3D camp tour
Travel through a Gulag camp and learn about the daily lives of prisoners in a correctional labour camp! The virtual tour enables you to visit all of the buildings in a camp; you will encounter authentic items of camp life and learn from survivors what everyday life was like for political prisoners in Stalin’s labour camps.
The virtual tour of the Gulag is the result of the mapping of the remnants of Gulag camps along the so-called Dead Road. It is a precise reconstruction of individual camp buildings which you can compare to their present state thanks to panoramic photographs of each of them. Given that by no means all types of buildings have been preserved at any of the camps, we have been forced to create a virtual “Dead Road labour camp” on the basis of tours conducted at five different camps – depending on where individual types of buildings were best preserved.
The resultant reconstructed model of a camp corresponds to the most common layout of camp buildings (though each camp differed in number of buildings and other details) and contains all types of buildings typical of most camps; three types of prison building, administration, kitchen and dining hall, solitary, latrines, baths, drying hut, workshops and stores, sick bay, gatehouse, guard towers and kennels.
It is necessary to point out that the reconstructed form of the camp cannot be generalised onto all Soviet labour camps; during the entire period that the Gulag system was in place there were over 30,000 of them and they differed in form, number of prisoners, building materials and usage. Our camp is a reconstruction of particular labour camps from the early 1950s used in the construction of Gulag no. 503, which were just one of the many forms of the Soviet Gulag.