Day 2: Karlag-Spassk-Nur-Sultan

• Karagandy

  40 minsAdmission Ticket Free

  After the breakfast you will be transferred to the village Dolinka (42 km) where The Museum of the Memory of the Victims of Political Repressions also known as Karlag is located. Opened in 2002, it contains the facts about the tragic fate of thousands of prisoners affected by the policies of the Soviet regime. Karlag labour campor Karaganda Penitentiary Labour Camp of the Nation’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of NKVD used to be one of the many Penitentiary Places of the GULAG system created by the order of Josef Stalin. The peculiarity of the Karlag labour camp is that it wasone of the largest camps in the USSR, stretched for several hundred kilometers. Over 28 years of existence, more than million people have passed through the Karlag. These people built the industry of Central Kazakhstan, primarily the Karaganda coal basin. Upon arrival to Dolinka village before entering Karlag memorial museum we will first visit Children’s cemetery also known as “Mammie’s cemetery” where thousands of babies of prisoner’s women are buried. It is a horrifying place to be still up to nowadays. After the cemetery we will proceed with the tour to the Karlag memorial museum where you will seeand learn many things about the prisoners among whom were also Nobel Prize nominees. Being quite vivid the installations of the insulator, the punishment cell – basically a hole in the floor with metal grille on top, the division pit, the torture chamber with like real life mannequins of prisoners and Soviet offices make an non-forgettable impression. Upon finishingin Karlag we will proceed further to the Spassk village (35km from Karaganda) where the Spassky memorial is located. Spasskused to be another labour camp under the Gulgag –Karlag system of camps with a particularly high rate of detention of foreign war prisoners during the Second World War. The camp is infamous for being extraordinarily brutal and with a particularly high death rate. Today, in Spassk there is no labour camp left but there are memorials of those prisoners who used to sit in the Spassk labour camp. Each memorial stone has its own design reflecting or portraying the nations that the camp’s prisoners had come from. Countries that erected memorials: Germany, Hungary, Japan, Korea Italy, Russia, Poland, Romania, France, Finland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus. Historians estimate the number of prisoners of war buried in Spassk as of 5152 people of different nationalities. Upon the end of this tour,we will transfer back to Nur-Sultan (c.3-3.5 hours by car).