This article was orginally posted on July 1, 2006.
Well, not really on communism, but on Latvia’s communist past. For 5 lats, you can experience a Soviet prison first hand. Karosta Military Detention Center is located in the city of Liepaja and is open for tourists.
From The Observer:
I’ve packed some light reading, a toilet roll (just in case), a towel and an electric toothbrush. My guide and interpreter Evija said nothing else is needed for a night in Liepaja’s most unconventional hotel. All other comforts are presumably laid on.
Wrong. No comforts are laid on, at all. This ‘hotel’ proudly bills itself as ‘unfriendly, unheated, uncomfortable and open all year round’. But that’s the point. A stay here is reality tourism writ large, a chance to experience at first hand (albeit handcuffed for part of the time) the brutal, degrading regime of a damp, rotting red-bricked naval jail built in 1905 to house the czar’s mutinous sailors. New management took over in the 1970s: the KGB.
For those who suffered at the hands of the evil KGB this is no joke. Indeed it is an insult to the memory of the thousands of Latvians who were tourtured and killed by these monsters. Imagine the outcry if Dachau was opened as a theme park! Sometimes I really dispair for Latvia, I really do.
On the other hand, this might be a useful tool for bringing home the reality of what people experienced in the gentle care of the KGB, and, thus, for helping dissipate the rosy glow through which all too many Western liberals (in the American sense) view the Soviet Union.
Mark my words – Guantanamo Bay is the next Disneyland!