Perm-36

Listen for a moment. Wind moves through the birch and pine around you. A crow calls somewhere beyond the fence. Underfoot there is gravel, packed earth, and old timber boards that give slightly as you walk. The air smells of resin and damp wood. Nothing here is loud. That quiet matters, because this place was built to keep people out of sight and out of mind.

You are standing at Perm-36, near the small village of Kuchino in the Chusovskoy District of the Urals. This was a Soviet labour camp. Today it is the only surviving Gulag camp complex in Russia preserved as a museum. The Gulag was the Soviet system of forced labour camps. Millions of people passed through it. Most camps were later torn down, burned, or left to rot in the forest. This one remained standing.

The camp began in 1946, in the years just after the Second World War. Its first purpose was logging. The forests of the Urals held enormous reserves of timber, and the Soviet state wanted that wood. Prisoners cut trees, floated logs, and worked in sawmills. Look at the wooden buildings around you. The same forest that prisoners felled also gave the material for their barracks, fences, and watchtowers.

In the early 1970s, the camp changed character. It became a strict regime camp for people convicted of so-called especially dangerous state crimes. In practice, many of these prisoners were dissidents. They were writers, human rights activists, religious believers, and national activists from across the Soviet republics. Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Armenians, and Russians all served sentences here. The state called them criminals. Many of them saw themselves as people who had simply refused to stay silent.

Now look at the fences. There is not one fence, but several layers. Wooden walls, rows of barbed wire, and a strip of open ground between them. That strip was a control zone. Guards could see anyone who stepped into it. Above, the watchtowers gave a clear line of sight over the whole compound. Notice how little space there is between the barracks and the wire. The world beyond was close enough to see, and impossible to reach.

Inside the barracks, the rooms are plain. Rows of beds, a stove, small windows. Prisoners in the strict regime section worked in the camp workshops. Many produced parts for household electric irons. It is a strange detail, and one that many visitors miss. Ordinary Soviet families may have used appliances that contained pieces made by political prisoners, without ever knowing it.

In 1980, a separate special regime section opened nearby. This was the harshest level of confinement in the Soviet camp system. Prisoners lived in cells, not barracks. They were held there for long sentences, often after earlier terms in other camps. Conditions were cold, the food was poor, and contact with family was very limited. This section became known among dissidents as one of the hardest places a political prisoner could be sent.

One name is closely tied to that section. Vasyl Stus was a Ukrainian poet. He wrote about conscience, language, and personal dignity. He died in the special regime section in 1985, during a hunger strike period and after time in a punishment cell. Today he is honoured in Ukraine as one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Standing here, it helps to remember that the people behind these walls had names, families, and work they wanted to finish.

Other well-known dissidents also passed through Perm-36. Sergei Kovalev, a biologist and human rights activist, served time here. Later, after the Soviet Union ended, he became a prominent public figure in Russia. Levko Lukyanenko, a Ukrainian lawyer and activist, was also held in the Perm camps. Their stories show how the camp connected to larger changes. Some former prisoners went on to help shape the new countries that emerged in the 1990s.

The camp closed in the late 1980s, during the period of reform under Mikhail Gorbachev. Political prisoners were released, and the site was abandoned. Buildings began to decay. In the mid-1990s, historians and activists connected with the human rights society Memorial started to restore it. They rebuilt fences, repaired barracks, and collected testimony from former prisoners. Their goal was simple and difficult — to keep the memory of the camp physically present, so it could not be easily forgotten.

For several years in the early twenty-first century, the site also hosted a summer civic festival called Pilorama. The name means sawmill, a nod to the camp's past. People came for music, film, theatre, and open discussion. In the mid-2010s, the organisation that had built the museum was pushed out, and the site came fully under state management. Its exhibitions and their emphasis have changed since then. Visitors and historians continue to debate how this history should be told.

As you walk, pay attention to small things. A worn step at a doorway. The height of a window above the floor. The distance from the cell door to the far wall. These details tell you about daily life more clearly than any number. Prisoners measured their world in these few metres. Try to imagine a winter evening here, with the stove barely warm and the forest dark beyond the wire.

Before you leave, stand still once more. Look past the fences to the trees and the open sky. The forest has kept growing all this time, around the camp and over the years. The village road leads away, back toward towns and ordinary life. Many people who walked out of here carried this place with them for the rest of their lives. As you walk back, notice the sound of the gate behind you... and the simple freedom of choosing which way to go.