If and when we can all travel, I would like to go to Tayshet. Here are the reasons why (a thread)

Tayshet, in Russia's Irkutsk Oblast, was the site of an important labor camp complex that served the BAM. Its units held many foreigners, including thousands of Japanese POWs. Among them was Takasugi Ichirō (高杉一郎), author of a bestselling memoir of Siberian Internment.

But Tayshet was a stomping ground for other foreigners: young (and not so young) Marxists or Cominternians who had come to the USSR to serve the revolution but were arrested in the 1930s. The Austrian-Yugoslav communist Karlo Štajner was among those who passed through Tayshet

There was the Polish-Israeli communist Joseph Berger (Barzilai), Štajner's friend and founding member of the Communist Party of the Palestine. Years later he wrote "Shipwreck of a Generation" - a memoir I cherish as much as I do Štajner's "Seven Thousand Days in Siberia"

There was, of course, Jacques Rossi, the "honorary citizen" of the Gulag who spent nearly two decades in it and wrote the "Gulag Handbook" (Справочник по ГУЛагу) - the bible for anyone who is interested in the jargon or folklore of the Gulag Archipelago.

At a recent conference at Georgetown on the "The Political Police and the Soviet System," I talked about the friendship of Jacques Rossi with Uchimura Gōsuke, the late professor of Russian literature at Tokyo's Sophia University and the author of "Japanese in Stalin's Prisons"

There were thousands of other foreigners, let alone tens of thousands of Soviet citizens, who passed through the Tayshet system. Interestingly, there were also three American citizens interned at Tayshet, as we learn from this archival source

I don't know if any of the camp units or structures survive - probably not. (Two years ago I tried to locate Camp No. 188 at Rada, Tambov Oblast', to no avail - maybe a story for another thread). But I'd like to walk in those forests, where these men once walked & worked & lived.

In 2017, I met and interviewed Mr. Satō Kashio, who was also interned in Tayshet. Mr. Satō and a friend erected a monument on top of Mt Takao to all the Japanese POWs who never returned from Siberia. I made this short video about our visit to the monument