Krasnoyarsk

"On the quay a small fleet of minivans stands by for those passengers who are impatient to reach Predposylov. No, we are not many, we are pitifully few. The Gulag tour, the purser told me with an indulgent shrug, always lost money; and then he mimed a yawn. Similarly, on the flight from the capital to my point of embarkation I quite clearly heard a stewardess refer to me (she and a collegue were remixing my drink) as 'the Gulag bore in 2B'. It is nice to know that this insousiance about Russian slavery - abolished, it is true, as long ago as 1987- has filtered down to the caste of tourism. I let the stewardess get away with it. Start a ruckus on a plane these days and you get fifteen bullets in the head. But the indulgent purser (much shaken, much enriched) now knows that here is one who still swears and weeps, that here is one who still hates and burns."

House of Meetings - Martin Amis

Gulag Tours