{"id":115862,"date":"2021-04-10T13:42:58","date_gmt":"2021-04-10T13:42:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=184741"},"modified":"2021-04-10T13:42:58","modified_gmt":"2021-04-10T13:42:58","slug":"above-the-arctic-circle-a-soviet-era-metropolis-battles-a-drawn-out-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/04\/10\/above-the-arctic-circle-a-soviet-era-metropolis-battles-a-drawn-out-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Above The Arctic Circle, A Soviet-Era Metropolis Battles A ‘Drawn-Out Death’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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VORKUTA, Russia — In May 1931, a group of 39 prisoners toiling in the Soviet Union’s expanding network of forced labor camps set off north from the town of Ukhta to explore the vast coal basin in the Russian Arctic.<\/p>\n
Joined by a team of geologists and camp guards, the men traveled for weeks through barely navigable waters and icy tundra into the frigid, inhospitable region that would test the limits of the lauded Soviet conquest of the Far North.<\/p>\n
They were soon joined by more prisoners, hundreds of whom died from sickness, hypothermia, and starvation. But by the spring of 1932, they founded Rudnik, a small coal-mining settlement 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle that would soon grow into the city of Vorkuta.<\/p>\n
It had been a barren, forbidding terrain known only to indigenous Nenets reindeer herders; within a decade, it hosted one of the deadliest Gulag camps in the Soviet Union, and after Stalin’s death in 1953, a burgeoning metropolis that would be upheld as a symbol of Soviet power.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n