ShortHand: Kapustin Yar – Russia's Area 51

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
In the arid reaches of southern Mother Russia, there is a place so top secret that for a long time, it technically didn't exist. It didn't appear on any maps. And the Soviet government educated an entire nearby town just to make sure none of the residents ever discovered its existence.
Officially, Kapustin Yar was one of the Soviet Union's most highly classified military testing sites for ballistic missiles after the Second World War, playing a crucial role in launching the Soviet space program. Do you know what Kapustin means in Russian?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:51)
No.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:53)
Cabbage.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:55)
What does Yar mean?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:57)
That I don't know. I only know Kapustin because it's my friend's surname.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:01)
Yar refers to a steep river bank or ravine.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:05)
Cabbage cliff.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:06)
So it will be like something, Yar. So yeah, it's basically like, yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:09)
Cabbage cliff.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:10)
Cabbage cliff.
Nothing to see here, boys. It's just old cabbage, cabbage cliff, cabbage creek, cabbage, cabbage.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:21)
Cabbage crevasse, cabbage space crater.
Anyway, unofficially, cabbage cliff was rumored to be something far stranger. An epicenter for extraterrestrial activity on the other side of the iron curtain. But this was Stalinist Russia, where anything that strayed from the party narrative could summon a KGB agent to your front door, let alone spinning a yarn about a flying saucer. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union that stories began to emerge. They described unexplainable aerial events, crashed UFOs and hidden underground laboratories at the secretive government base, and it earned the infamous nickname Russia's Area 51
So what really went on in the elusive skies above Kapustin Yar, and in its spooky rumored vaults below the ground? This is the declassified ShortHand.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:20)
In 1946, less than a year after the end of World War II, the Soviet military quietly claimed a remote patch of the Russian hinterland 500 miles south of Moscow. Far from prying eyes, Kapustin Yar was set up as a top-secret testing facility for V-2 rockets and other Nazi technology plundered from the wreckage of post-war Germany. And this being Soviet Russia, they took top secret to the next level, because Kapustin Yar and its nearest city technically didn't exist. That's right, the base and its surrounding area, including the town of Zemensk, which was built by the government for military personnel and their families, didn't appear on any official maps until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s.
Its operations were so closely guarded that in 1953, the government even forced the nearby village of Zuka to migrate when it was deemed too close for comfort.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:16)
So what exactly were the Soviets getting up to at Kapustin Yar for nearly half a century? From 1947 to 1957, it was the Soviet Union's only site for ballistic missile tests alongside nuclear technology development. It was also in many ways the birthplace of the Soviet space program, after the boffins there realized the same technology that shot nuclear warheads into sub-orbit could be used for satellites. And Kapustin Yar was actually the first place in the world to launch living creatures into space. In 1951, the brave Soviet patriots Desik and Gypsy, two well-trained canines, were launched from Kapustin Yar in an R-1 rocket.
The pups reached sub-orbit, achieved weightlessness for four minutes, and then fell back to earth with a parachute, and they survived.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:09)
And then they were shot in the head at Cabbage Creek, just in case they told anyone.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:18)
Sergei Korolev was the lead Soviet rocket engineer who came up with the idea, and Korolev was so excited when Desik and Gypsy landed safely that he grabbed them from their little spacecraft and ran all around Kapustin Yar with them, and then fed the very good girls some sausages and sugar. Sugar!

**SPEAKER_2** (4:39)
Why not?

**SPEAKER_1** (4:39)
Why not? I mean, if they've just survived space, they're going to survive a spoonful of sugar, aren't they? And it is the homecoming that poor Soviet space dog Lyka deserved but never got after she made her legendary orbit around the Earth in 1957 and perished out there in the cosmos.

**SPEAKER_2** (5:01)
But don't let the tales of these four-legged fur babies flying to the stars distract you. Because if you believe certain reports and rumours, and of course we do, that began to emerge after the fall of the Soviet Union, there were far stranger and more sinister things happening at Kapustin Yar during its glorious space race era. Think close encounters of the third kind. Cold War Russia style. But, as you might expect, those alleged close encounters wouldn't see the light of day if the KGB could help it.