Spassk

Spassk memorial - darkometer rating : 3 - A cemetery-like ensemble of memorial stones dedicated by various nations to the gulag centre that used to form part of the KarLag system in east-central Kazakhstan . More background info What there is to see Location Access and costs Time required Combinations with other dark destinations Combinations with non-dark destinations Photos More background info: for background information about the gulag system in Kazakhstan in general see KarLag (and cf. ALZHIR ). Spassk used to be a particularly infamous 'special camp' within this system, extraordinarily brutal (according to Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago") and with a particularly high death rate. There isn't an awful lot of precise information available on the Internet, but there seems to have been a separate women's camp at Spassk. Hard labour was performed in a nearby quarry. Apparently there had also been an uprising at Spassk (in the early 1950s?) which was violently crushed with the use of machine guns and tanks. What there is to see: there isn't anything of the actual camp left at all, although a nearby overgrown depression in the ground has been identified as possibly the camp quarry. Today, however, the only thing of note for the passing dark tourist is an ensemble of memorial stones, put up in a barren field in the low hills of the steppe south of Karaganda . The monuments are lined up at the northern end of a fenced-in open field that is regarded as a cemetery – a mass grave of sorts, with unmarked graves. Only a few uniform, unmarked sets of three low black crosses are set into the middle of the field, and a single tall and thin cross marks the far end of the field/cemetery. The memorial stones, on the other hand, are all of a quite individual design, some more traditional, others quite unusual.