"Club Gulag": Mayor has dreams of a gulag vacationland

'Club Gulag' plan horrifies camp survivors

By Andrew Osborn
Age Correspondent
Moscow
June 13, 2005

For more than two decades it was a living hell for anyone Joseph Stalin deemed to be an enemy of the people, but now a Siberian mayor believes it is time to cash in.

He wants to reopen part of the Gulag, the very heart of the region's dark history, for fee-paying tourists.

To the horror of prison camp survivors and human rights activists, Igor Shpektor, the mayor of Vorkuta, has floated the idea of reopening one of the many Soviet prison camps that sprung up in the 1930s. His vision would give history-conscious tourists a taste of the suffering the original inmates endured.

Tourists would be housed in re-creations of the camps, complete with forbidding watchtowers, guards and fierce dogs, rolls of barbed wire, spartan living conditions and forced labour.

If they tried to escape they would be shot with paint balls rather than real bullets.

Read on ...

Mayor has dreams of a gulag vacationland

By Steven Lee Myers The New York Times

TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2005

VORKUTA, Russia This broken-down Arctic coal town does not offer much when it is comes to economic prospects. The mayor works with what he has.

"My dream is to build a gulag," the mayor, Igor Shpektor, declared the other day in an outburst that stung like the bitter chill of late May in a place whose history is inseparable from the Soviet Union's notorious system of penal labor.

He meant a gulag for tourists. "Extreme tourism," he explained.

Then he spun an improbable vision of hard times and hard bunks, where tourists could eat turnip gruel and sleep in wooden barracks in a faux camp surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, patrolled by soldiers and dogs.

"Americans can stay here," he went on. "We will give them a chance to escape. The guards will shoot them" - with paint balls, naturally, not bullets.

Whether Shpektor's idea is madness or an act of civic desperation is hard to say, but reaction to the idea, which he first floated in 2003 during a town meeting that included survivors of Vorkuta's camps, has been mixed.

"I think it is sacrilege," said Tatyana Andreyeva, a teacher who conducts expeditions for schoolchildren to the ever-disappearing remains of Vorkuta's camps.

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Welcome to Vorkuta

It's 10 degrees in this former prison town in Russia's Far North. So why can't the government even pay people to leave?

by Suzanne Sataline, Spring 2003 IRP Fellow
Reprinted with permission of The Boston Globe

VORKUTA, Russia -- The road from this city in Russia's far north cuts into the frosty gray bleakness, sweeping past exhausted coal mines and crumbling watchtowers near settlements named "Komsomol" and "Industrial." One grim housing block is home to pensioner Rasma Pavlovna Stodukh.

Stodukh arrived in Vorkuta in 1947, during the Soviet Union's second wave of repressions. As a teenager in Riga, she was accused of aiding Lithuanian partisans and convicted of treason. She and two dozen male prisoners were packed into a cage on a train that crawled toward the cusp of the Arctic Circle, bound for one of the most infamous prison camps in the Soviet Union.

For 13 years and four months Stodukh shoveled coal onto a conveyor belt and dreamed of seeing the next day. In January the night winds bellowed 50 below zero, gusting through the slats of the wooden barracks. After she was freed in 1959, Soviet laws prevented her from returning to Lithuania and so she remained in Vorkuta, marrying and raising a family.

Today, at 76, she lives in a cluttered, dusty apartment with sinking floors and drafty large windows that let in a few hours of meager sunlight in winter. "We hoped to save money here and maybe a little later move from Vorkuta, but then we stopped thinking about it," Stodukh said.

To some this arthritic grandmother might seem just another one of Russia's stoic survivors. But in the eyes of the Russian government and the World Bank, she's a roadblock to the country's economic reform.

Last year, with $80 million borrowed from the World Bank, the government asked Stodukh and thousands of other residents of three northern cities to leave, offering a one-time payment of $2,400 toward the cost of housing -- a huge sum for pensioners who might receive $70 monthly -- if residents would abandon their decrepit homes and move south, to what northerners call "the mainland." To the authorities, the north is a new kind of costly prison, so cold, so remote, and so poor that local governments are going broke trying to provide food and fuel. Just whittling away these outposts, according to World Bank officials, could save these cities $15 million a year -- and create a model for evacuating other unsustainable communities across the globe.

But the economists and demographers failed to take into account one thing: the power of the Russian refusenik.

Since the program began signing on volunteers, 2,053 people have taken the payments and moved, and another 4,000 are expected to go soon. But hundreds of families -- including former prisoners in Vorkuta, Norilsk, and the Magadan region -- said no. Many said their relatives were dead and they had no one to join. Others said the laughably small housing allotments would not allow them to afford shelter elsewhere. Some discovered that the Russian government would cut off their monthly pension if they returned to their now-independent homelands.

Asked about her own decision to stay, Stodukh warbled a patriotic rationale echoed by others stuck in the north. "If a person has been living in a place so long, it's his motherland," said Stodukh, who keeps photographs of herself smiling with other prisoners in a field. "That is the best place for him."

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