The escalators of the station caused a significant disaster on the Moscow Metro on February 17, 1982, that killed at least eight people.

As the first commuters began to use it to descend, a poorly-attached step came loose, completing the cycle of coming all the way down and then back up on the opposite end of the chain.

This broke the clutch between the driving gears of the engine, and the thread, now free to move in any direction, began to accelerate from the weight of the passengers.

However, the standard working brakes lacked the strength to stop the momentum of the thread (heavily laden with passengers at this rush-hour), or even to reduce its acceleration.

Even when the escalator supervisor saw that the thread had accelerated to 2.4 times faster than its maximum rate and attempted to manually operate the brakes, nothing happened.

With the exception of a vague note in Vechernyaya Moskva, the state-controlled Soviet press made no reference to the event.

All of the eight people who died were crushed at the base of the escalator by other passengers who did not have time to move away, forming an obstruction.

Immediately an investigation was launched, where it was determined that the speedometer was wrongly wired to the emergency brake and that all of the three other escalators at the station were prone to similar disaster.