Perm, formerly known as Molotov during the Soviet era, was a closed city until the late 1980s (and apparently still has blurry bits on Google maps) and about 17 kms from Perm was the Starry Missile site, where they controlled various nuclear weapons, including ones that could travel 13,000 kms at 5m/s, which meant that they could have reached Australia in 30 mins!

Anyway I get ahead of myself again, about 200 Kms outside Perm is also the last gulag left standing as it was when in operation. Perm-36.

We organised a tour to Perm-36 first with a guide who wasn't brilliant and seemed to be very interested in finding out how he could get a visa to Australia. It turns out he was a part time guide and otherwise a lecturer in Human Geography.

Perm-36 had an interesting history, it was first utilised for those victims of crimes against the state (so 1930s and early 40s), then later in the 1950s when Stalin died it became the prison for ex-NKVD (KGB), and Stalin cronies (so the ones that sent the people there in the 1930s/40s). It then became more of a "standard" prison for political prisoners until it closed in 1988.

It was interesting to see the improvements in "comfort" they made once Stalin's people and the later political prisoners arrived. I say "comfort" as it was still a pretty bare, harsh place and would have been horrible in winter. It can get to -40 Celsius.

Perm itself has two parts, the old city which has many beautiful late 18th and 19th Century buildings, and then a modern Soviet city of high rises and Khrushchev flats. Our guide to the Starry site was telling us that Perm lost favour with the communists as it had White Army sympathies, and therefore Ekaterinburg was chosen as the more important Soviet city and got more funding. Apparently there is still a rivalry between the cities.

Thankfully the green tourist walking tour line around Perm was a good one and we did half one day, and half the next.

The second day was an absolute highlight. The Starry missile site. We had a tour of the underground control centre. The site guide was a retired Colonel who worked at the site when it was operational. We were warned by our guide that he was a bit of a character and would ask some strange questions... he was brilliant. Such a character! You just weren't too sure how firmly his tongue was in cheek as he spoke about destroying the "imperial aggressors".

He started by asking where we were from (Australia). How long it took us to get there, and then whether we had heard of Lenin and Stalin... Then the hardest question, whether we had heard only the bad things about Stalin (he seemed to think Stalin was ok)... I had done Russian history at Uni, so decided to answer I had heard the "historical" things about him. It was a good enough answer and our tour guide was pleased. I have a feeling the Colonel knew I had avoided the question.

He then went on to explain the capabilities of the site and how they could have destroyed the "imperialist aggressors"... they had some serious nukes! Multiple serious nukes!

We then got to muck around and press the buttons to destroy the world. We went through the launch process, which was from start to launch, 100 seconds. So short.

What became more funny throughout the tour was the commands the Colonel gave about taking photo's. So I would get told to sit and pose and Luke who was now just known as "moosh" which is "husband" in Russian would get told "moosh, photo!" It was not a question, it was an order!

I think what made it even better was our guide's reactions and sometimes minor despair regarding some of the things the Colonel said.

The scariest thing I found out about were the missile trains. In the 1990s, Russia created 12 trains which each contained 3 x 550 kiloton nuclear weapons. The one dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kiloton. There were 4 trains based in Perm. The missiles were always armed and ready to be launched (in 100 seconds). The thing was, these trains looked like normal refrigerated freight trains and utilised the normal train network. So, if you were on the trans-Siberian in the mid-1990s or even early 2000's (they were destroyed in 2004) you could be pulled up at a station next to a world-killing train!! That is some scary shit.

Our guide, who was a Perm local, said that his Dad was in the military and had told him the only way you could tell a missile train from a standard one was the extra set of wheels per carriage on the missile train. I asked whether he ever saw one. He said he did, only once! He said he didn't quite know the enormity of what he was seeing at the time. Can you imagine!

Anyway, mind-blown, we finished the green line tour of Perm, found Lenin and some of the locations that Boris Pasternak used for Yuritan, the location in the Urals both Zhivago and Lara end up, in Dr Zhivago i.e. the house with the figures and the library where Zhivago sees Lara for the third time. We had both read Dr Zhivago in preparation for coming to Perm.

It's easy to see why the book couldn't get published during Soviet times, but an excellent read.

Anyway, Perm, despite being not so polished as Ekaterinburg was a great stop and I am so pleased we did it.

It's funny though, we have been remarking, we aren't seeing other backpacking trans-sibbers. We aren't staying in hostels all the time and we are going the "wrong way", but I would have thought we would have seen them on the green line tours or even just at the stations, but hardly anyone. I wonder where they are? I expected to see them in Ekaterinburg at least, it's one of the main stops. Perhaps we'll see them closer to Moscow?

I didn't really mean to have separate stops for both Perm and Ekaterinburg on the blod, but once again, there are too many photos.

Our next train trip is a horrible one, a 14 hour day trip from Perm to Nizhny Novgorod, our last long train journey before leaving Russia, all remaining ones are between two and three hours.