Perm 36 Prison Work Camp (Gulag)

Well, since I am in Russia I think I should tell you what is going on in our daytime here.

On November 3rd 2012 we, my dad, mom, Ilya and I, drove to Perm 36, a prison work camp 120 km form Perm, opened in 1946 by General Stalin.  I can't believe how many people he sent to jail by just saying, "I disagree with your beliefs."  This place is not highly popular, but it's worth the trip!  

Here the walls surround you from every corner so; you don't have a chance of escape, and if you somehow did escape you wouldn't survive very long in the wilderness because of no food in the entire area, but your camp.  Here if you want to live you have to work, like logging, mining by hand and other things like hard labor.  Here they worked 14 hours a day with no rest. In the summer it was OK, but step into history and you will freeze your toes in the winter.  The high security jail consists of 6 rooms all very cold, wet, stinky and dark.  One of the rooms is a work place so if you went to jail you can't just sit your rear down and sleep.  You had to work hard in there too!  The prison staff would sit in one of the rooms, to make sure nobody is getting hit, running away or anything else like that.  

The prison guards would stand outside in the cold or hot weather.  No matter what they had to watch too. 

So what kinds of people would go to jail?  Well, some of them were writers, anybody who said bad things about politicians, average people that said anything about the government and sometimes even war heroes.

Most of the people spent there nights in one big sleeping room which consists of 64 bunks altogether.  All together that will fit 128 people in one room. WOW!

There was also a hospital, a banya which is a place to shower, a toilet building, a water tower and a guard shack. The toilets were very gross, very simple, but very stinky and not sanitary.  The water tower was a huge log building with a black-filmy water.  The hospital was very ordinary.  Also, the people had suits to wear, but easily wore holes in them.

The people who lived there got to write a letter once a month to their loved ones.  Can you believe that?  That means you can't hear from your loved ones for a month and you wouldn't know what is going on. There was a double fence around the grounds just in case someone tried to escape.

In conclusion, it was fun, but sad that so many people would die because of nothing.  This place closed in 1987; one the last works camps to still be used.  It is now a museum and that is how we were able to visit it.

by Angelika Jones