Day Schedule

➤Breakfast

➤Excursion: Investigation of the remains of the camps and the ruins of the tunnel

➤Meeting with the old-timers

➤After 16:00 return by the car along the Komsomolsk-Oha oil pipeline, built by the GULAG prisoners. The story about the oil-pipe

➤Overnight stay in Zimmermanovka village

As well as building most of the factories, oil pipeline, apartment blocks in the city, the prisoners in Komsomolsk and neighbouring towns built the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), an east-west railway line running parallel to the older trans-Siberian line, around the northern end of Lake Baikal to Komsomolsk. The first prisoners in the 1930s laid most of the tracks.

Two peaks in the supply of prisoners occurred. The first of these was in 1936-37, after the paroxysm of denunciations and frame-ups known as the Moscow Show Trials, in which tens of thousands of workers and others who had made the revolution, along many others outside the political struggle altogether, were framed up on fantastic charges of supporting counter-revolution, executed and jailed.

This is how this looks like in real Gulag camp located in the remote and wild Far Eastern taiga forest. Place with no people does not require a protection against theft. Hence, it does not include “gates” as it was completely unnecessary. The wilderness of the area served as the best protection – this is what the local guide, Mikhail, was also explaining during the trip. The superficialities about “prisons”, barbed wire or anything similar to Dachau concentration camp, refers to the main issue: what is the Gulag camp? In the far East it was just a place where people were gathered, literally, with no fences around. The wild nature and hundreds of kilometers of taiga around guarded those places.