant interruptions, continued to actively explore and study the sixth continent. Even before the start of World War II, preparations began, and after its end, the formation of the Antarctic fleet of the USSR Navy, which was based off the coast of Antarctica, was completed. In researching and studying the ice continent, Stalin worked in close cooperation with Hitler, which did not stop even … during the war years. Representatives of alien intelligence in the vicinity of Antarctica are certainly present. But all this information is not for mere mortals.

Nothing is said about the author of the book - Olga Greig. Is this surname an individual or collective pseudonym, and if so, whose, and is it a pseudonym at all? Unknown. At first glance, the goal that was pursued when writing and publishing this book is not clear. Is it just to make some money by writing a completely opportunistic, salable text, or is it a kind of “message” of a group of interested persons to the Russian power elite and the thinking part of the country's population, a kind of call to resume active development of Antarctica? (Note in parentheses that in 2011 Olga Greig's book was published in the second edition, and was also supplemented by another book by the same author on the same topic: "Operation Antarctica, or the Battle of the South Pole."

Soon after the publication of Olga Greig's first book, on March 5, 2007, a "post" was posted on one of the Russian-language Internet forums telling about the march of the Russian FSB to the South Pole.

This message, in particular, said:

Director of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev and his first deputy, head of the Border Service Vladimir Pronichev, as well as Deputy Speaker of the State Duma Artur Chilingarov, head of Roshydromet Alexander Bedritsky and even Russian Ambassador to Chile Yuri Filatov, using the "air jump" in Chile, performed first on an airplane " An-74 "flight from South America to Antarctica, where on January 5 they landed on King George Island. There is one of the five operating Russian Antarctic stations - Bellingshausen.

On January 7, high-ranking officials on two Mi-8 FSB helicopters made a rush to the South Pole. “For the first time in the history of mankind,” one of the Russian publications wrote triumphantly, “Christians celebrated Orthodox Christmas at the South Pole - where all the earth's meridians converge at an altitude of 2835 meters.”

In his Christmas euphoria, Patrushev even risked waking up Vladimir Putin to report on the success of the expedition. True, for this he used not his special communication, but a satellite phone, which was kindly provided to him by the American polar explorers from the Amundsen-Scott station, stunned by the visit of the head of the FSB.

The head of the Khabarovsk Aviation Center of the FSB of Russia, Colonel Andrei Sobolev, told the Pogranichnik Severo-Vostoka newspaper (No. 49 of December 12, 2007) about the purpose of this visit very frankly:

First of all, it is political. This year, a 50-year international treaty ends, according to which Antarctica is recognized as a public territory. And the closer the agreement expires, the more actively some countries begin to claim unilateral ownership of the southern mainland.

Meanwhile, Antarctica is the richest territory. After all, this is the lightest uranium. That is why a political decision was made to bring a high-ranking Russian delegation there, in order to thereby designate our presence. The general management of the expedition was carried out by Artur Nikolaevich Chilingarov, and the director of the FSB Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev was the official representative of the state.

On November 18, 2009 it became known that the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin headed the Board of Trustees of the Russian Geographical Society. At the very first meeting of the Russian Geographical Society, being in the status of the chairman of its Board of Trustees, he proposed at least 10 times (up to 50 million rubles) to increase the allocations to the budget of the Russian Geographical Society to preserve the research work carried out by this society. On the same day, the head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Russian Federation, Sergei Shoigu, elected as the new president of the Russian Geographical Society, promised to further popularize geography and even noticed the possibility of creating a specialized TV channel.

And on April 15, 2011, as reported by the RIA-Novosti news agency, at a regular meeting of the Board of Trustees, it was announced, in particular, that the RGS might soon have its own ships and underwater vehicles: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin supported the idea of developing and build a Russian naval research vessel.

Let us also recall that a year earlier, on April 15, 2010, during the first official visit to Argentina, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and President of this South American republic Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner signed 12 agreements on cooperation in various fields of activity.

On this occasion, in particular, in the plot of the First Channel, the following was said:

Russia offers its technologies not only in energy, but also in the restoration of railways - in Argentina they are half destroyed, in space exploration - in Argentina ground equipment will be installed for the GLONASS satellite system, in the construction of new nuclear power plants, as well as in the study of Antarctica - here we need Russian icebreakers and helicopters.

After that, on October 21, 2010, at a meeting of the Government of the Russian Federation chaired by its head, Vladimir Putin, the Strategy for the Development of Russia's Activities in Antarctica was discussed.

The details of this strategy and the circumstances prior to its development were not widely reported in the media.

Fragment of the book by I. A. Osovin, S. A. Pochechuev "Ominous secrets of Antarctica"