Russia stokes nuclear-war frenzy at home amid mass production of mobile shelters

By Murad Rakhimov | 2025-01-15

TASHKENT -- Russia is ordering the mass production of mobile bomb shelters as part of Moscow's continued efforts to whip up domestic fear and hysteria over its threats to launch a nuclear war.

The move comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin steps up his nuclear-war rhetoric amid his army's mounting losses in Ukraine, and as aid from the United States and the European Union to Kyiv remains steadfast.

In addition, Russia updated its military doctrine in the past year, deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus and enacted a new national regulation mandating the conversion of apartment buildings' basements into bomb shelters.

54 people in a cube

In November, RIA Novosti reported that an enterprise in Nizhny Novgorod province had begun mass production of modular mobile shelters procured by the Ministry of Emergency Situations (MChS).

The structure, known as a "KUB-M," is designed to protect civilians from the shock wave and optical radiation of a nuclear explosion, radioactive contamination and penetrating radiation, according to the report.

If there is danger of a retaliatory strike, 54 residents can take refuge in the shelter for up to two days, it added.

A year ago, a promotional video appeared online showing explosions, destruction, the shelter itself and MChS cadets evacuating into containers.

The portable shelter is a standard metal shipping container and has a simple interior with two tiers of benches along the walls, similar to a sleeper railway car.

Its "creature comforts" include two toilets with a 400-liter tank, a 440-liter drinking-water reservoir, a diesel generator and an air purification system.

The shelter's occupancy can be increased by adding new modules. Modules can also be connected to utility systems.

The manufacturer has not announced expected pricing for its products, but similar shelters are already available online for 38 million RUB (about €358,000).

False hopes of permanent peace

Sanat Meliboyev, a Kokand, Uzbekistan, resident born in 1973, recalled his formative years in Soviet times.

Meliboyev remembers his older sister crying when Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's death was announced on television in November 1982. She cried because she believed a war would inevitably begin the next day.

"In the early 1980s, we lived with the idea that a nuclear war with the United States was unavoidable," said Meliboyev, who now teaches music at the Kokand campus of Uzbek State Institute of Arts and Culture.

But the mood changed throughout the 1980s as perestroika and glasnost reshaped the Soviet Union.

"The time when I grew up -- it was the late 1980s -- was a great time ... [W]e naively thought that [final Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev had eliminated even the possibility of nuclear war," Meliboyev said.

"It turns out that he only delayed it. ... [I]t pains me to see the current masters of the Kremlin rattling their nuclear weapons again."

Reactivating old bunkers

Russia still has a large number of traditional underground bomb shelters, although most of them are from the Soviet era. Since 95% of them were completed before 1993, many have seriously deteriorated or have fallen into disuse.

After the warming of US-Soviet ties that Meliboyev experienced, the threat of nuclear war waned and authorities deemed the shelters unnecessary.

Some were rented by entrepreneurs, who converted them into warehouses and even opened nightclubs. Others were privatized, perhaps illegally, as the Russian authorities now say.

The Russian Accounts Chamber kept records and published data until 2016, when it found 16,448 "civil defense facilities and protective structures" throughout Russia. That number included bomb shelters.

Authorities remembered them five months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. In July 2022, the Russian Finance Ministry announced an imminent inventory of protective structures.

The purpose of the inventory was to understand whether old bomb shelters could be returned to service and to identify who owned or was responsible for them.

Two months later, the Finance Ministry even proposed compelling ordinary Russians to renovate the shelters at their own expense.

War hysteria, graft

Officials might be exploiting simultaneously war hysteria and the chance to make some money from it, said a Russian anthropologist and historian who wished to remain anonymous.

The feverish rhetoric is propaganda for now, but it could be transformed into real policy, he said.

"Some provincial officials will make a fortune from all of this," he told Global Watch, referring to the various bureaucratic approvals needed to build or modernize bomb shelters.

Dmitry Dubrovsky, a lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague, agreed.

Mega-construction comes with mega-corruption in Russia, he said.

"It is obvious to me that [the new set of shelters] will not be in Moscow or St. Petersburg but in other places. Otherwise, the construction in large cities would make them look like Albania, where numerous bunkers from the time of dictator Enver Hoxha have been preserved," he told Global Watch.

The current frenzy over renovating or building bomb shelters is "performative," he added.

Still, Moscow home buyers in 2022 learned from real estate advertisements about the presence of a bunker in their residential building or about nearby shelters, according to a Kommersant article entitled "Real Estate in Troubled Times."