DOLINA KANYONA, Eastern Siberia - Josef Stalin sent millions of Soviet citizens down Siberia's so-called "Road of Bones" to the misery and death of the gulag labor camps.

Now tourists are being invited to the remote Kolyma track to Dolina Kanyona, a labor camp crumbling into the tundra nearly 50 years after its last inmate was released.

Forty-six-year-old Alexei Alabushev, born the year the labor camp closed, swapped a teaching career for an unlikely tourist dream amid the taiga and tumbling rivers of Russia's far northeast.

"I wanted to come up with a project that would embrace all sides of tourism - nature, history, ethnic themes, extreme tourism, sport," Alabushev said.

"Dolina Kanyona fits ideally into this idea. This place is unique; it has mountains, lakes, cascading waterfalls, glaciers; rare animals. Here you can satisfy the most demanding tourist."

Snow-capped mountains overlook Dolina Kanyona and the expanse of Siberian taiga, whose autumnal reds, yellows and greens fan out around the crystal clear Verina river.

But some 2,000 Dolina Kanyona inmates saw a different picture half a century ago.

Vladimir Svertelov, prisoner number M-1247, recalls climbing the camp's wooden stairs every morning to work, whipped by a piercing wind and gnawed by temperatures plummeting to minus 50 degrees Celsius.

"Nature itself served as a guard here," said Svertelov.

Since the camp closed in 1954, rivers have washed away the wooden bridges built by prisoners on the road that led to it. But Dolina Kanyona's isolation and forbidding elements have helped it remain one of the best preserved of Kolyma's 500 or so camps.

Barbed wire still twists around the camp and metal bars criss-cross the tiny square windows of the prison barracks. Quilted jackets, numbered caps, tarpaulin boots and tins litter the floor of the barracks and workshops.

At the top of a steep slope looms a huge refinery surrounded by heaps of cobalt ore, which the Cold War-era Soviet military needed to make armor.

Svertelov was banished to Dolina Kanyona for the "crime" of having been captured by Nazis while a soldier during World War II.

German prison was bad, but being treated as a traitor upon returning was worse.

The only survivor of Dolina Kanyona left in the regional center, Magadan, Svertelov is wholeheartedly in favor of Alabushev's tourism idea.

"People must go there and see how we lived," Svertelov said. "It doesn't matter if someone also wants to make money on this."

The Magadan region suffers from the economic woes which grip much of Siberia.

The infrastructure built by prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s was developed by workers from across the Soviet Union, drawn by special wages and powerful propaganda.

But much of region's transport and industry became too inefficient to maintain after the economic reforms of the 1990s.

Ivan Panikarov, a former plumber from the southern Russian town of Rostov, has set up a gulag museum in Yagodnoye - a town of 8,000 that once housed the regional gulag administration headquarters - and put it on-line.

Panikarov came to Kolyma in the 1970s, where he learned the grim history of the camps and began visiting their remains, collecting prisoners' clothes, tools and tableware.

In 1994, after many failed attempts to get support from the local administration, he bought a two-room apartment in Yagodnoye and put the exhibits on display.

Today Panikarov's museum is Yagodnoye's key attraction and the local administration has offered to exhibit his artifacts at a former cinema.

The Kolyma track is littered with abandoned villages standing next to the ruins of labor camps, but Yagodnoye, "the town of berries" in Russian, is prosperous by local standards.

The local administration is trying to lure entrepreneurs and gold prospectors. There's even a town Internet server.

"The wives of the gold prospectors look at the Web sites of Moscow shops so they know where to go when they get there. The prospectors themselves look up the world prices for gold," said Vladimir Alexeyev, director of the town's communications center.

One computer is available for public use at Yagodnoye's post office, but Alexeyev dreams of installing a Web camera to let residents stay in touch over the Internet with children studying in Magadan, which would save money on telephones and travel.

The server also hosts Ivan Panikarov's gulag history Web site (http:/ya.
msi.ru/musemus/main.htm). But Panikarov's ambition is to take tourists to see the real thing.
. The Museum Link (Russian only)