Club Gulag: Inside Post-Soviet ‘Extreme Tourism’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 08.07.06 | 7:41 AM ET
Care to stay the night in a former KGB prison in Latvia? How about a weekend in an abandoned gulag 100 miles above the Arctic Circle? Or do you just want to make like a Volga boatman, pulling a barge up the river? According to The Age, the night at the KGB prison is already a hot destination for masochistic tourists. “On some nights, for extra money, they call out the guard, and the shivering guests can witness a mock execution, with the ‘corpse’ being flung like a sack of potatoes into a lorry before being driven away, presumably for a reviving cuppa,” Allan Hall writes. “Once past the humiliating stripping and donning of prison garb, the gruelling physical exercise regime, the interrogation and the solitary confinement cell—for those that answer back to Ivan—there is dinner. It is a delicious melange of stale rye bread, pickled fish heads, pressed meat from some unidentifiable mammal, pickles and black, sweet Russian tea.”
Elsewhere, according to a story in the New Zealand Herald, the mayor of Vorkuta, Russia seeks investors “to turn an abandoned prison complex into a ‘reality’ holiday camp for novelty-seeking tourists keen to understand what life was like for Soviet political prisoners at first hand.”
His idea, which has upset prison camp survivors, envisages recreating a tiny part of the Gulag complete with watchtowers, guards armed with paintball guns, snarling dogs, rolls of barbed wire, partan living conditions and forced labour.
It may sound a far cry from a week on a beach in southern Europe but Mr Shpektor is convinced that there will be no shortage of takers.
He wants to charge tourists US$150-200 ($240-325) per day and for them to commit to a minimum three-day ‘holiday.’
Related on World Hum:
* More from Planet Theme Park
* Welcome to Khmer Rouge Land!
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
Justin 02.25.07 | 5:07 PM ET
So where do you go to make reservations at one of these extreem soviet vacations?