I was reading about the epic battle of Kursk, in 1943 The author wrote that the Russians alone set over 1,100,000 mines. And Kursk was just one battle-there must have been jillions of landmines set in Russia. Surely not all of them were removed after the war-so do unlucky hikers and farmers still get blown up today?
I don’t have factual information to directly answer your question, but I would not expect any piece of soviet technology with moving parts and volatile chemicals to still be functional after being in the soil for nearly 70 years.
The trigger mechanisms are not very complex and I don’t believe TNT is volatile (if they were packed with TNT). I would be more concerned with spontaneous detonation rather than failure to work due to age/Soviet quality control. I also note that plenty of Soviet land mines are still doing damage in many parts of the world. Granted, they are not as old as WWII-era mines but not fresh.
According to this, between 1992 and 1998, 39 people were killed and 67 wounded by old unexploded ordnance.
Personally I’d be very careful if I were to go poking around on old WW2 battlefields.
Smithsonian magazine had an article a few years ago about a French Army unit of sappers which is occupied, fulltime, in recovering and disarming mines from World War One. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia is still having a few problems from the leftover unpleasantness of 1939-45.
I suspect that there are a few countries that are a whole lot more dangerous than Russia as far as danger due to land mines goes. When wandering around Angkor Wat in Cambodia, you are specifically told to stick to well traveled paths as much of the countryside has not been cleared of land mines. I seem to recall that there were a boat load of them in Mozambique as well.
I was talking to some Swedish land mine experts working for the U.N. in Hanoi, and they said that the goal in Cambodia was to reduce the death rate from land mines to that of the automobile death rate. And when you see how people drive in southeast Asia, well this is pretty high. The fact of the matter was that it was impossible to clear all the mines. It was apparently a pretty good job to be a land mine deactivator, even though it is dangerous as fuck.
27% of farmland in Libiya is uninhabitable due to British/American/German/Italian mines.
As mentioned above, unexploded ordinance is a problem throughout Europe. When I was in St. Pete in the mid-90s, construction crews had uncovered an unexploded shell from the siege of Leningrad. How it ended up in St. Petersburg is a mystery :). Of course UXO is a problem in a lot of countries where there has been war in the past century.
Nah, Stalin just ordered a few tens of thousands of political prisoners to walk around the mined areas until all the mines were cleared. No problem.