The “Kresty” Prison and Tourism: The Past, the Present, and the Future

Abstract

Dark tourism is a global phenomenon (Lennon and Foley 2000: 168) whereby ordinary people take interest in and frequent “dark places” associated with death and human suffering. Notable examples across the globe include Holocaust museums, Gestapo museums and disaster sites (Tumarkin 2005; Wilson 2008). Dark tourism is also popular in Russia, where past battle sites (for instance, the Field of Borodino) and the locations of famous deaths (such as the scene of Boris Nemtsov’s murder) have attracted the interest of tourists. In this chapter, I focus on tourist interest in some of Russia’s decommissioned prisons. Although prison tourism is a relatively new field of study, a significant body of literature has emerged internationally in recent years, discussing and examining the various historical, social, political, and commercial ramifications of re-opening former institutions of incarceration as museums and/or heritage sites (Ross, 2012). A notable lacuna in this scholarly work lies in the study and analysis of tourist experiences of the growing number of former prisons, prison camps, and other carceral sites being transformed into museums and tourist sites in Russia.