Courtesy International Herald Tribune
Mayor has dreams of a gulag vacationland
By Steven Lee Myers The New York Times TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2005
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/06/06/news/gulag.php
VORKUTA, Russia 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 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.
Then he spun an improbable vision of hard times and hard bunks, where tourists could eat turnip gruel and sleep in wooden barracks in a faux camp surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, patrolled by soldiers and dogs.
"Americans can stay here," he went on. "We will give them a chance to escape. The guards will shoot them" - with paint balls, naturally, not bullets.
Whether Shpektor's idea is madness or an act of civic desperation is hard to say, but reaction to the idea, which he first floated in 2003 during a town meeting that included survivors of Vorkuta's camps, has been mixed. <...>