![]() ![]() There are branded shoes from the West, for instance, and what could be Lego bricks – things that only a few people, such as Soviet officers with access to foreign currency, could buy under communist rule in the Eastern Bloc. Kiarszys says the waste is "completely different" from what you'd find in an ordinary Polish rubbish dump from the same era. Text on some of the items confirms their date and origin in the Soviet Union. (Read more: Garbology: How to spot patterns in people's waste.) At these isolated former bases, old pieces of uniform lie decaying in the leaf litter next to sweet wrappers, rubber ducks and toy telephones. ![]() Rubbish can tell you a lot about a person or community, a phenomenon called garbology. Kiarszys has seen photographic evidence confirming the presence of these families, but it was the ephemera and waste they left behind that revealed the most striking insights about how they lived while stationed there. "Commanding officers knew very well that, for their psychological health, it is very important to create an illusion of everyday peaceful life," says Grzegorz Kiarszys, an archaeologist at Szczecin University who has studied the ruins and rubbish piles at three long-abandoned Soviet nuclear weapons bases in north-western Poland.Įach of the three bases – Podborsko, Templewo and Brzeźnica Kolonia – was once home to around 140 people, mostly soldiers but also some officers whose immediate families were allowed to live there too. Their father laid out his uniform, the hammer and sickle button sparkling, while their mother sat down for a game of chess.īut they knew that beneath their feet, stored in utmost secrecy, were nuclear warheads, likely many times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The children brushed their teeth hurriedly after breakfast, then rushed outside to play soldiers with plastic pistols. At a Soviet military base deep in the Polish forest, miles from the nearest village, an officer's family was whiling away another Saturday morning. ![]()
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