“Pure Tarkovsky. You could have filmed Stalker here,” recalls journalist and ethnographer Eugenijus Bunka, remembering his first steps into the secret underground nuclear missile base hidden in the Plokštinė forest, near Lake Plateliai, just three days after it was abandoned by Soviet troops in 1979.
Rapid construction
Work on the Plokštinė underground silo-based missile base began in September 1960 and took around two years. Some 10,000 Soviet soldiers, drawn from across the USSR, were deployed here.
“They deliberately sent workers from places like Estonia and Kazakhstan,” explains Judita Šatkauskienė, who was born and grew up nearby and now works as a guide at the Cold War Museum.
“Why Estonians? Because they always struggled with foreign languages – the idea was to stop them from talking with locals,” she explained.
The troops cleared 12 hectares of forest near Lake Plateliai and dug four silos, each 30 metres deep. Between them, a two-storey bunker was built, containing a control room, a back-up power station, a communications hub and living quarters.
The entire underground complex was watertight. Under normal conditions, its personnel could survive there for 15 days; in sealed conditions, with the silo hatches closed, for up to three hours.
A 2.5-kilometre pipeline was laid from Lake Plateliai to supply water to the base.
On the surface, a small garrison town was built with around 20 buildings – barracks, officers’ quarters, garages, a power station, a medical post and even a farm with 60 pigs.
The Cold War arsenal in Lithuania
Plokštinė was one of the first underground missile bases of its kind in the Soviet Union, and the only one built in Lithuania. Together with nearby ground-based launch sites, it formed part of the USSR’s nuclear strike force in the region, capable of devastating Europe.
The SS-4 ballistic missiles deployed here, armed with two-megaton thermonuclear warheads, had a range of around 2,000 kilometres. At various times, their targets included West Germany, Britain, Norway, Turkey, Denmark, Spain and other European countries.
Each missile was more than 100 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Total secrecy
The Plokštinė forest was deemed by the Soviets the ideal location for an underground missile complex. Its sandy soil made it suitable for digging deep shafts, the nearby Lake Plateliai provided water for cooling, and, sitting some 180 metres above sea level, the site would have required less fuel for rocket launches.
The forested surroundings offered excellent concealment. Soviet troops ensured the Plokštinė missile base remained hidden not only from locals but also from Western intelligence.
Signs of this secrecy are evident even before reaching the museum. The narrow road leading to the former base remains paved with cracked concrete slabs – deliberately designed so that grass could sprout through the gaps, disguising the entrance from American satellites. The winding route itself also had a purpose: to make it harder for enemy aircraft to target convoys approaching the site.
The base was ringed by six fences and a fine wire mesh, six metres wide, laid flat on the ground. During the day it carried 220 volts; at night, some 1,700 volts surged through it.
But such defences failed to deter local curiosity.
“We all knew it was a military unit, we knew it was a missile base. As a child, I used to pick blueberries near here with my grandmother. We even came right up to the first barbed-wire fence. Beyond that, there was always a line of soldiers shouting in Russian: ‘Get out of here – forbidden!’” recalls Judita Šatkauskienė, who grew up nearby and is now a guide at the Cold War Museum.
She remembers that soldiers often went further than warnings. One museum visitor once told her how, as a student, he had come to observe birds near Plateliai. While using binoculars, he was suddenly confronted by soldiers, who detained him for three days to check he really had been looking at birds. They never returned his binoculars.
Troops also guarded the convoys that moved military equipment into the forest at night. Lorries rumbled from the Šateikiai surface missile base some 20 kilometres away, passing through villages such as Gintališkė, Plateliai and Beržoras.
Šatkauskienė recalls one childhood memory vividly.
“We were told to stay indoors when the convoys passed. Curtains drawn, lights off. But my cousin and I – one ten years old, the other about fifteen – couldn’t resist peeking. We thought, ‘Nobody will see us.’ Suddenly soldiers surrounded the house and pounded on the windows. We dropped to the floor in fright. Later, our parents scolded us severely – though nothing worse happened.”
Residents were frequently instructed not only to draw curtains but also to shut windows. Alongside vehicles carrying military kit, the convoys transported rocket fuel – a toxic kerosene whose fumes could escape from sloshing tankers.
“Three breaths of that and tuberculosis of the bones was virtually guaranteed,” recalls Eugenijus Bunka, a local journalist and historian who has lived in Plateliai since his youth.
Encounters with soldiers
Because of the extreme secrecy, residents rarely saw the soldiers stationed at Plokštinė itself. But troops from the nearby Šateikiai base were a more regular presence.
“They would come into the villages looking for strong drink,” says Šatkauskienė.
When she was about ten, one such visit came to her family’s yard.
“A small lorry pulled up, covered in canvas. An officer and a driver climbed out. ‘Have you got anything?’ they asked.
My mother replied, ‘No.’
They kept pressing her in Russian.
Then one soldier turned to me: ‘Would you like to hold a Kalashnikov? Aim it like this. Point it somewhere.’ And I pointed it at my mother.”
She laughs now, but at the time it was frightening. The soldier merely warned her never to do such a thing again. Others, however, were less fortunate. Bunka remembers how one soldier, drunk after visiting a village, froze to death after falling asleep on a tree stump.
A treasure trove
By 1978, American reconnaissance satellites had pinpointed the base’s location. Its secrecy compromised, the Soviets dismantled the nuclear missiles, removed the toxic fuel and, in 1979, abandoned the site.
For locals, the deserted complex became a treasure trove.
When the troops withdrew, Eugenijus Bunka was among the first locals to step inside the abandoned missile base. Before they left, Soviet soldiers had welded the doors shut, but several men from Plateliai cut through the metal and entered the bunker, shrouded in darkness.
“Now it looks like a three-star hotel,” Bunka remarks as he walks through the underground galleries of what is today the Cold War Museum.
But his first encounter with the site was anything but polished.
“All the equipment was still in place, but there was no electricity. We went in with torches and candles. The corridor leading to the silo had loose, rattling metal floors. Every step echoed. Cables trailed beneath the floor and across the walls. The light was dim, barely enough to see. It was like something out of Tarkovsky. You could have filmed Stalker there,” he recalls.
Before long, the deserted base became a goldmine for villagers in Plateliai and the surrounding area.
“The soldiers left, welded the doors shut and vanished. But everything was still there – desks, instruments, cables, generators. The tunnel walls were lined with cables, generators everywhere,” says Bunka.
For years afterwards, locals stripped the underground complex of anything useful.
“Fourteen years they hauled it all out,” adds museum guide Judita Šatkauskienė. “If the collective farm workshop needed metal – they went there. A sawmill needed timber supports – there. Tiles, switches, engines, generators – everything was taken.”
Today, few authentic artefacts remain. The site was emptied by villagers and scrap dealers long ago.
But visitors to the Cold War Museum can still walk the narrow underground passages, peer into the empty missile silos, and learn not only about the great stand-off between East and West, but also about the lives of the soldiers once stationed in one of the Soviet Union’s most secret installations.
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