When the Soviet Union had disintegrated, and Russian troops were finally leaving Latvia in 1994, much of the country’s hidden military infrastructure was suddenly exposed. Secret maps surfaced. Abandoned bases were opened. And in the middle of a vast pine forest near the Baltic Sea, one Latvian astronomer followed a rumor that had survived decades of secrecy.
Juris Zhagars and his wife, Gundega, climbed into their orange Lada in Riga and drove roughly 300 kilometers to Irbene, a former Soviet military outpost that had been home to about 2,000 soldiers, scientists and intelligence personnel.
They were expecting to find a giant radio telescope. What they encountered was something much stranger: a deserted Soviet settlement, stripped almost bare, and a 600-ton telescope that had once been among the most sophisticated instruments of its kind in the world.
A secret Soviet ghost town hidden in the Latvian forest
For decades, Irbene did not appear on ordinary maps as what it really was. The Soviet military installation was hidden deep in the forest, only about four kilometers from the Baltic Sea. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the existence of its enormous radio telescope was largely unknown outside the Soviet intelligence community.When Soviet forces began withdrawing from Latvia in 1993, Latvian officials received previously classified maps of their own territory.
One of those maps contained a deceptively ordinary label: “space-station mission control.” Zhagars suspected there was more to the location than met the eye.
He followed the clues and rumors of a huge radio telescope until he reached Irbene.
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What he found was almost a ghost town. The Soviet troops had gone. The power plants and cafés stood empty. Local residents had reportedly stripped the abandoned buildings of anything they could use. Windows had been removed and sold. Cold, deteriorating apartment blocks remained behind, occupied by a handful of squatters.
And then there was Little Star.
Rising above the surrounding pine forest was a massive radio telescope stretching roughly 50 meters into the Latvian sky. It weighed about 600 tons.
For Zhagars, the abandoned machine was not simply another Soviet relic. It was a scientific treasure.
The telescope was more than a Soviet spy machine
Little Star, known by its Russian nickname Zvozdochka, had been built as part of a network of Soviet electronic listening stations. Its primary purpose was highly strategic.
The telescope could listen to satellite communications between the United States and Europe, a Wall Street Journal report noted in 1999.
But according to Zhagars, its designer, scientist Boris Poperchenko, had given the instrument capabilities far beyond military surveillance.
The telescope could also focus on radio signals coming from distant galaxies. That meant the machine built behind the Iron Curtain to listen to communications could potentially be transformed into an instrument for studying the universe.
Zhagars believed it had once been “the best antenna in the world,” the WSJ report quotes. And he was determined not to let it disappear.
Soviet engineers tried to disable it before leaving
The telescope was already in terrible condition when Zhagars arrived. The departing Soviet team had deliberately damaged key components. Acid was poured onto the electronic motors that move the giant dish.
There was even a last-minute effort to prevent the telescope from being completely destroyed. Instead of becoming another abandoned military machine, Little Star was given a second chance.
Latvian authorities, with financial assistance from Swedish and Russian sources, began working toward restoring it. Zhagars contributed something the project had in abundance: his own time and labor.
The repairs were slow. The electronics and computer systems were outdated. Major infrastructure remained in poor condition. The telescope could not immediately return to its former capabilities. But it began working again, not perfectly or not at full strength, but enough to demonstrate what might still be possible.
The astronomer who had once helped the Soviet missile program
Zhagars was not an outsider stumbling upon a piece of Soviet technology. During the Soviet era, he had belonged to the country's elite scientific establishment.
His work had military applications, and it took him to some extraordinary places. He traveled to Antarctica and Mozambique as part of Soviet scientific programs designed to precisely measure the shape of the Earth.
The work had given him an unusual understanding of both Soviet military science and the technology now sitting abandoned in the Latvian forest.
After independence, however, that world disappeared. There were no more Soviet-funded international scientific trips.
Instead, Zhagars found himself working several jobs while spending his weekends protecting an enormous telescope that few people in his own country seemed to value.
He and his wife started rebuilding the ruins
Zhagars and Gundega did not simply visit Irbene. They began making it part of their lives. Every weekend and holiday, they traveled from Riga to the abandoned site.
Piece by piece, they repaired an old guardhouse and began turning it into a future home. The building was hardly comfortable.
The whitewash was peeling. Mice moved through holes in the foundation. Rusty bars protected newly installed windows. Inside, some rooms remained cold and damp, with cement floors and uneven plaster.
But gradually, the couple reclaimed a bedroom and a parlor. It was an extraordinary contrast. Outside stood a gigantic piece of Soviet scientific engineering.
Inside, the astronomer who had adopted it was slowly restoring an abandoned building for himself and his wife.
Little Star finally began looking toward science again
The telescope's revival was slow, but it eventually began participating in scientific work.
One important milestone came when Zhagars supervised Little Star's first international project, helping astronomers from countries ranging from China to Italy make highly precise measurements of Earth. That was exactly the kind of future Zhagars had imagined.
Instead of serving as a satellite communications system for a military superpower, the telescope could become part of an international scientific network.
Astronomers could use it alongside other radio telescopes to study astronomical objects and conduct precise measurements.
Latvia had a giant telescope but little money for science
Zhagars estimated that restoring Little Star properly would require around $2 million at the time, roughly $1 million for scientific repairs and another $1 million for infrastructure.
For him, the investment was obvious. Modern governments could spend tens of millions of dollars constructing new radio telescopes. Latvia already possessed a giant one.
But the country's government faced a different calculation. Latvia was rebuilding after decades of Soviet rule. Hospitals, roads and other basic infrastructure needed money. Science was competing with immediate national priorities.
That left Zhagars frustrated. He saw a world-class scientific instrument deteriorating before his eyes, while the government saw an expensive machine inherited from a difficult past.
Four Jobs, $354 a month and one giant telescope
Zhagars' dedication came at a personal cost. His four jobs brought him only about 200 Latvian lats a month, equivalent to roughly $354 at the time.
He worked at the radio telescope, taught in two departments at Latvia University and served as a museum curator. At Irbene, he was more than an astronomer.
He was a caretaker, guide, guardian and researcher. On weekends, he would take students and tourists up the steep stairs toward the telescope's enormous 32-meter dish.
He even went to Brussels looking for NATO help
Zagars did not limit his efforts to Latvia. He also went to Brussels to seek NATO assistance in converting Little Star from a Cold War surveillance instrument into a purely civilian scientific facility. But the request produced an almost ironic response.
According to Zagars, officials received him warmly but declined to provide funding. The reason was tied to the telescope's unusual past: NATO was understandably interested in whether the former Soviet installation was still being used for intelligence gathering.
“I spoke about converting the telescope to a research facility, but they responded by asking if it was still spying on them,” Zagars said as quoted in a 2000 Associated Press report. “When I said no, they said, ‘Then in our view, the conversion has already been made.’”
From a secret Soviet military installation to scientific hope
The story of Irbene was therefore bigger than one telescope.
The Soviet Union had built Little Star for secrecy, surveillance and strategic advantage. When that system collapsed, the people who operated it disappeared, the military base emptied, and the surrounding town became a ghostly reminder of a vanished superpower.
But Zhagars saw something different. He saw a machine that could outlive the political system that created it.
A telescope built to listen to the Cold War could instead listen to the universe.
A secret military installation could become an international scientific center. And a forgotten 600-ton machine in a Latvian forest could still have a future.
Current condition
Today, the site is far from the abandoned Soviet ghost town Zhagars encountered in 1994. The former military installation is now the Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Center (VIRAC), with the 32-meter RT-32 and 16-meter RT-16 radio telescopes operating for scientific research, including radio astronomy, solar observations, space-debris tracking and international VLBI experiments.
The center has undergone major refurbishment since the 2010s and, in 2026, is undergoing another modernization phase funded by the EU and Latvia; however, the RT-32 currently operates at about 35% reception efficiency, so the restoration story is not quite finished. The facility has also expanded beyond astronomy: VIRAC says its telescopes provided their first services to spacecraft missions in deep space in 2025, while the complex continues to welcome visitors on guided tours.