An abandoned military science institution ⋆ Russian Urban Exploration

Today’s post is about a rather curious and fascinating location. This is a huge academic building with dozens of labs, testing benches, departments, workshops and offices that was abandoned not so long ago.

At first we pass about a dozen identical rooms in order to see what’s behind them. Turns out that it’s a great hall with a beautiful fake stained glass window on the ceiling.

I won’t go into detail about those rooms, I’ll just say that the interiors consisted mainly of desks like the one on the photo with piles of books on them.

A beautiful, although typical staircase connects the floors.

We keep exploring the building and enter a large hall. Apparently, it is one of the rare places where some of the metal structures have already been sawn apart by marauders.

We keep walking and then find ourselves in another hall. But this one is not empty, there’s a huge control panel inside!

One of the panels in the control room.

Here’s a shot showing the view the watch officer would have.

Let’s head into the next room. A chemical lab is located there. Honestly, we had never expected to see it here. And as usual, there are lots of chemical agents and chemical analysis equipment inside.

One of the devices.

In one of the shelf units there was a collection of chemical agents and aviation fuel samples.

Some more photos from the lab. You can see a consistency meter, a very curious device that serves for determining the viscosity level of some of the oil products.

And here’s the chalkboard attached to one of the walls of the lab. You can see a comparative table of various aviation fuel properties on it.

After that we peeked inside some of the lecture halls.

Then we return to the main staircase and go down to the ground floor.

And here’s the ground floor and the main entrance hall, which is quite beautiful.

Judging by the calendars, the place became deserted about a year ago, though it may well be that someone stayed on to guard it for a while after. Currently there are no fresh signs of life.

We enter the hall and take a photo of the checkpoint. Above it there is a display that indicates if there is a drill or a call for assembly in case of an emergency or an important issue.

And now we’re going on a tour of the ground floor. This is the lab floor, and it is one of the most fascinating parts of this building.

In the first room we found workshops with machines. Here is one of them, a real beauty. It was manufactured by 3VG Miller Company, by the way.

And here is another machine that we found somewhere close to the workshops.

If you go a bit further into the corner room, you will discover a huge storage of old mag tapes on bobbins that were used in computing machines, and some floppy disks.

Then we enter the next lab. The first thing that attracts your attention is a curious input device looking like some kind of a typewriter.

There is also a control and performances measuring panel. But what was it that was studied in here?

Then we open the massive door and enter the chamber. Wow! It turns out that this whole lab was a training simulator for launching a aerodynamic turbine, and this is the turbine itself.

It was also made by a foreign manufacturer, the logo says “SSW”.