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Locals Fight to Save Wooden Airport Terminal in Russia's Magadan

By The Moscow Times
The summer landscape in Russia's Magadan. Wikicommons

Authorities in northeastern Russia are under pressure to save a wooden airport terminal dating from World War II that could be razed in a government program to modernize aviation infrastructure in Russia's remote territories.

A reconstruction plan for the airfield, which is part of state-run enterprise Airports of the North, would destroy building, according to local news site MagadanMedia.ru.

But the local Civil Chamber has got wind of the plan and will lobby officials to make sure the building outside the village of Seimchan in the Arctic Magadan region will not be destroyed, the report said.

The Seimchan airport was built in 1942 — a year after Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union — as part of the Alaska-Siberian air road along which U.S.-built aircraft were flown into Russia under a lend-lease program for use on the eastern front.

Seimchan is the only one of the 26 airfields that made up the air road that survives, according to MagadanMedia.ru.

The Civil Chamber, an oversight committee without executive authority, will harry the local administration, Culture Ministry and military commissariat for information on the airport's fate and propose a plan to preserve the building, the report said.

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