The secret imperial metro near St. Petersburg

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

The underground passages dug in Tsarskoye Selo, connecting the Catherine Palace with a number of buildings in the city, allowed Her Majesty, without advertising her visits, to appear at any end of Tsarskoye Selo at any time of the day or night. The idea of creating underground conveyors and elevators was also in the air. She seemed cumbersome, but the empress liked it very much.

The Pugachev revolt and, in particular, the Decembrist uprising of 1825 forced Nicholas I to speed up the construction of railways. The construction of the first railway line in Russia between Tsarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk (the movement was opened in 1826) was supervised by the III department, and the requirements for it were purely military: in the event of a mutiny, the artillery of the Pavlovsky garrison, as well as equipment and the train of the Pavlovsky grenadier regiment, were transferred to Tsarskoye Selo, distinguished by special devotion to the emperor. But the construction of the underground railway ran into insoluble technical problems at that time.

Everything changed in 1873, when the first power plant in Russia was launched in Tsarskoe Selo. Small hydro generators installed in the Singing Tower - a water tower near the Catherine Palace - gave the first current to the Catherine Palace. In 1879, an underground conveyor was transferred to electric traction, which since the time of Catherine II served hot dishes from the kitchen of the Catherine Palace to the park pavilion of the Hermitage.

The project for the construction of the first underground railway in Russia was completed at the end of the 19th century. The experience of the British was not needed; The Russian project was distinguished by independence of solutions, simplicity and reliability. The reality of the project was supported by the launch of the first electric tram in Russia in 1901.

The tragedy of "Bloody Sunday", which grew into the first Russian revolution, so frightened the Tsarskoye Selo courtyard that the construction of the subway began immediately. To keep the secret, a separate branch of the land-based railroad, the so-called "royal" road, is being built near Tsarskoe Selo. A verst from the Alexander Palace (the suburban residence of Nicholas II), a small depot, a railway station and the barracks of the Tsar's personal convoy are being built. A country road is being laid to the Alexander Palace through the Farmers' Park.

The management of the construction is entrusted to a mysterious person - Senator N. P. Garin, who for some time has replaced the Minister of War and supervised the military-technical programs of the Ministry of War. Garin is known for his numerous fantastic projects.

The construction began with the fact that in May 1905 the public was strictly forbidden to freely visit the Aleksandrovsky and Farmersky parks in Tsarskoye Selo. Solid wire fences and outposts were installed around the parks. The security service spread rumors that colossal construction work was launched on the territory of the parks in connection with the preparations for the three hundredth anniversary of the reigning House of Romanov.

For eight years, under the conditions of extraordinary secrecy, 120 trucks were taking out hundreds of tons of soil from here per day. Four hundred carts delivered food at night and took out workers, for whose accommodation two-story barracks were erected in the village of Aleksandrovskaya. The lion's share of the excavated soil was transported along the single-track cargo track, later the soil was transported to the right bank of the Kuzminka River near the Aleksandrovskaya station. In 1912, security measures were strengthened and a second strip of barbed wire was put into operation, through which current was passed. A month before the commissioning of the object, unprecedented work on covering traces unfolded on the surface. The Aleksandrovsky Park was actually rebuilt. And eight years later, during the celebration on the territory of the imperial parks, distinguished guests did not find any traces of the works being carried out here in 1905.

- And where is it ?! - the journalists threw up their hands.

- But! - replied Senator Garin, pointing his finger at the tiny wooden gazebo on

the top of Parnassus - a high artificial hill a stone's throw from the Alexander Palace.

- And so! - He pointed his finger at the Lamskoy pavilion on the border of the Alexander Park.

A grandiose scandal erupted, almost costing Garin the senatorial seat and the entire fortune. Public opinion demanded that the senator be deprived of his entire fortune. But Nicholas II himself stood up for the senator, who made Garin … court photographers!

When the capital's society learned what the “Garinsky fuss” in Tsarskoye Selo had cost the treasury, they had to immediately look for a scapegoat, whom the late Prime Minister Stolypin was chosen, whose signatures were on all orders concerning the financing of the work. The strange top-secret object in Tsarskoe Selo, worth 15 million gold rubles, remained the most secret in the Russian Empire until March 1917.

On March 19, 1917, a group of warrant officers from the Tsarskoye Selo garrison discovered a pit leading to a deep underground. What he saw shocked the imagination of the ensigns. At a depth of eight meters, a wide single track was laid in the belly of a three-meter-high concrete tunnel. In a small depot, an electromechanical railcar with two trailed carriages for twenty seats, according to the number of members of the royal family and retinue, was rusted. Electric cables were visible everywhere along the walls, small searchlights in the side aisles illuminated the entire underground space from the basements of the Catherine Palace to the Alexandrovskaya station, where an electric lift for the trolley with its contents was mounted. The total width of the central tunnel with side passages was 12 meters. The special drainage system for groundwater and condensate has remained unsolved. The tunnels were ventilated in a simple and ingenious way - through natural draft: through pipes in local boiler houses. The intricate design of the chimneys, ventilation ducts connected to storm water wells - everything was thought out and calculated with mathematical meticulousness.

To supply electricity in Tsarskoe Selo, the so-called palace power plant was built. Back in 1910, electrical engineer A. P. Smorodin drew attention to the fact that its power was one hundred times higher than the needs of lighting the Catherine's or Alexander's palaces. The station was built with a huge power reserve for purposes far from the power supply of Tsarskoye Selo palaces, the city and the garrison. A two-story building in the Moorish style at the corner of Tserkovnaya and Malaya streets was placed in such a way as to supply energy not only to the already open tunnels, but also to the new ones planned in the city limits and under the military town of the Tsarskoye Selo garrison troops.

Soon a whole expedition, equipped by the Tsarskoye Selo Soviet of Soldiers and Other Deputies, wandered underground with drawing boards and pencils, drawing up schemes of underground passages and main pits in the territory of Alexander Park. The side tunnels of the Tsarskoye Selo metro led an underground expedition to the basements of such park pavilions as the Arsenal and the Chinese Theater, and one of them led the researchers to the basements of the Alexander Palace.

A commission of warrant officers from the Tsarskoye Selo garrison found it difficult to find living witnesses of the construction of the subway. Of the two and a half thousand engineers, workers, military men, miners, truck drivers who once flooded Tsarskoe Selo, by 1917 there was practically no one left in the city. The watchman Ivchin and the merchant of the 3rd guild Ilya Martemya-novich Morozov, my great-uncle on the line of my grandfather, were called to witness the creation of a unique object.

In 1907, when funding for construction from the treasury began to seriously lame and it became necessary to attract private, off-budget funds, my family received an offer to invest in a secret subway.

On August 11, 1907, Ilya Martemyanovich was given a pass to the facility and a competent escort was appointed. To the surprise of Ilya Martemyanovich, the tour of the secret site began from a strange house number 14 on Pushkinskaya Street (in those days Kolpinskaya). The two-storey wooden house has long attracted attention with a strange brick extension in one window along the main facade and a narrow tower from the courtyard, which had communication only with the second floor of the building. During the reign of Catherine II, her secret chambers were located here. Through an underground passage, the empress could reach this house, unnoticed by anyone. Here she conducted highly secret, confidential negotiations.

Ilya Martemyanovich remembered the descent down the spiral staircase into a deep underground for the rest of his life … The brick vault was replaced by concrete, powerful steel structures and a sea of dazzling electric light. A warm stream of air, filled with the scent of withering Tsarskoe Selo greenery, it is incomprehensible how it penetrates into the underground, ruffled the forelocks of the workers who scurried along the corridors. The wide tunnels that opened in the direction of the Aleksandrovskaya railway station made an enchanting impression.

- And here, - the guide reminded of himself, - it is supposed to place the gold reserve of the House of Romanov.

A side tunnel, separated from the main by an armored door, led somewhere to the right.

- Above the storage is an artificial mountain Parnassus, - the knowledgeable person responded again, - in which an underground hall was equipped at the time of its filling. Here they tortured the most desperate enemies of the empire and Tsarina Catherine II.

The system of side tunnels of the tsar's subway turned it into an underground hub with its own gold storage, a network of wide tunnels capable of accommodating troops to suppress the revolutionary elements and save the tsar's family. Everywhere were visible traces of the application of new engineering ideas and technologies, albeit crude, but daring, expensive and elegant.

Every hundred meters of the tunnel, the excursionist stumbled upon round brick columns.

“These are the Kingstones,” the guide explained. “If necessary, the water from the ponds of Aleksandrovsky Park will flood everything you see in a matter of minutes, so that no one will ever know what we were doing here.

The guide took the guest to the very basements of the Catherine Palace. Jumping out through the palace boiler room straight to the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, he, muttering something under his breath, without saying goodbye, disappeared. Under the supervision of an agent of the secret police, the shocked Ilya Martemyanovich made his way to his house in Pavlovsk.

Having agreed to participate in the project of the century, Morozov unexpectedly acquired the status of a supplier to the court of His Imperial Majesty. But he had to deliver to Tsarskoe Selo to the object not concrete, brick and metal fittings, but valuable species of wood, amber, gold leaf, jasper, the so-called fish glue. That is, what is used in the decoration of rich palace interiors.

By the time the facility was put into operation in 1913, electric lifts were to be installed at all its end points and dead ends, backup substations were installed in five intermediate nodes, electromechanical bogies were replaced by tram cars. However, the small state commission headed by Nicholas II did not see any of this, none of the above was installed in the tunnels.

Immediately after the celebrations, the Tsarskoye Selo metro began to be shaken by continuous accidents. It will close the damp wiring, then the running gear of electromechanical carts will become completely unusable, then the frozen air will break through the barrels of the Kingston. Constant emergencies have cooled the courtyard's interest in the underground masterpiece of science and technology. The subway began to become completely unusable.

In January 1917, when the capital of the Russian Empire exploded with revolutionary unrest, Nicholas II fled to Headquarters closer to the combat units. At that moment, the Tsarskoye Selo metro, partly submerged and overgrown with moss, could still be used to evacuate the royal family, but some of its sections could only be overcome by swimming.

By May 1, 1917, all the side tunnels of the most secret facility in Russia had been surveyed and looted, including the gold reserve storage of the House of Romanovs near Parnassus and the underground bunker of Nicholas II under the building of the Chinese Theater. The last mayor of Tsarskoe Selo A. Ya. Nodia and the last Petrograd governor-general of the Socialist-Revolutionary BV Savinkov argued that there was nothing of value in the underground storage. But the testimony of the Tsarskoye Selo old-timer Leonid Petrovich Panurin testifies that this is not so.

Panurin's father served as a warrant officer in the Tsarskoye Selo commandant regiment and took part in the survey of subway tunnels. According to him, the vault under Parnassus Hill was filled to the ceiling with fake foreign currency, mainly dollars and British pounds sterling. The fakes were beautifully executed.

Five trucks loaded with counterfeit money drove off in the direction of Petrograd on April 19, 1917, but got stuck near the village of Kupchino. In a report to the Tsarskoye Selo Soviet of Deputies, Ensign Danilov and Lieutenant Rozhkov stated that the counterfeit currency was simply burned on the spot so as not to waste precious gasoline on useless paper. In fact, the counterfeit currency entered the party cashier of the Social Revolutionaries, about which there is also a report and a record on the acceptance of "tsarist junk" dated April 20, 1917. In the hands of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, both printing houses were also found, which printed counterfeit currency. Governor Savinkov took care of this.

In the wake of this money, the KGB of the USSR pursued the Social Revolutionaries until the very collapse of the Union. Former KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in 1984 offered the remnants of the Socialist-Revolutionary elite to reveal the secret of such receipts to the party treasury in exchange for the rehabilitation of their party and even the abolition of the sixth article in the USSR Constitution. Andropov's letter with this proposal is kept in the archive of the Socialist-Revolutionary emigration.

While the royal family was kept under house arrest in the Alexander Palace, they had some, albeit small, chance to escape through the subway tunnels. Alas, the secret of the Tsarskoye Selo metro ceased to be a secret before it was possible to plan the escape of the Romanovs. In mid-March 1917, unprecedented measures were taken to protect the former emperor and his family, everything that could be taken was taken under protection. Nevertheless, on March 16, 1917, a small group of monarchists made a desperate attempt to break through to the Alexander Palace through the tunnels that had not yet been opened. The result was disastrous. Part of the group was consumed by the smoke that covered the subway tunnels. Another part of the conspirators on the way to the basements of the Alexander Palace came under high voltage from the electrical wiring flooded with water.

Engineer LB Krasin, appointed director of the Tsarskoye Selo palace power plant in the name of the revolution, spoke about this attempt to free the tsarist family to VI Lenin.

“Someday we will swing and build a subway under the Moscow Kremlin,” Ilyich dropped with a devilish gleam in his eyes and explained that the Germans were demanding the transfer of the Russian capital to Moscow.

The question of building a metro in Moscow became on the agenda after Lenin's death. In May 1931, a state commission headed by Lazar Kaganovich himself arrived in the former Tsarskoye Selo to get acquainted with the tsarist underground. By his arrival, the Tsarskoye Selo subway was brought into a divine form. We pumped out water, replaced old cables, some sleepers and rails. Knowing the special weakness of the Kremlin dreamers for all kinds of bunkers, the local authorities prepared a special route, which was to begin at the gates of a small concrete bunker built next to the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. In the bunker there was a huge bowl of silver, in which drinking water for the royal court was once settled. The tunnel flooding mechanism was also located here.

Lazar Moiseevich's excursion through the tunnels of the tsarist metro ended with an unusual proposal - to test the mechanism of their flooding. The tunnels were flooded in half an hour to the laughter of those present. Later, Stalin forgave Kaganovich for this trick: the first in Russia was to be the Soviet metro. On May 13, 1935, the newly launched section of the Moscow Metro was named after the pioneer Lazar Kaganovich.

In 1946, when in the former Tsarskoye Selo a talented company of local historians gathered, trying to help the state solve the mystery of the disappearance of the Amber Room from the Catherine Palace, the search engines became interested in the secrets of the Tsarskoye Selo metro. However, the topic was closed by itself. After the war, closed military organizations were located in the Alexander and Catherine Palaces, and concrete plugs appeared in the places where vertical wells emerged.

Already in the era of perestroika, the most innocent notes in the local press about the strange house number 14 on Pushkinskaya Street ended in a scandal. The official opinion of the “experts” read: there are no tunnels on the territory of Aleksandrovsky Park, there have never been and cannot be, because there is no one to tinker with them and nothing for …

But in 1997, the famous Tsarskoye Selo psychic Mikhail Fedorovich Milkov discovered the tunnels and put them on the plan of Alexander Park. He determined their width, height and depth. The very first publication about the discovery of Milkov in the St. Petersburg weekly "UFO-Kaleidoscope" aroused great public interest, and a threatening bell rang in the administration of the Tsarskoye Selo reserve …

For some of the officials, the flooded Tsarskoye Selo metro is just an extra headache. But the tsarist underground is not only a unique technical facility, but also a monument to the history of our state. His research can provide a basis for a completely new view of Tsarskoe Selo in the history of scientific and technological progress in Russia. After all, it was it that laid the foundation for two most important projects for our country: the first Tsarskoye Selo railway in Russia and the world's first electric subway!

Magazine "Miracles and Adventures", №3 / 2000