Cultural policy of the Archangel regional administration and the project entitled The Roads of the Gulag are based on the unique cultural and
natural heritage of Northern Russia. The purpose of this project is to contribute to the development of cultural tourism in the region.
The project started with opening of the air-route Archangel-Kargopol-Onyega-Solovyetski Islands(1) which acquainted the participants with the riches of the Russian North. We saw Kargopol, a city older than Moscow and one of the oldest cities in Russia (founded in 1146.), famous for its cultural monuments, historic events and the art of making clay toys which turned this city into a capital of creativity and Russian national souvenirs(2).

We visited Onyega, town on the coast of the White Sea, which had its 200th birthday at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is a town of choir singing and theatre, and a venue of the Onyega Dawns festival. It is also a town of sad memories of tragic events(3).At the end, we landed on the Solovyetski Islands that Solzhenitsin described in his Gulag Archipelago.

The islands are not only famous from the best-seller about Stalin’s concentration camps, but also because of Europe’s richest archaeology sites from the Neolithic period. The natural, cultural and historical heritage of the Islands has been under the protection of the UNESCO since 1992.

They are located 165 km from the North Pole, and have only one season - winter, but there are two kinds of winter here, white and green. With 600 lakes, the Islands used to have 22 settlements, but today they are almost completely deserted. Around one thousand of today’s inhabitants gather algae from the White Sea and take care of the natural and cultural riches.

So where is the problem?

All participants of the North Russia “Gulag Road” tour witnessed the organizer’s determination to make this undoubtedly attractive expedition and cultural route succeed. It is clear that with such a determination, anything is possible, despite the obstacles. But the problem lies in the fact that for all of us, this was possible only with a “pass” - that of an important delegation. We were an important delegation and only thanks to our privileged status were we able to go places that a potential tourist for the time being cannot go to. (For example the fact that we landed on runaways that were no more than simple meadows, and that we used the only kind of air-planes that can safely land there - wartime bombers from the WW II that take only 12 passengers, and of which only several exist in the whole regional air-fleet).

This is the reason why it is not possible to speak of the development of mass tourism in the region (It is possible to go by train from Moscow and Archangel to Kargopol, but the only route from Kargopol to Onyega is by water - taking a ship along the Onyega river, only during North Russia’s two summer months.) The fact that the airport in Onyega was opened after ten years for the sole landing - ours, shows that there is little probability that something like that could be organized for an “ordinary tourist”. The same goes for the transport to the locations near the towns that we visited that contain the sites worth seeing, which are the objective of travelling to the region.

About routes and means of transport that we used. They were uncomfortable and dated - airplanes from the World War I, old buses, old ships - undoubtedly they are all antiques, but if that is what makes them attractive, it also makes them uncomfortable.

As for other infrastructure potential, lots of improvement is needed. The accommodation is extremely unsatisfactory (there are no bathrooms or hot water in the rooms, and besides, there were so few rooms that the management of the hotel in Onyega had to temporarily move out several ordinary tourists for us to move in).

And the last and maybe the most important point - thanks to our privileged status as an “important delegation” - we were able to see, hear and find out something about the concentration camps that other people undertaking the “Gulag road” tour would not be able to hear, in which case the very purpose of such a trip would become doubtful. We were allowed to do what ordinary tourists would not be - to ask the guides of our little expedition questions, to interview the local population, to take photos everywhere and visit all places related to concentration camps (For example to visit the location of a former camp at the embankment of a lake near Kargopol, the Ki Island which is hard to approach because of the high and low tide, the opening of the memorial at the location of mass-graves near Onyega and so on.)

A tourist would not know who to ask for the information, since there were not any tourist or information bureaus in Kargopol, Onyega or Solovyetski Islands.

Memorial tourism - what to offer to the tourists with special requests - It is self-evident that all of us carry the burden of the tragic past and that we should all give our contribution to the preservation of the truth about the tragic events and thus prevent their repetition in the future. On our trip we witnessed a clear determination to do this, but it was shown only by the representatives of regional and local authorities and a small number of the local activists who worked on that problem with dedication, whereas the whole local communities do not participate in the attempt to preserve the memory of the tragic past. There are several facts that prove this: first, the planned monuments at the locations of the mass-graves have not been finished - both in Solovyetski and in Onyega only a stone was put up, without a monument. This shows that there was no perseverance to finish the monument - probably because of the resistance of the public. Furthermore, we found out unofficially that two days before the opening, the memorial with the inscription “To the victims of political repression” was damaged by spray-paint, which shows that whoever did it is against the initiative to preserve the memory of the tragic events.

·The wall of silence is all around us. The first thing we saw on the Solovyetski Islands were the ramparts of the 15th century monastery. All we knew about them was that they were located between the 35th and the 36th meridians and that they guarded the treasures protected by UNESCO.

We also knew that one part of the monastery has been turned into a museum in which in 1989. a permanent exhibition about the suffering in Russia’s gulag was opened. We were told that this was the first exhibition of its kind in what was then the Soviet Union.

We thought that many similar exhibitions were to follow. But they did not. We learned about only another two. We were present at the opening of one of those just a few days earlier in Kargopol.

This means that in the meantime, since the first such exhibition, in the whole region of Archangel, only one other exhibition was mounted in ten years! This revelation was a real shock. This was the first time we encountered the wall of silence.

The second time we encountered it was when we were taken to the memorial on the “Alley of remembrance”. There were only two words written on the stone “To the Prisoners of Solovyetski”. I thought: “There, at least here they managed to face their own responsibility”. Here meant the place where the first mass crimes in human history were committed. The place which saw the building of the most horrid legacy of the 20th century - the cultural laboratory. In this laboratory, in the process of “transforming social parasites into people who deserve to live in socialism” around one million were killed, and the whereabouts of their graves are unknown….First it happened to the members of all political parties, then to the Russian aristocracy, civil servants and the White Guard Officer Corps, then to the Kulak peasants, scientists and cultural workers, artists…Everybody! There was not a single social group that did not represent a threat to Stalin.

They say that today every second Russian has memories of a close person who perished in the terrible death camps! And the homeland of all the suffering is here in SLON, the Solovyetski camp for special purposes. It is the oldest concentration camp in the world, founded in 1923. In this camp, the technology of mass murder was perfected and was later used in all other Soviet, Fascist, and also our camps. But we learned that the stone-memorial was just a base on which a monument was supposed to be built. It was never built because of the wall of silence.

During the Gorbachev era, when the archives about the sufferings in Stalin’s camps were open, it seemed like the silence ended. But it did not. The silence resumed and stood between the real events and our knowledge and conversations about them today.

People who visit former camps and mass graves are the survivors, relatives and friends of the victims, members of state, political and non-governmental organizations. There is a similar kind of tourism for the Nazi camps, and in Croatia there are plans to develop memorial tourism on the island of Goli otok, which served as a prison for the convicts of the Inform-bureau period.

But the main condition for development of memorial tourism for tourists with special requests are the exact, double-checked and public data about the number of victims, locations of the camps, names of the prisoners detained there, information on whether they survived or perished and how it happened. To make that possible it is necessary to open the archives and conduct systematic scientific research which could produce the necessary range and quality of data about the camps in this part of Russia, and form a database about the prisons, prisoners, trials and so on. The next step would be to connect the gulags into a network (also by the Internet) and to ensure that all the interested users can access the data. Another possibility is to offer a number of camp-related projects - screening of documentary and feature films about the Gulag, photographs, books, manuscripts, documents, theatre plays and works of art, meetings and discussions with the survivors, educational projects such as seminars, trips and congresses followed by Internet presentations and discussion lists, and many similar projects.

Cultural tourism - education and animation

As far as cultural animation is concerned, it is obvious at first glance that cultural institutions and cultural projects exist in the region, but that their potential is not entirely activated for the purposes of culture and tourism.
·The first problem we encountered was the conservativism of the museums and galleries. The region is rich in museums which in most cases function as generators of the economic and cultural life of local communities. (The museum on the Solovyetski Islands is protected by UNESCO, the Kargopol museum, apart from its primary function, is the founder of a folklore association and a workshop where famous Kargopol souvenirs are produced, and the director of the museum in Onyega is the president of the association “The consciousness of the town of Onyega” which initiated the mounting of the memorial at the location of the mass-graves of the prisoners.)

But the exhibitions in the museums lack creativity. Most of them are conservative and do not follow contemporary multi-media trends (an exception is the exhibit in Kargopol, which was modern in design and included an exhibit about the concentration camps mounted in a monastery cell of one of the Kargopol monasteries. This exhibition functions very well, despite the fact that only a small number of exhibits is presented. The same goes for the permanent exhibit on local ethnology, designed, by an author from Moscow, which explains its spirit of modernity.)

While today museums utilize new technologies, the museums in the Archangel region lack even the basic printed information materials - such as press-releases, catalogues, new post-cards (those post-cards that can be found were designed in the Soviet period). Therefore, the problem here is the often-repeated mistake which can be described as “too much thinking about the exhibits, too little thinking about the visitors”. This was evident from our experience at the opening of the exhibition of the concentration camps, which was then closed only a half an hour later, which did not give us enough time to see all the exhibits. We had a similar office-hours problem with one of the two gallery-shops in the region (the souvenir-shop in Kargopol and the gallery of contemporary art on the island). After two days of trying to coordinate our free time with their office-hours, we finally ended up “negotiating”, helped by the director of the regional Committee for culture and tourism - without his mediation the gallery would never have opened during the lunch-break hours.

The life of the local community is rich but hidden from visitors. When you walk through the towns and villages that you visit, you are not able to see everyday life because it is hidden behind the windows and doors of family houses. And the very reason a tourist comes to visit these places is to find out how local people live, to learn about their past, culture, language, customs, beliefs…To get to know all that is unique and different, that cannot be seen anywhere else but here. For example, the white nights, and the festival “White Dawns” that takes place for the occasion of this natural phenomenon. Or how the islanders harvest the precious algae of the “laminaria” species from the White Sea - the algae that are in demand in all the markets of the world. Or, how the artisans in Kargopol make the famous souvenirs - clay whistles, or how people of Onyega make home-made beer.

The solution of the problem - what needs to be done and how

1. First of all, there must be a vision about what the goals are at the regional level, including in all those communities with potential for the development of tourism. All the participants in the expedition were able to see that there is such a vision. It is a very impressive vision of development that relies on its own demographic, economic, social, natural and cultural resources. But the question of whether such a vision is realistic, taking into consideration the weak infrastructure of the whole region and the current financial situation of Russia cannot be avoided.

2. The next step is defining a policy of cultural tourism in this region, which would include a short-term and long-term strategy of development. This would require cooperation between different sectors, in other words a “desectoring” of different sectors of the state and local administration which, until now were separate (for example, legislature, finances, information, culture, tourism, sport, agriculture and so on). Once these elements are established, it is necessary to open competitions for projects and raise funds for them through fund-raising.

At the same time, two things crucial for cultural tourism need to be borne in mind. The first one is education for everybody working in the area of cultural tourism, and the second one is animation.

People who work in cultural tourism should know how to meet the demands of tourists. In order to do that they should be familiar with the laws and logic of the tourist and cultural markets which continuously change, which causes a change in the elements of the demand. How to communicate, how to serve a guest, how to stimulate new needs, how to sell a “product”, how to organize a marketing campaign, how to make a presentation…all of this has immense importance for the success of cultural tourism. But the most important task is to animate the tourist - what needs to be done to make him happy with his stay, how to stimulate his investigative spirit, how to increase his activity, and finally, his spending. If a tourist is not included in the life of the local community, if he is not in contact with the local population, if their everyday life and values remain hidden from him, he won’t be satisfied. This means that he will not come again and he will not recommend the place to his friends. This means less money in the tourist cash-register, in other words, a failure.

Why cultural tourism needs the animators?

The local population does not know how to present their everyday life to the tourists. They are even less able to demonstrate their cultural and artistic potential. Local people cannot recognize those values, they don’t know that those things would interest tourists and do not how to show them to tourists. That is why the animators are needed - they know how to activate the local potential and how to enliven it for the tourist.

They know that the tourist would like to see an islander harvesting the algae. They know how to present the unique souvenirs of the Kargopol artisans and how to organize tasting of the Onyega home-made beer. The animators know all these things - they can also instruct the tourist about the difference between the artisan-made and industrial products. Animation is a sum of actions, and animators are specialists who integrate different groups of people (tourists and local population).

The task of the animators is to plan and conduct the process of interaction between the elements of the guest culture and the host culture. The overall result of such intervention is, on one side the rehabilitation of the local culture that becomes active and worth noticing, and on the other, satisfying the tourist needs and demands.

Animation is important for several reasons. It helps in understanding the economy and culture, in the exchange of money and cultural exchange, in understanding art and understanding between people. That is why an animator must use different kinds of knowledge in his work - that of economics, culture, sociology, psychology. He must also have certain educational and artistic skills to shake, excite and inspire the intellectual and the emotional potential of people. Animation should remove the obstacle which separates the world of empty idleness from the world of creative activity, investigative spirit, creativity and art and build a bridge between these two shores.

Animation has been used in tourism for several decades, as well as in culture. Although the main goal of the tourism business is to achieve the economic effects, people working in tourism have for some time been aware that the humanist and cultural functions of tourism for the social and cultural development of a community should not be neglected.

If for no other reason, this is so because animation can help increase the social and cultural quality of what is offered and increase the profits without any significant investment. And the profits are what is the most interesting to the economists. Even though this is about economic calculation, the profit here is reached through play. Play is, in fact, the basic form of the tourist animation, and many tourist programs contain some elements of it - we are playing at being peasants, mountaineers, fishermen, rafters, painters, explorers, and so on. But when one uses animation in cultural tourism, the target is the artistic and cultural experience of the tourist.

It should stimulate the tourist and move him to start exploring and discovering the local cultural characteristics of the place he is staying in. In this case animation primarily assumes the role of the mediator between the host and the guest cultures. It should help the guest to better understand the culture of his host, and the host to better understand the guest.

If there is no such mediation, the guest can become bored and leave without having discovered the cultural values that were around him all the time. Another possibility is that a conflict occurs between the guest and the host. One such conflict occurred in the tourist village of Languedoc in France where the tourist offer from the local people included bad riding horses, a boat-ride on a polluted lake, wiener-schnitzel for lunch and the international souvenirs made in Hong-Kong instead of in the workshop of the local artisan. The problem was noticed when the number of tourists started to decline dramatically. Then a group of experts was invited who (using the methods and techniques of animation) managed to return the tourists to Languedoc after a period of time.

Conclusion

Unless workers in tourism are educated and the tourists animated, the cultural tourism of Northern Russia cannot satisfy the needs of the “new generation” of tourists. This is why the planners of the development of cultural tourism should think about animation as much as they should about the means of transport and accommodation of tourists.

Only when all this is provided, could Northern Russia could become a real tourist destination, and the cultural tour “The Gulag roads” could attract new pilgrims. It could become a part of a big tourist and educational cultural tour which would go around the world (it could be called “The Road of Communist Illusions”). Such a tour would cover all the gulags, camps and prisons in which millions of victims of communist regimes perished – in China, Korea, USSR, Yugoslavia and other former communist courtiers, for example in Eastern Europe. But all of this can only happen if...Until that moment, the potential exists, but it is not activated. This will depend on the management, not conservative, but innovative management and the managers with entrepreneurial spirit. One thing is certain - until there are such people, this tour will not be able to take off.




(1) The trip took place from 17-24th of June 2000, and it was organised by The Information and Poligraphic Centre for the Cultural Activities of Russia; the participants were representatives of the regional cultural administration, local and foreign journalists and experts in cultural management and cultural tourism; after the trip a discussion and a seminar were organised; it is the intention of this project to finish it by publishing a monograph, the working title of which would be “Places of Sorrow”

(2) built by the tsar Ivan the Terrible in mid 16th century; a powerful Russian army gathered before the walls of this town in 1380. on the eve of the Kulikov battle; during Stalin’s purges the town became a transit concentration A pearl of Kargopol architecture is the Cathedral of the Christ’s Birth camp known as Kar-lag. This camp was surrounded by a number of other camps to which the prisoners were sent for forced labour, never to return.

(3) Nearby the town of Onyega another concentration camp of the Archangel region had been built - Sorko-lag. The inmates were building the railroad here, the granite for it came from nearby Ki island, also from a prison quarry

Vesna Djukic Dojcinovic, Ph.D., is Director of the Centre for studies in cultural development, Belgrade,
Serbia.
As researcher and expert she leads and participates in development and educational projects for international, national, governmental and non-governmental organizations.
Her email address is: veurdoj@EUnet.yu