Spoil alert: I found Perm-36 (despite the odds and the doubtful looks from the woman at the hostel). Russia - 1, Stephen - 1. Here's how:
I set my alarm for an early start which I hate doing (I'm on vacation!) but I knew today was going to be a difficult day of long bus rides, exercise in non-verbal communication,
(Sorry, quick writer's pause. It's worth noting that I'm surrounded by somewhere in the vicinity of twelve burly Russian men in tank tops, the same ones from last night making the stew, looking at me and talking about me while I write this. Unfortunately, there are no other places to go where I can sit in peace and write. So, this will have to do. When I walked through the door of the hostel an hour or so ago, they immediately recognized me as the American and asked to look at the photos I had taken of Perm-36, they knew I had went there today. I said, okay, and proceeded to do a slide show for all twelve guys, communicating with them in my poor Russian, about all the photos I had taken since Irkutsk. I had fun, they had fun, and it's all light hearted, but it's tough to write under these conditions. So, please forgive the distracted quality of this post.)
and wandering through forest looking for the gulag museum so I wanted to ensure I had an early start. I packed my bag and set out for the bus station. As soon as I walked through the thresh hold of the door to the outside I was hit in the face by snow from the blizzard that was wreaking havoc on the city. I trudged through three kilometers of this mess and, under self navigation, arrived at the bus station. The previous night I had gone to great lengths to work it out with the hostel receptionist on exactly how to go about finding this place. The reason she was skeptical that I would find it was because in order to get there I had to find and get to the bus station in Perm, find the right bus to take (to Chusovoi, a town 150 kilometers to the north through vast countryside), figure out which stop to get off at (a small turn out on a lonely highway in the forest to a small village - and its not really a stop, you just have to ask the driver to let you off), then walk the three kilometers to the village where the museum was located, then work my way through the museum with a Russian guide, all in a Russian blizzard (which is worse than a normal blizzard). To be honest, with the poor luck I had finding the Europe-Asia monument, I had my doubts as well.
I found very little information the night before on my own in english from the internet. No travel forums, no english language websites, not much at all. All the foreigners that made this trip previously that had left information through forums all went by private car - useless! But the official website of the museum did have directions in Russian, which despite my best efforts, did little to help me, even when translated. But it did have a map of the route that the bus from Perm was likely to take, and included the names of the villages that it would pass along the three hour journey to Chusovoi. I took a photo of this map and used it on the bus. I took a window seat near the back of the bus so that I would be able to look out and observe each sign that we passed on the highway that had arrows that pointed to the names of these villages and their turnouts. So for the two hours or so that I was on the bus before my stop, my eyes were glued to the window looking for village signs. When finally we had passed the last village turnout before the one that I had to get off at, I made my way to the front of the bus, asked the driver, "Kuchino?" and he said, "Nyet, russian russian russian..." which I understood to mean, no but soon. So he knew that I wanted to get off at that turnout. We soon arrived and he let me out.
Here's the scene. The bus pulled over to the side of the highway (a small, long, two lane highway), no bus stop, no land marker of any kind except a sign that said "Kuchino 3 km" and had an arrow that pointed to a small village road down the hill. Everything in view was pure white. Either side of the road was dense forest and there were countryside fields down in the area where the village road was. No buildings of any kind. And again, a snow blizzard.
But, luckily, two others got off as well and there really is only one reason to get off at this location, to make the trek into the village to see the gulag museum. They looked at me and said, "English?" and I said, "Da!". They were two Germans, Jens and Susie, who were going to the museum too. We started to trek our way through the snow and down the hill to the village. After about five minutes a massive truck passed us, moving cautiously through the storm, and slowed to a stop in front of us. He opened the passenger side door and assuming correctly that he was going to give us a lift into town, the three of us squeezed in next to him and we slowly plowed our way down to the museum. He knew where we were going without words, he pulled up right in front of the museum entrance. We jumped out and thanked him.
Perm-36 is the name of the gulag, the political prison camp, that was very active during the Soviet days in this village. During the Soviet days following WWII, hundreds of thousands of people were sent to these camps for "political crimes", a campaign led by the infamous Josef Stalin. This specific prison camp was just one of thousands across the country and is today the only known camp still standing. The camp has been renovated in many parts but a lot of the original structures still exist. We entered through one of the original buildings, the administrative building of the camp, bought our tickets, and met our guide. Here is why I was really lucky. Jens and Susie were two German teachers living in the city of Volgagrad (famous as the city that turned the tide against Hitler in WWII) and who also happened to speak Russian (as well as perfect English). So I had the benefit of a Russian guide who led us around the camp and explained different things to us and the benefit of a personal translator in Jens who could act as my intermediary.
We started in a small cinema room where we watched a video of a short introduction to the museum and a quick overview of the history of the gulags in general. It was a film made in the mid nineties, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the official closing of the Perm-36 as a prison camp, but it was filmed with cameras from the seventies, so everything looked like it was filmed in the seventies. The film was in English and talked about how important the museum was and why it is important to remember the events that occurred there and in all the gulag camps around the country. It sort of seemed like a plea for money. But it was a nice intro to the museum and certainly set the grim, more serious stage that would follow us with the rest of the tour. The small cinema room was filled with Soviet propoganda posters and above the viewing screen was a large, red banner with a slogan written in Russian that Jens translated for me saying, "Marxism is good for the people and will be followed because it is the truest way," or something close to that. And on another wall were all the photos of the camps many "celebrity" inhabitants, mainly political activists.
When the film had finished we were led from the cinema room and walked around the camp while our guide continued to offer us facts about the rooms and the grounds. The camp looked like you might expect it to: bare walls, barbed wire, iron bars, cold, barren rooms. We walked into a small room where 60 men would sleep in bunk beds made of planks of wood that slept four, two up, two down. We walked through the prison within the prison where the troublemakers were kept. And we walked around the labor grounds where the prisoners spent most of their day.
Here are some things we learned from the guide:
-the camp housed men, women, and children held for "political crimes" but in reality, people could be sent to the camps for years for stealing a loaf of bread, riding the bus without a ticket, or making an official angry in some way. One story she told us was of a ten year old orphan girl whose family was all killed in the war and was sent to 10 years in the camp for picking an onion from a field because she was starving and homeless. Many hundreds of thousands of people were sent to these camps for similar reasons, suffering from the whims of others
-Perm-36 was one of the leading camps in the area, although their were hundreds more in the region
-this particular camp used its prisoners to produce electrical components for irons
-prisoners spent 12 hours per day (or more depending on the moods of the officers there) either making the components, or working in the labor yards doing various chores
-many of the prisoners died in the camp, mostly due to starvation and some from suicide
-etc.
The camp had a hollow feeling to it. Like you could tell that something big had once occured there. You could feel that presence around you. We were the only visitors at the time (and probably that whole day), and the quiet of the snow storm sort of added to the effect. We walked around the grounds awhile, soaking in the experience after the guided portion was done, and after having the chance to take photos and contemplate awhile, we left.
We knew this part was going to be tricky. We knew we had to walk back up the hill, out of the village, and to the highway. And we knew we had to flag down a bus coming back from Chusovoi heading to Perm. But we didn't know how frequently the buses came (not frequently as we later learned). As we began to walk back through the blizzard to the highway, a local village bus picked us up and dropped us off. Now we were on the side of the small highway and in the middle of the relentless blizzard, prepared to wait all day for a bus to take us back. But, Jens had brought a small sign from the tourist office in Perm with one side offering information on the museum and the other that, when unfolded, read "Perm" in big, red Russian letters. The idea is that you could hold this sign on the side of the road and use it to hitch hike back to the city. This is sort of emblematic of Russian tourist attractions. They are remarkably difficult to find and get access to. When you have to provide tourists with a means to hitch hike their way across 150 kilometers of blizzardy, Russian taiga, you know you need a better system. But whatever, go with the flow. We decided to hold up the sign and see what would happen.
Someone eventually stopped. A big Russian guy pulled over in a tiny, Japanese car and the three of us quickly piled in, thanking him for stopping. Jens got in the front so that he could chat with the driver in Russian (he looked like he squeezed into a clown car - he's 6 ft 8). The driver was a local villager heading into Perm to visit a friend and was sympathetic to our cause. He drove us the three hours back into town and was super cool about it. He hadn't planned on driving to the center of the city but insisted on it after he learned we were headed there. But he was a village driver and was easily frustrated by city driving. The more we sat in traffic, the more, "tak, tak, blyadt!" we heard coming from the driver's seat (Russian words of frustration). Eventually he pulled into a parking lot and, halting to a stop, quickly turned around and said, "We're here!" smiling and laughing, relieved. We thanked him profusely and paid him a few dollars for the cost of gas (the accepted gesture of thanks when hitch hiking, mainly the reimbursement of gas money). Then the three of us walked back to Lenin Street and looked for a place to grab a bite of food.
We spent much of the rest of the day together, I was happy to have found some companions in the city. We ate some Russian food (I again had the benefit of some translators) and drank some local beer from a Russian microbrewery. It was a nice evening.
Now I'm back, having shared my travels with a bunch of Russian guys and writing this post in the zoo that is this hostel kitchen. (Another point worth observing: the gentlemen that were having a good time talking with the me, the American, a novelty, and looking at my photos all suddenly got very serious and very quiet when we hit the photos that I had taken of the gulag. Some of them, when watching the photos, started to shake their heads as if reminded by some cruel memory. They were probably too young to have been in the camps themselves but it is likely that they had family members or knew of people that had been in the camps). Tomorrow I will sleep in (because I can), check out late, head to the train station, and hop my last train along the Trans-Siberian line to Moscow where my friend Yana will hopefully be waiting for me.
I won't have internet access again until I reach Moscow on Friday. See you then!
I set my alarm for an early start which I hate doing (I'm on vacation!) but I knew today was going to be a difficult day of long bus rides, exercise in non-verbal communication,
(Sorry, quick writer's pause. It's worth noting that I'm surrounded by somewhere in the vicinity of twelve burly Russian men in tank tops, the same ones from last night making the stew, looking at me and talking about me while I write this. Unfortunately, there are no other places to go where I can sit in peace and write. So, this will have to do. When I walked through the door of the hostel an hour or so ago, they immediately recognized me as the American and asked to look at the photos I had taken of Perm-36, they knew I had went there today. I said, okay, and proceeded to do a slide show for all twelve guys, communicating with them in my poor Russian, about all the photos I had taken since Irkutsk. I had fun, they had fun, and it's all light hearted, but it's tough to write under these conditions. So, please forgive the distracted quality of this post.)
and wandering through forest looking for the gulag museum so I wanted to ensure I had an early start. I packed my bag and set out for the bus station. As soon as I walked through the thresh hold of the door to the outside I was hit in the face by snow from the blizzard that was wreaking havoc on the city. I trudged through three kilometers of this mess and, under self navigation, arrived at the bus station. The previous night I had gone to great lengths to work it out with the hostel receptionist on exactly how to go about finding this place. The reason she was skeptical that I would find it was because in order to get there I had to find and get to the bus station in Perm, find the right bus to take (to Chusovoi, a town 150 kilometers to the north through vast countryside), figure out which stop to get off at (a small turn out on a lonely highway in the forest to a small village - and its not really a stop, you just have to ask the driver to let you off), then walk the three kilometers to the village where the museum was located, then work my way through the museum with a Russian guide, all in a Russian blizzard (which is worse than a normal blizzard). To be honest, with the poor luck I had finding the Europe-Asia monument, I had my doubts as well.
I found very little information the night before on my own in english from the internet. No travel forums, no english language websites, not much at all. All the foreigners that made this trip previously that had left information through forums all went by private car - useless! But the official website of the museum did have directions in Russian, which despite my best efforts, did little to help me, even when translated. But it did have a map of the route that the bus from Perm was likely to take, and included the names of the villages that it would pass along the three hour journey to Chusovoi. I took a photo of this map and used it on the bus. I took a window seat near the back of the bus so that I would be able to look out and observe each sign that we passed on the highway that had arrows that pointed to the names of these villages and their turnouts. So for the two hours or so that I was on the bus before my stop, my eyes were glued to the window looking for village signs. When finally we had passed the last village turnout before the one that I had to get off at, I made my way to the front of the bus, asked the driver, "Kuchino?" and he said, "Nyet, russian russian russian..." which I understood to mean, no but soon. So he knew that I wanted to get off at that turnout. We soon arrived and he let me out.
Here's the scene. The bus pulled over to the side of the highway (a small, long, two lane highway), no bus stop, no land marker of any kind except a sign that said "Kuchino 3 km" and had an arrow that pointed to a small village road down the hill. Everything in view was pure white. Either side of the road was dense forest and there were countryside fields down in the area where the village road was. No buildings of any kind. And again, a snow blizzard.
But, luckily, two others got off as well and there really is only one reason to get off at this location, to make the trek into the village to see the gulag museum. They looked at me and said, "English?" and I said, "Da!". They were two Germans, Jens and Susie, who were going to the museum too. We started to trek our way through the snow and down the hill to the village. After about five minutes a massive truck passed us, moving cautiously through the storm, and slowed to a stop in front of us. He opened the passenger side door and assuming correctly that he was going to give us a lift into town, the three of us squeezed in next to him and we slowly plowed our way down to the museum. He knew where we were going without words, he pulled up right in front of the museum entrance. We jumped out and thanked him.
Perm-36 is the name of the gulag, the political prison camp, that was very active during the Soviet days in this village. During the Soviet days following WWII, hundreds of thousands of people were sent to these camps for "political crimes", a campaign led by the infamous Josef Stalin. This specific prison camp was just one of thousands across the country and is today the only known camp still standing. The camp has been renovated in many parts but a lot of the original structures still exist. We entered through one of the original buildings, the administrative building of the camp, bought our tickets, and met our guide. Here is why I was really lucky. Jens and Susie were two German teachers living in the city of Volgagrad (famous as the city that turned the tide against Hitler in WWII) and who also happened to speak Russian (as well as perfect English). So I had the benefit of a Russian guide who led us around the camp and explained different things to us and the benefit of a personal translator in Jens who could act as my intermediary.
We started in a small cinema room where we watched a video of a short introduction to the museum and a quick overview of the history of the gulags in general. It was a film made in the mid nineties, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the official closing of the Perm-36 as a prison camp, but it was filmed with cameras from the seventies, so everything looked like it was filmed in the seventies. The film was in English and talked about how important the museum was and why it is important to remember the events that occurred there and in all the gulag camps around the country. It sort of seemed like a plea for money. But it was a nice intro to the museum and certainly set the grim, more serious stage that would follow us with the rest of the tour. The small cinema room was filled with Soviet propoganda posters and above the viewing screen was a large, red banner with a slogan written in Russian that Jens translated for me saying, "Marxism is good for the people and will be followed because it is the truest way," or something close to that. And on another wall were all the photos of the camps many "celebrity" inhabitants, mainly political activists.
 |
| The cinema room at the gulag, above a propaganda sign promoting marxism |
Here are some things we learned from the guide:
-the camp housed men, women, and children held for "political crimes" but in reality, people could be sent to the camps for years for stealing a loaf of bread, riding the bus without a ticket, or making an official angry in some way. One story she told us was of a ten year old orphan girl whose family was all killed in the war and was sent to 10 years in the camp for picking an onion from a field because she was starving and homeless. Many hundreds of thousands of people were sent to these camps for similar reasons, suffering from the whims of others
-Perm-36 was one of the leading camps in the area, although their were hundreds more in the region
-this particular camp used its prisoners to produce electrical components for irons
-prisoners spent 12 hours per day (or more depending on the moods of the officers there) either making the components, or working in the labor yards doing various chores
-many of the prisoners died in the camp, mostly due to starvation and some from suicide
-etc.
The camp had a hollow feeling to it. Like you could tell that something big had once occured there. You could feel that presence around you. We were the only visitors at the time (and probably that whole day), and the quiet of the snow storm sort of added to the effect. We walked around the grounds awhile, soaking in the experience after the guided portion was done, and after having the chance to take photos and contemplate awhile, we left.
 |
| The administrative building of Perm-36 |
 |
| The camp grounds |
 |
| Me in front of the gulag entrance |
 |
| Susie running after the bus that slowed to give us ride to the highway |
 |
| Yens holding our official "get me back to Perm, please" hitch hiking sign |
We spent much of the rest of the day together, I was happy to have found some companions in the city. We ate some Russian food (I again had the benefit of some translators) and drank some local beer from a Russian microbrewery. It was a nice evening.
Now I'm back, having shared my travels with a bunch of Russian guys and writing this post in the zoo that is this hostel kitchen. (Another point worth observing: the gentlemen that were having a good time talking with the me, the American, a novelty, and looking at my photos all suddenly got very serious and very quiet when we hit the photos that I had taken of the gulag. Some of them, when watching the photos, started to shake their heads as if reminded by some cruel memory. They were probably too young to have been in the camps themselves but it is likely that they had family members or knew of people that had been in the camps). Tomorrow I will sleep in (because I can), check out late, head to the train station, and hop my last train along the Trans-Siberian line to Moscow where my friend Yana will hopefully be waiting for me.
I won't have internet access again until I reach Moscow on Friday. See you then!
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