Inside The Eerie Abandoned Underground Soviet City Under Tbilisi

The complex network of tunnels — some desiccated, some half-built, and some simply abandoned, includes a 50-unit bunker beneath the city airport and miles of corridors leading to airtight nuclear bomb shelters built during the days of the Soviet Union. My Modern Met reported the dark discovery of a collapsed tunnel built beneath the former Institute of Marxist-Leninism that apparently leads to a real-life prison under River Mtkvan. Could the tunnels have been used as a method of prisoner transport?

If so, it wasn't the only shady thing Stalin's regime was up to within the subterranean enclaves snaking beneath the streets of his birthplace. Stalin's Soviet regime was literally churning out mass volumes of propaganda from within the bowels of the city for years. Tbilisi was the base for Stalin's underground printing press, preserved today as a museum (via Atlas Obscura). Among the underground city's more innocuous structures is an abandoned water reservoir, looming empty and fractaled like an alien ship buried from modernity to conceal the secrets of its half-realized plans. While famous sites like this one have made it into the history books, what we've been told lies beneath the city is apparently but one very small segment of a much broader, deeper story where secrets lie at the end of abandoned tunnels, and perhaps are better left there.

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