Perm sits on the Kama River, which is one of the great Ural waterways and at certain times of year looks more like an inland sea than a river — flat, wide, the far bank barely visible. The city rose on fur trading and then salt mining and then industry, and all of those histories are still visible in the architecture if you know what sequence to look for. What brought me here wasn’t the architecture.
Perm-36
Sixty kilometers from the city center, in the village of Kuchino, there is a gulag — a genuine one, not a reconstruction. Perm-36 operated from 1946 until 1988, one of the last labor camps to close in the Soviet Union. It held political prisoners, including many who were serving second and third sentences for continued dissent. The wooden barracks are preserved. The watch towers are still standing. The barbed wire fence runs its full original perimeter.
I’ve been to Holocaust memorial sites in Europe and I’ve been to the Tuol Sleng museum in Phnom Penh and Perm-36 belongs in that category — not as a tourist attraction but as a place that insists on being confronted. The exhibition inside the barracks documents specific prisoners: their names, their offenses (writing poetry, distributing samizdat, belonging to the wrong ethnic group), their sentences, their fates. You read one file and then another and then you have to step outside.
The recent political situation in Russia complicated the museum’s mission — there was a period when the narrative was softened under pressure, then pushback from the original founders. What you encounter now is honest enough. It’s the most important single site in the Ural region.
The Art Moment
Perm had an extraordinary decade as a contemporary art destination in the 2000s and early 2010s, centered around the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art and a public art program that installed major works around the city. Some of those works are still there. The famous red letters spelling ПЕРМЬ on the riverbank esplanade have been photographed so many times they’ve become a logo, but they still work in person — especially at night when the Kama is dark behind them.
The Perm State Art Gallery occupies a converted cathedral and has a serious collection of wooden religious sculpture from the Ural Perm region — perm gods, as they’re called, a form of carved wooden icon unique to this area, faces with an expressiveness that doesn’t look like anything else in Russian religious art.
The River and the Food Market
The Kama embankment in summer is where Perm walks. The esplanade runs several kilometers along the riverfront and the scale of the river from ground level is something you have to see to calibrate — boats that look enormous from the dock become small halfway across. In winter the river freezes solid enough that people fish through holes cut in the ice, tiny figures in enormous white.
The central market on Krasnoflotskaya sells Ural produce: dried mushrooms in quantities I’ve never seen elsewhere, several varieties of wild berries, pelmeni made with venison or bear (the venison is better), and a sour fermented milk drink called prostokvasha that I ordered by accident and liked more than expected.
Getting Here and Moving On
Perm is on the Trans-Siberian Railway, which makes it a natural stop between Moscow and Yekaterinburg. The overnight train from Moscow is eighteen hours and arrives in the early morning. The train east to Yekaterinburg is another four hours through increasingly dramatic Ural scenery.
When to go: May through September for the most comfortable conditions and the full river experience. January and February for the ice festival on the Kama — elaborate ice sculpture installations in the cold that deserve the effort of being cold to see them. The art museum and Perm-36 are worth the trip in any season; neither is weather-dependent.