Forbidden City of Oil Platforms: The Rise and Fall of Stalin's Atlantis

[sysop]

In the 1950s, Soviet engineers built a massive city in the Caspian Sea off the coast of Azerbaijan. It was a network of oil platforms linked by hundreds of kilometers of roads and housing 5,000 workers, with a cinema, a park and apartment blocks. Gradually disintegrating but still closely guarded, this astonishing place inspired a fiery scene in a James Bond movie.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-867055.html

[powermeerkat]

Those who complain about Soviet-made pollution in the Caspian should look at the predicament of fast disappearing Aral Sea. Or heavily polluted Baikal Lake.

Not to mention an incredible ecological and human disaster caused in Kazakhstan' huge Semipalatinsk area by hundreds of Russian nuclear tests. (many atmospheric).

Or pollution in Baikonur rocket launch area (leased to Moscow), with hundreds of not completely spent missile stages littering the landscape.

[just as across the border - in putinesque new improved Russia.]