Flugplatz in Tukums

A former military commander, Aivars Skurstenis, got in touch with Neatkarīgās Tukuma Ziņas and came in for a very frank discussion. He was a reserve officer and a member of the Home Guard, and in 1993, he was offered a job as a guard at the Durbe agricultural company, where he was instructed to guard the little building in which the company’s offices were. That’s where the story begins.

Skurstenis: I’d worked there for less than a month when people came from the Defence Ministry to talk about guard services. The Russian army was still at the airfield. They offered me the job of commander of a guard division, and a month later I was made a deputy officer and approved as the commander of the unit. The minister, Dainis Turlais, signed the documents. In 1996, I was sent to Denmark for some training. Afterward, the Armed Forces and the Home Guard were merged. Juris Dalbiņš was appointed commander of the Armed Forces thanks to pressure from the Home Guard. That’s a bit of history.
We brought the first unit of soldiers to the airfield on October 12, 1993, although a group of instructors had been working there for some time before. The Russian army was still controlling the airfield at that time. The Durbe agricultural company took over all of the oil facilities of the airfield, as well as the headquarters of the airfield’s commander.
There were three fences around the so-called “deaf and dumb” unit – one made of boards, and two made of barbed wire. There were two hangars there where nuclear warheads might have been kept, but it is more likely that they were storing uranium-enriched bombs instead (uranium enhances the explosive capacity of bombs). Their purpose was to destroy specific objects, and the Americans used such bombs in 1991 in the Persian Gulf War. Nuclear warheads, for their part, were used for medium-range and similar missiles. They were fired from shafts or mobile firing equipment. Near the barracks at the airfield was a lead-covered hangar which might have contained short or medium-range missiles. They could have carried nuclear warheads, but the territory was not in the zone that we were guarding, and the lead plates were all stolen. If there was any radiation there, those who stole the lead might well be six feet under at this point.
Colonel Kārlis Kīns, who was a specialist in this area, claimed that there was a mobile missile firing system at the airfield, but only until the late 1970s. When Gorbachev came to power and concluded several arms reduction treaties, the Russians hoped to cheat the Westerners. In just a few days’ time, bomber pilots and others were dressed in naval aviation uniforms (the pilots made a lot of fun about the process). It didn’t work. Arms had to be reduced anyway.

Q: What do you know about the “deaf and dumb” unit?

A: There were two hangars there with equipment to maintain a specific temperature. There, unlike elsewhere, the entrance was behind a wall of cement blocks. Warheads for missiles might have been stored there.

Q: And right alongside was the airbase automobile facility?

A: There was a warehouse, but it was not there to store munitions. Instead, it was probably used to assemble missiles. Now, when it comes to whether the Russians left anything buried in the ground, I can tell you that when I took over the guard unit at the airfield, I was a student at the National Defence Academy. Captain Gunārs Opmanis, who was a professional chemist, taught us about weapons of mass destruction. He was interested in the airfield, because I told him that the Russians had left behind protective clothing and major stores of litmus. On another occasion, Colonel Kīns arrived for an inspection of the lockers in the facility. We found machine gun shells with bullets. Soldiers had found them at headquarters!
Captain Opmanis and I walked all across the airfield and did not find any increase in background radiation anywhere. There was one hillock behind the warehouses which might have been dangerous. You got dizzy if you stayed there too long. Captain Opmanis said that that was probably not radiation, it was more likely that chemicals of some kind had been buried there. We protected the location very carefully, because there was a whole warehouse of used protective apparel against chemicals. There was a white brick building with metal barrels and liquid to wash that apparel. Local schoolboys tried to steal the liquid, because it stank horribly, and if you dumped some at school ... well, there would be no classes that day.
While I was in Denmark, the man who replaced me, Captain Tisļonoks, ordered men to bury the barrels. They’re probably rusted now, and the ground around them must be polluted. Specialists should take a look at this matter. Captain Opmanis conducted chemical analysis of the contents of the barrels and said that there were various chemicals there. There was ammonium chloride, which is used by gardeners. There was dichloramine T, which is a disinfectant. There were chloramines, known as soap medicine, and there were barrels of an industrial solvent. We don’t know what these were used for. I might add that there was some increased background radiation at the “deaf and dumb” unit. There was a building with lots of reserve parts for aircraft. Captain Opmanis, just out of interest, checked the manometer of one of the aircraft cabins and, much to his surprise, found a considerably higher level of background radiation. Interestingly, there was no additional radiation on the screen of the manometer. Apparently there were radioactive elements inside it.

Q: I’ve heard that when the Russian military was departing, soldiers were trying to sell everything that they could find.

A: Absolutely, including their old trucks. I was offered a 5.45 mm machine gun with 300 bullets for 130 lats, complete with Russian documentation. 130 lats was a lot of money at that time. They were selling a generator that could ensure power for an entire military unit for 70 lats. Those who were living in Jauntukums moved everything to their garages, and once the army left, they tried to sell all kinds of things.
The war in Chechnya was beginning at that time, and Russia “wrote off” a great deal of weaponry because of it. I’ve heard that there were land-to-air missiles in Chechnya. What were the Chechens using? They were using Russian-made weapons, and their supply lines kept expanding.
Many of the little gray men at our own Defence Ministry had only economic interests. A good example was a company established under the wing of the ministry, the Rabarberi company, which supposedly produced mineral water at the airfield. (During that period, we found wooden barrels and several thousand bottles of the type used for vodka, not mineral water, on the site – Editor). My boys watched everything with their binoculars. One night an entire railroad cistern was buried into the ground. We became undesirables – we were too careful in guarding what we were told to guard.

Q: Did the Russian officers tell you what was stored at the airfield?

A: Sometimes. There was an old man called Mikhailich, he was a cook and a smart man. He said that in the 1960s, there was thought given to the storage of nuclear weapons in Tukums. A hangar was built, but that was that. He had no information about the “deaf and dumb” unit, he could only say that that was a country within a country. You needed a special pass even to enter their territory. Mikhailich said that there was a facility to assemble land to air missiles, because they had to be assembled before they could be used or tested.

Q: I was surprised to see cement guard towers around the “deaf and dumb” unit, with gun slots all around.

A: The airfield wasn’t the only place where there were such towers. There was another one on the side of the Ventspils highway. There were lots of towers of that kind.

Q: What do you know about underground passageways or bunkers? There have been so many stories about them.

A: I haven’t seen any myself, but I have heard that munitions were stored underground. After the Russians left, the airfield was taken over by the Latvian authorities, and if there were any underground bunkers, they’ve been sealed off now. The commander of the airfield during Soviet times was not a man who wanted to sit in a simple headquarters building. Legends at that time said that there was an underground passage from headquarters to the “deaf and dumb” unit. Supposedly there was a little bunker down there. Some say that there was a 25-metre firing range underground, or that weapons were stored there. It may be that such passageways really did exist, but when we got there, there was nothing to suggest that it was so. Everything was very carefully sealed off and masked. Things were left for history.

Q: Surely when the Russians handed the airfield over to the Latvians, they also offered documentation about the communications systems that were there.

A: I’ve seen those documents. There was a whole list of inventory and its value, but there was absolutely nothing about communications systems. I think that the Russians were pretending to be friendly as they left, but the fact is that no army discloses its secrets. If there was anything major there, then it has been hidden very carefully.
At the same time, though, the collapse of the Soviet Union happened very suddenly, and the army had to withdraw from the Baltic States during a fairly brief period of time. And what exactly happened with strategically important airfields in Latvia? Just as soon as the army was preparing to go, private companies linked to Russia took over. Vasilijs Meļņiks – a millionaire who was an advisor to Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis. He finished aviation school, but as the Soviet Union was coming to an end, he became important in the port and shipbuilding industries. I think that that was Russia’s plan – putting its own people into strategically important positions so that they could destroy the various facilities. The Russians were not about to hand them over to another country’s army.
The transport airfield in Jēkabpils is an excellent example of this. The runway at the Tukums airfield could handle 1,600 tonnes per axle, which is very serious weight. The one at Jēkabpils could handle 1,900 tonnes per axle. And what happened? Jēkabpils was declared to be a reserve airfield, and it was taken over by a German company which, it soon proved, was linked to Russia. What do we know about the Jēkabpils airfield today? Nothing, because there is no airfield at Jēkabpils anymore. It used to be that every professional knew that the Tukums airfield was in much better condition than the one at Lielvārde, even though the government claimed the opposite. The airfield in Lielvārde was built on a swamp, and the drainage systems there are faulty. The airfield is sinking into the ground. The airfield at Lielvārde was also trashed, there were virtually no buildings at all, but it was declared to be more valuable than the Tukums airfield. That was true even though the hangars here in Tukums were in perfectly good order. We had fire-fighting equipment. One soldier accidentally turned it on once, and you should have seen the foam! Only the barracks and the central club were in shoddy shape. That didn’t make any difference, though – everything that had to do with the airfield as such was in ideal condition. (NATO is spending 31.5 million lats and the Defence Ministry is contributing 5.5 million lats to restore the runway and infrastructure at the Lielvārde airfield – Editor)
My guard unit was like a toothache to higher bosses. We thought that Latvia needed the airfield. We’d have jobs. We tried to protect everything. We brought all of the more or less useful furniture into a hangar, but then I was sent to Denmark, and everything was stolen from the hangar. We listed everything that was stolen, including plates from the runway itself, we caught the thieves, we wrote down the license plate numbers of their cars, and we informed our commanders. And then we were told that it had all been done with approval.

Q: So does that mean that the Defence Ministry was corrupt and took decisions that did not serve the interests of Latvia?

A: I have never said so, and I could not prove it, but the fact is that every single defence minister since the restoration of independence has visited the supposedly unimportant airfield in Tukums, to say nothing of commanders from the Armed Forces – Dainis Turlais and Juris Dalbiņš. You know the political parties which Turlais represents today. (In the local government election he represented the party of Ainārs Šlesers, before which he had been an MP representing two leftist parties; he attracted press criticism for organising the Interior Ministry’s sports games in Kandava on June 14, which is a day of national mourning in Latvia – Editor) And do we know who Laimonis Mucenieks, director of the now-bankrupt Durbe agricultural company, really was or what he’s doing today? He was a simple driver from Jelgava. How on earth did he get the right to destroy the airfield? Why did he live in Jūrmala, in a hotel that was financed by Russia?