Siberian Gulag a New Tourist Draw
C A N Y O N V A L L E Y, Russia, Nov. 10 -- Josef Stalin sent millions of Soviet citizens down Siberia’s so-called Road of Bones to the misery and death of the gulag labor camps.
Now tourists are being invited to the remote Kolyma Track to Canyon Valley, a labor camp crumbling into the tundra nearly 50 years after its last inmate was released.
Alexei Alabushev, 46, born the year the labor camp closed, swapped a teaching career for an unlikely tourist dream amid the taiga and tumbling rivers of Russia’s far northeast.
“I wanted to come up with a project that would embrace all sides of tourism — nature, history, ethnic themes, extreme tourism, sport,” he said. “Canyon Valley fits ideally into this idea. This place is unique: It has mountains, lakes, cascade waterfalls, glaciers, rare animals. Here you can satisfy the most demanding tourist.”
Snow-capped mountains overlook Canyon Valley and the expanse of Siberian taiga, whose autumnal red, yellow and greens fan out around the crystal clear Verina river.
But some 2,000 Canyon Valley inmates saw a different picture half a century ago.
Vladimir Svertelov, prisoner number M-1247, recalls climbing the camp’s wooden stairs every morning to work, whipped by a piercing wind and temperatures plummeting to minus 60 degrees. “Nature itself served as a guard here,” he said.
Since the camp closed in 1954, rivers have washed away the wooden bridges built by prisoners on the road that led to it. But Canyon Valley’s isolation and hardships have helped it remain one of the best preserved of Kolyma’s 500 or so camps.
Barbed wire still twists around the camp and metal bars crisscross the tiny square windows of the prison barracks. Quilted jackets, numbered caps, tarpaulin boots and cans litter the floor of the barracks and workshops.
Jailed By Nazis and Stalin
At the top of a steep slope looms a huge refinery surrounded by heaps of cobalt ore, which the Cold War-era Soviet military needed to make armor.
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