Togliatti, in Samara Oblast, Russia, is home to AvtoVAZ, the makers of Lada vehicles. The 2nd largest auto plant in the world churns out half a million Ladas per year, and employs around 60,000 people. I was fortunate enough to visit there on a business trip last year. However, just south of the auto plant is a museum unlike any I've visited before. It's basically a few fields of decaying Soviet military, space and railway hardware, with a smattering of civilian stuff thrown in too.
BEST MUSEUM IN THE WORLD EVER.
I can't put into words exactly how cool the AvtoVaz Technical Museum is, particularly for someone who grew up partly through the Cold War and wondered about all the crazy hardware the Soviet Military had available to them. They definitely did things their own way.
The museum covers 38 Hectares, and has everything short of aircraft carriers and Naval destroyers represented.
You can check out the aerial view of it here:
Googly maps
A 120 Ruble taxi ride from the hotel in an enthusiastically-driven Lada Priora took us to decaying Soviet military Mecca. Hundreds of tanks, guns, planes, helicopters, trains, ICBM launchers, Scud Missile Launchers and a frickin big Submarine all sitting amonst the long grass and the thistles and slowly returning to the earth. You can clamber over and into some of them, and generally get a pretty good impression of how bonkers and inventive the Soviets were back in the bad old days.
For example, need to lift really heavy stuff? Well, we already know how helicopters work, so let's just build really really big ones.
Need your plane to fly faster? Fit bigger engines.
Need to defend every square foot of a country that stretches from the arctic to the desert, over mountain ranges and across boggy ground that you can't cross by traditional means? Make stuff than can go anywhere.
There are vehicles there that I've seen on TV that I never thought I would get the chance to get close to. Now I've messed around like a child in a sweet shop, and all I want to do is go back and do it again tomorrow.
I took a lot of photos. There is no cropping or adjusting of these snapshots, just the raw experience of wandering around an appropriately dilapidated Soviet military Disneyland.
There is an old Railway building with steam trains and Soyuz capsules outside which contains a few oddities, like a variety of Lunar and Mars rovers which were never used, and a bunch of stuff thrown out of planes with parachutes attached. Trucks, Munitions, An armoured personnel carrier, all strapped up ready to be ejected. My personal favourite was the anti-aircraft gun. It had a crew of 4 who were strapped into seats and thrown out of the aircraft attached to the gun. 4 extra parachutes? What a waste of time and money. Far quicker to attach the men to the hardware and throw them all out together. Bonkers.
The only souvenir I bought there was a magazine about how they got the submarine into position. The Museum is a few miles inland from the massive Volga River, so once it was decommisioned and towed up the river it then had to be hauled out of the water by a team of military tractor units and dragged on a sled across country. Amazing. This happened a few years ago, so there is no longer any evidence of how it got there. It just looks like it was dropped from the sky (and yes, that is a torpedo sticking out the front).
Anyhoo, have a look at the following photos. If you're not amazed and impressed, you are not much of a man, frankly.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8103399...
My favourite Military Hardware museum. In the WORLD