By ROMANS KOKSAROVS and GARY PEACH, Associated
Press Writers Romans Koksarovs And Gary Peach,
Associated Press Writers – Fri Feb 5,
3:44 pm ET
SKRUNDA, Latvia – Latvia sold a deserted town built around a Soviet-era
radar station to a Russian investor who bid $3.1 million at an
unusual auction Friday, officials said.
The town formerly known as Skrunda-1 housed about 5,000 people
during the Cold War but was
abandoned over a decade ago after the Russian military withdrew
from Latvia following the Soviet collapse.
A representative of a Russian investor won the bidding contest
in Latvia's capital, Riga, with an offer of 1.55 million lats ($3.1
million), said Anete Fridensteina-Bridina, a spokeswoman for the
Baltic country's privatization
agency. She said the buyer was Aleksejevskoje-Serviss, a
Russia-based firm, though she could
not provide details.
It wasn't immediately clear what plans the buyer had for the
110-acre (45 hectare) property, which is located in western Latvia
about 95 miles (150 kilometers) from Riga. The town contains about
70 dilapidated buildings, including apartment blocks, a school,
barracks and an officers' club.
Built in the 1980s, Skrunda-1 was a secret settlement not marked
on Soviet maps because of the two enormous radar installations that
listened to objects in space and monitored the skies for a U.S.
nuclear missile attack. Like all
clandestine towns in the Soviet Union, it was kept off maps and given a code-name
— which usually consisted of a number and the name of a nearby
city.
After the Soviet Union fractured in 1991, a newly independent
Latvia was eager to scuttle all Soviet military bases and expel Russian troops. Russia's Defense
Ministry, however, continued to rely on Skrunda's early warning
system, and as a result the radar base was for years used as a
negotiation tool between Washington and Moscow.
One of the radar buildings — dubbed Pechora — was enormous,
soaring 60 meters (180 feet). In May 1995, it was ceremoniously
blown up by a U.S. demolition firm using over a ton of
dynamite.
Finally, in 1998 the last residents of Skrunda-1 departed,
leaving behind hundreds of vacant apartments and dozens of
buildings. Talk about transforming the town into a recreational
area went nowhere, and finally two years ago Latvia's government
decided to put the entire settlement on the auction block.
Sarmite Stradniece, a resident of Skrunda, which is 3 miles (5
kilometers) south of Skrunda-1, praised the idea to sell the former
military base. "They need to restore that
place and let some people live there," she said.
The fact that the town was sold to a Russian investor is bound
to bother nationalists in Latvia, who are leery of Russian capital
buying real estate in the tiny Baltic state, but privatizations officials insisted the
sale was a success.
"It fetched 10 times the starting price," Fridensteina-Bridina
said, "and finally something can be done with the town."
