A graveyard for gulag inmates who were shot during an uprising in 1953.
Posted on 06/06/2005 6:10:14 AM PDT by OESY
VORKUTA, Russia, May 30 - 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 L. 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....
The most significant foreign investment in Vorkuta (pronounced vor-ku-TA) since the collapse of the Soviet Union, after all, has been a program by the World Bank to relocate people out of here, encouraging them to abandon the Far North for better prospects elsewhere.
Vorkuta, a city built by gulag labor in the tundra 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow and 100 miles above the Arctic Circle, is slowly dying - and those who remain in many cases cannot afford to leave....
Ms. Andreyeva, the teacher, welcomed any effort to recognize the Vorkuta's grim history, but she accused the mayor of hypocrisy, saying that almost nothing, officially, had been done to preserve the remnants of the camps that were here.
She would like to see a museum built. So far the only acknowledged memorial to the gulag's victims here is a weed-choked graveyard, near the abandoned settlement called Industrial, where 53 prisoners were shot and buried after an uprising in 1953.
A theme camp is different, though. "It is like restoring Buchenwald," she said....
Vorkuta will not survive otherwise, Mr. Shpektor said.
"Capitalism in its worst form," he said, "has come to this place."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It sure reads like someone at the NYT is ripping off satire that can be found here:
I can't wait to go! One week of beatings, maggot-filled food, forced labor and frostbite! Just the sort of place that dreams are made of!
I can visualize it perfectly. The NYTimes newsroom: "Hey, what's this Gulag that Amnesty is talking about. Go send someone to investigate."
Now we are figuring it all out. Just like corporate sponsors pay race car drivers to get their label on the winning car, so too does Amnesty International apply "Gulag" to it's stories ~ most likely this particular tourist trap in the Arctic.
My favorite part is when the guy laments that capitalism came to town and destroyed the gulag. Darn shame. And I bet the NYT didn't even detect any irony.
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