Siberian Gulag a New Tourist Draw

C A N Y O N   V A L L E Y, Russia, Nov. 10, 2000 -- 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.

Svertelov was banished to Canyon Valley for the “crime” of being captured by Nazis while a soldier during World War II. German prison was harsh. Being treated as a traitor after his return to Russia was worse.

“There we were in the hands of the enemy so that was how it was supposed to be. But here it was hard, above all morally. In Canyon I worked as hard as I could trying to forget it all.”

The only survivor of Canyon Valley left in the regional center, Magadan, Svertelov is wholeheartedly in favor of Alabushev’s tourism idea.

“People must go there and see how we lived,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if someone also wants to make money on this.”

The Magadan region suffers from the economic woes that grip much of Siberia. Infrastructure built by prisoners in the 1930s to the 1950s was developed by workers from across the Soviet Union, drawn by special wages and powerful propaganda, but much of region’s transport and industry became too inefficient to maintain after the economic reforms of the 1990s.

Gulag Online

Ivan Panikarov, a former plumber from the southern Russian town of Rostov, has set up a gulag museum in Yagodnoye, a town of 8,000 that once housed the regional gulag headquarters. He came in the 1970s to Kolyma, where he learned the grim history of the camps and began visiting their remains, collecting prisoners’ clothes, tools and tableware.

In 1994, after many failed attempts to get support from the local administration, he bought a two-room apartment in Yagodnoye and put the exhibits on display.

“Maybe it does not all make sense to people, but when time passes maybe it will be useful. I think I am only doing rough work and later there will be somebody who will sum up and analyze what I have gathered,” he said.

Panikarov’s museum is Yagodnoye’s key attraction today and the local administration has offered to exhibit his artifacts at a former cinema.

The Kolyma track is littered with abandoned villages standing next to the ruins of labor camps, but Yagodnoye, “the town of berries” in Russian, is prosperous by local standards.The local administration is trying to lure entrepreneurs and gold prospectors. There is even a town Internet server.

“The wives of the gold prospectors look at the Web Sites of Moscow shops so they know where to go when they get there. The prospectors themselves look up the world prices for gold,” said Vladimir Alexeyev, director of the communications center.

One computer is available for public use at the post office but Alexeyev dreams of installing a web camera to let residents stay in touch over the Internet with children studying in Magadan, which would save money on telephones and travel.

The server also hosts Ivan Panikrov’s gulag history Web Site (http://ya.msi.ru/museums/main.htm). But Panikrov’s ambition is to take tourists to see the real thing.

When they met, Alabushev asked Panikirov if, with all of his knowledge about the gulag, he would take people to places like Canyon Valley to show them a real camp and explain what happened there.

“Yes, I am ready,” he said. “I know lot of places like this.”