Finding Shelter from Russia: A City Guide
February 26, 2022: Sadly, I can believe I am writing this. Since 5:00 am on February 24 there have been explosions in my native city Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. Its airports and residential neighborhoods, together with the rest of Ukraine, are under attack by Russia. There are many civilian victims and many newly minted military heroes. Like many Ukrainians, I grew up knowing that Russia would attack sooner or later. It has always attacked Ukraine—in 1918, in 1939, in 2014, with or without Putin in charge. So, I am not surprised, just disappointed that I am not there to help my elderly parents. Instead, I am scheming a way to get them out. And as they still have internet, I spent yesterday questioning them over various messengers and video chats to check out whether they will be able to use their apartment building’s basement during an attack.
If you are a civilian, a full-blown war in a densely populated city means looking for a bomb shelter. In Kyiv, with its still largely Soviet-era infrastructure, shelters come in several forms: basements of apartment buildings and public buildings, such as schools, as well as large street underpasses and subway stations. There are also newer types of shelters, such as underground parking structures.
Considering that the schools with their public shelters have been closed since the morning of the Russian attack, and underground parking structures are still a rarity, you will most likely end up either in the basement of an apartment building or in a subway station.
“If you are a civilian, a full-blown war in a densely populated city means looking for a bomb shelter.”
The subway shelters in older stations are a legacy of the Cold War. The oldest of them are heavy with classicist and Stalin-Empire Style elements: originally built in the 1940s and 1950s, they are unlike other subway systems in the world, designed primarily with utilitarian considerations (Figure 1). Of course, they are not as richly decorated as the stations in Moscow, because even in the supposed equality and friendship of peoples of the Soviet Union, only the Russian capital was entitled to major resources. The rest of the republics received cheaper copies. Nevertheless, Kyiv stations are decorated far beyond what one would expect from a transportation building, let alone a fall-out shelter. Kyiv is also home to the deepest subway station in the world, which was also expected to serve as a fallout shelter if needed: Metro Arsenal’na, 105.5 meters (346 ft) deep below the iconic Kyiv hills (Figure 2). I loved taking my friends visiting from abroad there to ride down the escalator, for many of them later remarked that it was one of their most memorable experiences in Kyiv.
Figure 2. Arsenal’na subway station in Kyiv, Ukraine, 1960. Photograph by user AMY 81-412, 2010, via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons CC BY-CA 3.0.
The only clues that give away the dual purpose of the old Kyiv subways stations are their gates; an attentive passerby will notice the seams on the floor and in the walls so that, when necessary, the hermetic doors may close, shutting out the outside world. In Kyiv, since the war started in 2014, such gates have once again begun being checked and regularly maintained. They no longer are forgotten remnants of a mid-twentieth century conflict that never happened, but a realistic everyday need for the imminent turn of events. On February 25th, people started taking shelter in these old stations, for the first time since they were built in the 1940s and 1950s with this secondary purpose in mind.
Figure 3. Bomb shelter map of Kyiv, by Kyiv City administration using Google Maps.
The basements in residential buildings are equally Soviet. Built right after World War II or following the launch of Khrushchev’s housing campaign in the 1950s, these buildings all adhered to the same standards of construction. They were often a part of serial production, where all buildings within a “series”—a set of construction documents, material and other technological specifications—were developed to be mass-produced as identical apartment blocks. With small variations such series could be exported elsewhere around the Soviet Union, producing very similar residential cityscapes no matter where one went. All of these buildings were built with basements. During the Soviet times, they were usually used as storage space, or for various liminal functions semi-invisible to the state. For instance, such basements often hosted unofficial weightlifting gyms or teen gatherings, and, later in the 1990s, were a place where the homeless would shelter from the elements. In any case, these basements are omnipresent. That is why a map of shelters in Kyiv looks like this (Figure 3):
“Considering that the schools with their public shelters have been closed since the morning of the Russian attack, and underground parking structures are still a rarity, you will most likely end up either in the basement of an apartment building or in a subway station.”
The only problem is that in the entrepreneurial 1990s and 2000s, these residential basements became a perfect place for small businesses. Many of these basements transitioned from “non-living space” status inside residential buildings to “commercial use.” They acquired new entrances, new windows and window grills, and iron gates and keyed entries (Figures 4 and 5). They hosted offices, bars, and hair salons. The one in my parent’s building still hosts a business that has always perplexed me: the publisher of a funeral industry trade paper titled Ritual. Yesterday, my father got a hold of the Ritual’s publisher and was able to retrieve the keys to their office so now my parents and their neighbors can actually use the nearest shelter when the sirens go off. I hope this 80-year-old basement withstands what is coming, because the nearest subway station to my parents is a 20-minute walk.
Figure 4. Metal ownings over the windows of a basement in an apartment building. Photograph by Kateryna Malaia, 2016.
Figure 5. Stalin-era apartment building stairwell: the blue door on the right leads to the basement; the brown door on the left leads up to the apartments. Photograph by Kateryna Malaia, 2016.
I hope the other private endeavors nestled in these basements are equally willing to let go; for the people of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Odesa, Chernihiv, Mariupol, Dnipro, Lviv, and the rest of Ukraine’s cities, towns, and villages need them. Only four Ukrainian cities have a subway system, so the basements we inherited from the Soviet Union are all we have.
I hate to think that the only thing left of my city if Russians go all the way and use nuclear weapons will be these Stalin-era stations. I hate to think that all that will be left of us will be ghosts of the Russian colonial past. Like a nightmare, it is the past we keep trying to escape, but it just will not let go.
Author’s note: This essay is not intended as a historic overview of architectural forms. It is rather a war-tilted and urgent angle on the nature of an urban environment in my native city and country under the Russian attack.
