The area under Moscow is a fascinating and dangerous place. I have discussed this before. Let me recap for those of you that don't know what I am talking about. If one is a felon then he or she is officially banned from entering Moscow. I find this law very strange but it seems to be enforced. With all the other cities in Russia I don't really understand why someone would risk jail by entering the city, but they do it.

Under the city of Moscow are many tunnels and catacombs. Some of them are occupied by people that live down there. From what I have heard, it is a horrible place where people are murdered for the smallest of objects. The criminal element down there has even tunneled through certain areas to make it convenient for them to dump the bodies. Apparently they will kill someone, maybe for his shoes, and drag the body to the new tunnel they dug out and throw the body in it. Living under a city is not so unusual, we see this all over the world, but the criminal element living under Moscow is particularly vicious.There are also poor people down there that are not killers or thieves but their lives must be hell.

Moscow itself is 859 years old. It celebrated it's 850 anniversary in 1997. I don't think that anyone truly knows how many layers are piled upon each other, but there are underground explorers who have been going down under Moscow since they were children. They claim that there are as many as 12 levels under the city in some areas and at least 6 levels everywhere. Contrary to what some people believe, old Moscow was a wooden city. The only stone structures were the palaces and churches. There were plenty of fires in Moscow and finally a huge one burnt down the old city. A series of reinforced and fortified monasteries were constructed to defend Moscow in the 1500s. The most famous of these is Novodevichiy Convent, built in 1524. Hardly any wooden buildings survive today from old Moscow but there are a few.

When our explorer friends decided to go under the city, they discovered ways into the metro tunnels as well. They found old sewer systems, drainage tunnels and many strange buildings. They talk about finding their way into what turned out to be a warehouse under the ground that contained huge tanks filled with preserved marine life. I'm sure that finding this was a surprise. As with cities like New York, there are palaces under moscow that have electricity and heat. When I talk about New York City I am referring to the vault type rooms under areas like Wall St. that have steam pipes going through them and electrical wires that can be tapped. The explorers are now complaining of finding more and more bodies of dismembered people in their travels. The crime rate under the city seems to be rising.

The explorers feel that the secure city of Moscow is vulnerable from below. They have stated that if they enter the metro they can get behind escalators and there are tunnel from there that lead all over the city. They even claim that there are tunnels that are under the secure Kremlin. The Kremlin is one of the most secure areas of Russia.

Will the people under the streets of Moscow stage a revolution? Boy this seems far fetched, but the underground explorers don't think so. They claim that they have seen paramilitary groups in camouflage uniforms under the city. To make matters worse, these groups all wore masks. What could they possibly be doing under the city? It certainly looks like the time for the Russians to clean out the area below the city before they have a lot of trouble on their hands. There is an obvious question that has to be asked here, could these uniformed men be part of the Russian military? Maybe they are and are on some secret mission. You can never be sure what is really going on.

There is so much under the city that it is mind boggling. We haven't even touched upon the fact that there are many bomb shelters and command posts under the city. A person could spend his entire life exploring the area under Moscow. The problem is that his life might be a short one. The explorers even claim to have found torture chambers most likely belonging to old Moscow. Our intrepid explorers believe that there may be a mass grave from the Stalin area under the city, but it still would be political suicide to open it. The explorers claim that they come across strange things under Moscow from time to time. On one of their excursions they came across a group of people dressed in monk's robes that were walking around a stone altar and singing. These people left quickly upon being discovered.

There have been tunnels under Moscow for hundreds of years and living under the city is nothing new. Weapons such as maces and old knives have been found that prove this. There are skeletons and bones in many different sections of tunnels dating back hundreds of years. We have two different cultures in Moscow, those of the city dwellers and those of the underground ones.