[ptaipale]

I could recommend another, shorter trip, if you can spare a few days: get a Russian visa and drive to Haparanda - Kuhmo - Kostamuksha - Belomorsk. Nowadays, it's a one-day drive.

Look at Stalin's Canal there, and imagine that when it was built, the wasted humans were many enough to lay along the canal, buried there head to toe, to form a chain as long as the man-built parts of the canal itself.

The canal was never economically or militarily useful, it was just a project used to get rid of people.

Not quite as many people killed as in Hiroshima, but they were each one separately and individually starved, beaten or shot to death instead of being killed remotely by one big industrial bomb. The killing machinery was human and it worked slow and it worked eye to eye.

From Belomorsk you can take a boat trip to Solovetsk, which was the original development lab for how to starve people in concentration camps. Both Soviets and Nazis studied and developed their methods based on the findings there.

Notice also that you won't see memorials for those who were killed. The miserable swamps are their monument.