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Paper short abstract:

Based on extensive fieldwork in Siberia and the Russian Far East, this project analyzes the connection between the former industrial sites in Kolyma and Magadan, which were originally maned by Gulag inmates in the 1930s and 1940s, and the emerging nature tourism and environmentalism in the region.

Paper long abstract:

Beginning in the 1930s, the Soviet government set on a course of turning the Kolyma and Magadan regions of the Russian Far East into major industrial-age mining centers. Lacking sufficient labor resources, the government relied on the Gulag penal system to provide manpower for the projects in the region. Despite significant obstacles, tin and other types of mining developed at a rapid pace, even if accompanied by such familiar attributes as suffocating shafts, endless grinding mills and crashers, and an enormous human and environmental toll. By the 1940s and ‘50s, industrialization seemed to have come full force to this remote part of the world.

Yet following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the process was reversed as quickly as it began. Abandoned for a while, these former Gulag sites are now nourishing a new fascination with nature tourism on an unforeseen level. Tourist advertisement campaigns praise the remoteness and the natural beauty of the camp settings and intentionally present these spaces of human suffering as new versions of Jack London’s Klondike and even Conan Doyle’s lost world, no longer mere Gulag structures or remnants of the industrialization but the sites of wild and exotic adventures. As such, my work demonstrates the process by which the former industrial complex and the tourism industry of today have come together to inspire fascination with wildlife sightings and the grandeur of the landscape and as a result have created a unique amalgam that feeds the emerging environmentalist movement in the Russian Far East.