Off hunting. Perm’s chief patriot belyh gave me a tour of the region’s three main attractions: Kungur Ice Cave Belogorsky Monastery the Perm-36 camp
Kungur Ice Cave didn’t impress me. There’s almost no ice in it. Lots of clay, and even more rocks—heaps of gravel. The tour goes more or less like this: "See that pile of rocks? Doesn’t it look like a little turtle?... And in this chamber there are lots of rocks too, and some of them look like a lizard! ... Now let’s move on to the next chamber, where we’ll be able to see even more rocks!" Belogorsky Monastery. Now that really is cool. A gigantic church (the third largest in Russia) built in some wild middle of nowhere on top of a huge mountain. How they managed to pull that off several hundred years ago is unclear. There are hardly any settlements around. You drive and drive and drive... All around you, nothing but bears, badgers, anteaters, and pythons—a traditional Ural landscape. And then, BAM
In the phone photo it looks smaller than it really is. Here’s another shot I took. I like it:
Memento mori (or, in a joking Russian pun, “instantly into the sea”) Perm-36. The last camp for political prisoners. Impressive, of course.
But in the north of Perm Krai there are still a hell of a lot of ordinary prison camps, and you get the feeling that the conditions there haven’t changed at all.
This is the “ceiling” of the exercise yard in the special-regime section. The famous “checkered sky” (slang for prison bars overhead). The main impression of Perm-36 isn’t the museum itself at all, but the “volunteer camp.” Every summer, students come there to work for free. Their camp is right nearby on the bank of the Chusovaya River. Very picturesque. There’s some kind of shack standing there. This, says the museum director, is where our volunteers live. Sometimes as many as three hundred of them. Three hundred male and female students living in a tiny barracks all summer on the riverbank. Now that’s a gold mine for the museum. Set up webcams in that shack and sell the broadcast rights to TNT (a major Russian TV channel). That would pull ratings. You could bump Ksenia Sobchak (Russian TV personality; “Sobchag” is a mocking nickname) to 2 a.m. I even came up with a title: "House-4. How to Build a GULAG." The hunting photo report will come later.