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excerpt - MOSCOW, Aug 27 (Reuters) - An intense earthquake measuring nine on the Richter scale hit the Lake Baikal area of eastern Siberia on Wednesday, triggering reports of panic, but there were no casualties or major damage, officials said. ~ snip ~

'Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel prize winner for literature who was exiled from the Soviet Union and graphically portrayed life in Soviet labour camps, was dead at age 89, the news agency Interfax reported early Monday. The agency quoted literary circles in the Russian capital. The world famous writer and historian had not been seen in public for months. He died from the aftermath of a stroke, according to unconfirmed information.'

Tunguska, a century later By Sid PerkinsJune 5th, 2008 Asteroid or comet blamed for Siberian blast of 1908BLAST FROM THE PASTThe Tunguska blast shook Siberia in 1908, but on-site investigations were delayed for two decades. One of the first photos showed a large area of flattened trees.Early on the morning of June 30, 1908, a massive explosion shook central Siberia. Witnesses told of a fireball that streaked in from the southeast and then detonated in the sky above the desolate, forested region. At the nearest trading post, about 70 kilometers away from the blast, people were reportedly knocked from their...

Orkney Islanders have Siberian relatives Last Updated: 12:01am BST 23/05/2008 A new study on ancient human migrations suggests that Orcadians and Siberians are closely related, writes Roger Highfield. Orkney Islanders are more closely related to people in Siberia and in Pakistan than those in Africa and the near East, according to a novel method to chart human migrations. The surprising findings come from a new way to infer ancient human movements from the variation of DNA in people today, conducted by a team from the University of Oxford and University College Cork, which has pioneered a technique that analyses the...

MOSCOW, April 23 (AFP) Apr 23, 2008 Russian fire services were on Wednesday battling blazes across Siberia blamed on an exceptionally mild winter and illegal logging. The emergency situations ministry said on its website that 36,000 hectares (89,000 acres) were burning in the Amur, Buryatiya, Khabarovsk, Primorsky and Jewish Autonomous provinces. Another 11,000 hectares (27,000 acres) of forest had been consumed by fire in the previous 24 hours, the ministry said. "To extinguish the fire, 6,551 people and 1,779 firefighting vehicles, including eight aircraft, have been deployed," the ministry said. The Interfax news agency reported the air was thick with...

New tomb for 'Altai Princess' to be built in Siberia 21:34 | 20/ 03/ 2008 NOVOSIBIRSK, March 20 (RIA Novosti) - A tomb to house the remains of a woman found after being preserved in ice for 2,500 years will be built in Siberia's Altai Republic, the director of a local museum said on Thursday. The well-preserved remains of the woman dubbed the Altai Princess were discovered in the region by a team led by a Novosibirsk archeologist in 1993 near the Mongolian border, and have been studied at the Archaeology and Ethnography Institute in Novosibirsk. Residents of Altai, where...

Women inmates in a Siberian prison take part in an annual beauty contest which offers inmates a chance to demonstrate good behaviour and win early parole. Natalya Khapova, 26, wears a ball gown for the Miss Spring contest In the middle of a small room, with dirty-white walls decorated with pictures of Jesus and an array of plastic plants, a young woman stands on a stool. She wears a candy-pink, cotton ball gown. At her feet, three other women sew tiny flowers along the hem of her giant hoop skirt. Her lips are painted bright red and light brown curls...

Genetic study ties Siberians to people in Americas By Will Dunham Thu Feb 21, 5:08 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People indigenous to Siberia have strong genetic links to native peoples in the Americas, according to a study further supporting the theory that humans first entered the Americas over a land bridge across the Bering Strait. Scientists at Stanford University in California combed through the genes of 938 people from 51 places, looking at 650,000 DNA locations in each person. The study, in the journal Science on Thursday, revealed similarities and differences among various populations. "This is the highest resolution...

Moscow, Russia (AHN) - Russians are bracing for temperatures of as low as minus 55 degrees Celsius (minus 67 degrees Fahrenheit) in Siberia as Russia's emergencies ministry warns on Wednesday of its impending dangers in the coming weeks. Government agencies were placed on high alert, reports AFP. The ministry ordered local administration officials to prepare for the extreme chill expected to last until Jan. 21. The ministry warned that the unusually cold weather could kill, cause frost-bite, conk heaters and cut electricity to homes, disrupt transport, increase the rate of car accidents and even destroy buildings across Siberia. The freezing...

Humans somehow made their way into the Americas from distant lands, but knowing precisely when and from where they made the journey are matters of heated scientific debate. New genetic evidence, however, backs up a chilly northwestern arrival to North America from Siberia about 12,000 years ago, via a temporary land bridge spanning the Bering Strait. The findings further challenge an alternative idea that humans sprinkled in to both North and South America on open sea voyages 30,000 years in the past. Excerpt only...... whole story at link

Contact: Anne Rueter arueter@umich.edu 734-764-2220 University of Michigan Health System 11-26-2007Gene study supports single main migration across Bering StraitSiberians and Native Americans share unique genetic variant The U-M study, which analyzed genetic data from 29 Native American populations, suggests a Siberian origin is much more likely than a South Asian or Polynesian origin. Did a relatively small number of people from Siberia who trekked across a Bering Strait land bridge some 12,000 years ago give rise to the native peoples of North and South America? Or did the ancestors of today’s native peoples come from other parts of Asia or...

Crater From 1908 Russian Space Impact Found, Team Says Maria Cristina Valsecchi in Rome, Italy for National Geographic NewsNovember 7, 2007 Almost a century after a mysterious explosion in Russia flattened a huge swath of Siberian forest, scientists have found what they believe is a crater made by the cosmic object that made the blast. The crater was discovered under a lake near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in western Siberia, where the cataclysm, known as the Tunguska event, took place (see map). On June 30, 1908, a ball of fire exploded about 6 miles (10 kilometers) above the ground in...

A British engineer judged a beauty contest, appeared on national television and shook hands with the Russian President after being mistaken for an international rock star. Neil Smith, 52, was working as the electrical projects manager at a new steelworks in Siberia when he suddenly became the subject of everyone's attention. He was halfway through a month long stay at a hotel in the industrial town of Sayangorsk when he assumed his unexpected celebrity status. Confusion arose when something was lost in translation during a conversation he had with a wealthy hotel owner through an interpreter. "One minute I was...

Neanderthals roamed as far as Siberia 18:00 30 September 2007 NewScientist.com news service Roxanne Khamsi DNA extracted from skeletal remains has shown that Neanderthals roamed some 2000 kilometres further east than previously thought. Researchers say the genetic sequence of an adolescent Neanderthal found in southern Siberia closely matches that of Neanderthals found in western Europe, suggesting that this close relative of modern humans migrated very long distances. Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues examined skeletal remains found in the Okladnikov cave in the Altai Mountains and dated as between 30,000 and...

NOVOSIBIRSK, Russia, Aug. 20 (UPI) -- Two Siberian scientists are under criminal investigation for allegedly divulging Russian defense secrets in a book they wrote. Brothers Igor and Olen Minin were targeted for a section in their book dealing with developments at the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Science's Institute of Applied Physics, Itar-Tass reported Monday. The two scientists worked at the applied physics institute before joining the Novosibirsk State Technical University located in Russia's third largest city. They aren't the first Siberian scientists to be accused of trading in state secrets. Earlier a laboratory chief at the Institute...

Frozen baby mammoth to be sent to Japan for research (Kyodo) _ A frozen mammoth found recently in Russia in unprecedented good condition is set to be sent to a Japanese university for examination, several experts told Kyodo News on Friday. The mammoth, thought to be a six-month-old female, was found in the best state of preservation among all frozen mammoths ever recovered, said the experts. "The mammoth has no defects except that its tail was bit off," said Alexei Tikhonov, vice director of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "In terms of its state of preservation,...

Native American populations share gene signature 00:01 14 February 2007 NewScientist.com news service Roxanne Khamsi A distinctive, repeating sequence of DNA found in people living at the eastern edge of Russia is also widespread among Native Americans, according to a new study. The finding lends support to the idea that Native Americans descended from a common founding population that lived near the Bering land bridge for some time. Kari Schroeder at the University of California in Davis, US, and colleagues sampled the genes from various populations around the globe, including two at the eastern edge of Siberia, 53 elsewhere in...

Gorbachev asks Gates to spare teacher By Our Foreign Staff Last Updated: 2:09am GMT 06/02/2007 Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, yesterday asked Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder, to intervene on behalf of a headmaster who faces jail in Siberia for using pirated software in his school. In an open letter, Mr Gorbachev said Alexander Ponosov, from a village in the Urals, should be shown mercy because he did not know he was committing a crime by using unlicensed copies of Microsoft software. "A teacher, who has dedicated his life to the education of children and who receives a modest salary...

Russia's emergency situations ministry says it is dispatching experts to a Siberian province to find out why yellow and orange snow has been falling in several villages, the ITAR-TASS news agency has reported. "A chemical test unit will be sent to Omsk ... it's main task will be to investigate pollution in the region and establish the degree of danger represented by the anomalous snow fall," the agency quoted an unnamed official from the ministry as saying. Snow ranging in colour from light yellow to orange and carrying a distinctive "musty"

Can flu viruses survive winter in frozen lakes? 12:29 29 November 2006 NewScientist.com news service Catherine Brahic Evidence of flu viruses frozen in Siberian lakes has prompted researchers to examine the possibility that global warming may release microbes locked in glaciers for decades or even centuries. “Our hypothesis is that influenza can survive in ice over the winter and re-infect birds as they come back in spring,” says Scott Rogers of Bowling Green State University, Ohio, US. He believes the frozen lakes act as "melting pots" for flu viruses, allowing viruses from one year to mix with those from previous...

WASHINGTON - Global warming gases trapped in the soil are bubbling out of the thawing permafrost in amounts far higher than previously thought and may trigger what researchers warn is a climate time bomb. Methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — is being released from the permafrost at a rate five times faster than thought, according to a study being published Thursday in the journal Nature. The findings are based on new, more accurate measuring techniques. "The effects can be huge," said lead author Katey Walter of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks said....

Walter Ciszek (1904-1984) Before there was an Armistice Day, Walter Ciszek was born on November 11, 1904, and lived through a crucified century. Death came gracefully in 1984 on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. In boyhood he was a bully in a gang on the gritty streets of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, and Ciszek’s Polish immigrant father dragged him to the police station, hoping to put him into a reform school. Everyone thought he was joking when the eighth grader announced that he would enter the Polish minor seminary. The seminarian swam in an icy lake and rose before dawn...

The Diocese of Allentown is asking the Vatican to canonize a Shenandoah priest who survived more than two decades of imprisonment in the Soviet Union. The diocese sent three crates of materials concerning the Rev. Walter Ciszek’s life to Rome two weeks ago. The crates included six cardboard boxes that contained things such as sworn testimony from 45 witnesses and thousands of typed pages of his writings and meditations. The documents reportedly took 16 years to compile. The Vatican is slated to review them beginning Tuesday. “They arrived last week,” Sister Albertine of the Father Walter Ciszek Prayer League in...

A storm is brewing in Surgut, the seemingly sleepy hometown of Kremlin-friendly oil company Surgutneftegaz. Discontent over wages and management tactics is driving thousands of workers onto the streets in protest. Managers at the closely held company may be sitting on a cash pile estimated at more than $13 billion from sky-high oil prices, but the sense of prosperity is not felt by many of the firm's thousands of workers, say workers at the company, who have set up a fledgling independent union to make their case for better conditions. The frustrations first broke out into the open during the...

Investigators are looking into whether the crew of an Airbus jet that went off a runway in Siberia on July 9 may have improperly used a braking system that was partly disabled before takeoff, people with knowledge of the inquiry say. The model involved in the crash, the Airbus A310, has a thrust reverser on each of its two engines, and normal procedure, as with other large jets, is that after touchdown the crew deploys the reversers, which direct jet blast toward the front of the plane, to assist the wheel brakes in slowing the plane down. After the thrust...

IRKUTSK, Russia (XFN-ASIA) - At least 140 people died when a Russian Airbus plane veered off a runway and caught fire while landing Sunday in the Siberian provincial centre of Irkutsk, officials said. 'Forty-nine people are in hospital. Eleven people left the plane and walked away -- we are appealing for them to come back,' an official at a crisis centre set up in Irkutsk said. Between 200 and 202 people were on board the Sibir airline plane bound from Moscow, including a group of children on their way to a holiday, according to different officials. A spokesman for the...

A-310 passenger airliner crashes in Irkutsk

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ancient roots and bones locked in long-frozen soil in Siberia are starting to thaw, and have the potential to unleash billions of tons of carbon and accelerate global warming, scientists said on Thursday. This vast carbon reservoir, contained in permafrost soil in northeastern Siberia, contains about 75 times more carbon than the amount released into the atmosphere each year by the burning of fossil fuels, the researchers said in a statement. Siberia isn't the only place on Earth with massive lodes of permafrost -- parts of Alaska, Canada and northern Europe have them too. The Siberian area...

ESTONIA, Latvia and Lithuania paid moving tributes today to the tens of thousands of men, women and children who 65 years ago were rounded up in dawn raids and sent to Siberia by the Baltic states' Soviet occupiers. In the early hours of June 14, 1941, some 10,000 Estonians, more than 15,000 Latvians and between 16,000 and 18,000 Lithuanians were herded onto cattle trains and shipped out to the far eastern reaches of the Soviet Union, where many of them died. Addressing a memorial gathering of several hundred people in a park in Tallinn, Estonian President Arnold Ruutel quoted the...

Mammoth skeleton found in Siberia By James Rodgers BBC News, Moscow It is rare to find mammoth remains in such good condition Fishermen in Siberia have discovered the complete skeleton of a mammoth - a find which Russian experts have described as very rare. The remains appeared when flood waters receded in Russia's Krasnoyarsk region. The mammoth's backbone, skull, teeth and tusks all survived intact. It appears to have died aged about 50. Mammoths lived in Africa, Europe, Asia and North America between about 1.6 million years ago and 10,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch. Alexander Kerzhayev, deputy director...

Pravda.RU:Top Stories:More in detail 15:33 2003-03-18Very Large Meteorite Fell Down in Siberia The falling of the meteorite is still mysterious. Scientists say that it might weigh 60 tons The night was rather dull in the north-east of the Russian Irkutsk region on September 25, 2002. All of a sudden, night turned into day. A very bright glow covered the sky, it was hard to look at it. Those people, who happened to be outside at 2 a.m., saw a ball of fire that was flying very fast across the sky. Weird rusting sounds could be heard. A few seconds...

Work starts on Russian pipeline   The pipeline will now bypass Lake Baikal Work has begun on the longest oil pipeline in Russia, two days after President Putin changed the proposed route to avoid approaching Lake Baikal.When completed, it will carry oil from eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean for consumers across the Asia-Pacific region, including China. The completed pipeline will run for more than four thousand kilometres and will be finished in 2008. It will be the longest pipeline in the world's largest country. Work has started near the town of Taishet in Siberia. The pipeline is being...

Last 2 Weeks of Earthquakes(within 10 degrees of LON=165.8, LAT=60.74) DATE links are into the IRIS WILBER system where you can see seismograms and request datasets. DATE LAT LON MAG DEPTH REGION 21-APR-2006 16:17:17 60.74 165.80 5.1 10.0 EASTERN SIBERIA, RUSSIA 21-APR-2006 16:05:57 60.62 165.76 4.6 10.0 EASTERN SIBERIA, RUSSIA 21-APR-2006 12:18:49 60.76 167.04 4.4 15.0 EASTERN SIBERIA, RUSSIA 21-APR-2006 11:19:50 61.22 167.80 5.2 18.2 EASTERN SIBERIA, RUSSIA 21-APR-2006 11:14:19 61.39 167.53 6.1 39.5 EASTERN SIBERIA, RUSSIA 21-APR-2006 08:57:37 60.55 165.81 4.6 32.4 EASTERN SIBERIA, RUSSIA 21-APR-2006 07:40:06 60.92 166.91 5.0 25.9 EASTERN SIBERIA, RUSSIA 21-APR-2006 07:32:28 61.70 167.58...

REGULAR meals of mammoth meat helped some early human tribes to expand more quickly than their largely vegetarian contemporaries, according to a genetic study. Human populations in east Asia about 30,000 years ago developed at dramatically different rates, following a pattern that appears to reflect the availability of mammoths and other large game. In the part of the region covering what is now northern China, Mongolia and southern Siberia, vast plains teemed with mammals such as mammoths, mastodons and woolly rhinoceroses and the number of early human beings grew between 34,000 and 20,000 years ago. Further south, where the terrain...

MOSCOW, March 19 (Reuters) - French adventurer Nicolas Vanier drove his team of dogs on to Moscow's Red Square on Sunday at the end of an 8,000-km (5,000-mile) odyssey through the world's biggest country. He said the hardest part was not the freezing Siberian wilderness, but early spring weather in the last few days, which melted the snow and forced him to fit wheels to his sled to reach Moscow. Vanier's journey, from Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia to Moscow, was the equivalent of travelling just under a quarter of the distance around the globe. It took place in temperatures...

TALLINN, Estonia, Feb. 10 (UPI) -- Moscow should act quickly and decisively to limit Chinese immigration into the Russian Far East lest the growing number of Chinese there "polarize" the country, weaken Russian national identity, and give Beijing a lever over Russia in the future, according to a Sakhalin native who works for an international consulting group. In an article posted on the Kreml.org website this week, Yevgeniy Kolesnikov says that that the number of Chinese residents in the Russian Far East has jumped from 2,000 in 1989 to just under a million now, only one-quarter of whom are officially...

WASHINGTON Feb 27, 2006 (AP)-- Eleven cities have shown interest in playing host to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, twice the number of cities that applied to get the 2004 gathering. The DNC initially sent out letters to more than 30 cities, giving them an overview and finding out their level of interest. The 11 cities that said they were interested: Anaheim, Calif.; Dallas; Denver; Detroit; Las Vegas; Minneapolis; New Orleans; New York; Orlando, Fla.; Phoenix and San Antonio. Some of the cities are in critical swing states like Florida and Arizona, while others are in population centers like New...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been sent to the wastes of Siberia to serve his 8-year sentence, authorities said on Thursday, sparking outrage among his defence lawyers and rights activists. Khodorkovsky's supporters say the move to send him to the other side of the vast Russian Federation is a continuation of a Kremlin campaign to isolate him as a voluble critic of President Vladimir Putin's leadership and break him psychologically. Penal officials said the 42-year-old oil tycoon, once Russia's richest man, had arrived at camp IK-10, near the border with China and 6,000 km from his native...

A private Chinese company plans to build the country's first oil pipeline to Russia, state media said Wednesday, underscoring growing Chinese interest in tapping Siberian petroleum resources. The planned 20-mile project would link railway lines between Heihe in northeast China's Heilongjiang province and the eastern Siberian city of Blagoveshchensk, across the Amur River, the officials China Daily newspaper said. The line is to be built by Heihe-based Xinghe Industries in cooperation with the Lanta Oil Company of Moscow at a cost of 520 million yuan ($64 million), the newspaper said. It is expected to begin operations in September 2006 with...

THE world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region. The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world's least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the...

More than half of Russians see China as a political ally and economic partner but their views change radically when they discuss specific forms of this partnership . . . The survey found that only 8% of the respondents said bilateral economic relations were more advantageous for Russia, whereas more than 50% said the benefits mostly went to China.  . . .In all, 66% of the respondents said the participation of Chinese companies and citizens in tapping the riches of the Siberia and the Russian Far East was dangerous for Russia. In addition , 71% of those polled were unhappy...

Irkutsk, August 5, Interfax - Archbishop Vadim of Irkutsk and Angarsk has consecrated a trailer church in the regional center. Now people in the remote parts of the region and in neighboring Buryatia will have an opportunity for coming to church at a nearest railway station. The new church conforms to all the canons and traditions. Its only peculiarity is that it will run a railway. And this, clergy believe, is its indisputable value in the conditions of Siberian vast lands. Now the church sacraments can be administered to believers who live in remote villages in the Irkutsk region and...

Chinese and Russian scientists will conduct a joint survey in Lake Baikal. The news was released by Chinese Academy of Sciences at a press conference held Saturday in Tianjin. The 22-day survey is scheduled to be launched in August. Scientists from both countries will cooperate for the first time to test the influence of changes in Lake Baikal's eco-system on North China. Lake Baikal is located in southeastern Siberia and holds a volume of 23,600 cubic kilometers of water, 20 percent of the world's fresh surface water.

“When Solitudes Collide, The Dragon Stings The Bear” The people of northern China used to fear and respect their powerful neighbours, but today the balance has reversed: The booming Chinese economy has reduced a Russian border town to a Chinese tourists' playground. And as GEOFFREY YORK reports, the change has revived historic resentments on both sides By GEOFFREY YORK BLAGOVESHCHENSK, RUSSIA -- Late at night in this Russian border town, a Chinese judge and a Chinese businessman are comparing the pleasures of their evenings: The businessman lost 4,000 rubles (about $165) in a night of gambling at a Russian casino....

Does China pose a territorial threat to Russia? 1/07/2005 MOSCOW, July 1 (RIA Novosti) - The Chinese are already settling in large numbers in Siberia and Russia's Far East, and some experts do not rule out that sooner or later there will be no Russians left in these areas. Izevstia, a respected daily, invited experts and politicians to comment on the issue. Sergei Darkin, the governor of the Far Eastern region of the Maritime territory: This is an invented problem. China is our neighbor and important strategic partner. The Maritime territory accounts for 10% of Russia's trade with China and...

Our North loses the Pole After centuries in Canada, the roaming magnetic North Pole has crossed into international waters, en route to Siberia CanWest News Service Thursday, June 09, 2005 YELLOWKNIFE, N.W.T. - Sometime in the last year, a longtime friend turned its back on Canada and was last spotted heading for Siberia.For centuries, the magnetic North Pole was ours, a constant companion that wandered the rolling tundra and frozen seas of our Arctic.But no more.A Canadian scientist who recently returned from a trip to measure the Pole's current location says it has now left Canadian territory and crossed into...

Polish 5th Siberian Rifle Division (Polish 5 Dywizja Strzelców Polskich; also known as the Siberian Division and Siberian Brigade) was a Polish military unit formed in Russia during World War I. The division was probably the longest-fighting unit of the Polish Army; it fought in both the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Bolshevist War, as well as during the World War II Early days During the World War I Russia entered a period of fast decline. Internal problems led to an outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Initially the revolutionists promised new world order and putting a bloody war...

Excerpt - HOUSTON - On the snowy steppes near Orenburg, southeast of the Ural Mountains in Siberia, teams of military search and rescue experts have spent the last month scanning the ground with metal detectors and probing the snow drifts for suspicious metal objects. Their quest: Russia's most advanced spy satellite, which hasn't been seen since it came down to Earth on Jan. 9. Midwinter cold, short periods of daylight, and blowing snow slowed the teams at every step, and now they appear to have given up. No official announcement of the loss has been made. Observers speculate that's because...

Poland marks 65 years since Stalin's deportation of Poles to Siberia AP Friday, February 11, 2005 WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Survivors marked 65 years yesterday since Soviet occupiers began sending Poles to Siberian labour camps after signing a pact with Nazi Germany to divide up Poland. Under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, at least 320,000 Poles from what is now Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania were deported between February 1940 and June 1941. Historians estimate that some 20 to 30 per cent perished from forced labour in subfreezing temperatures, disease and starvation. A wreath-laying ceremony at a monument to the deportees marked...

WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Survivors marked 65 years yesterday since Soviet occupiers began sending Poles to Siberian labour camps after signing a pact with Nazi Germany to divide up Poland. Under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, at least 320,000 Poles from what is now Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania were deported between February 1940 and June 1941. Historians estimate that some 20 to 30 per cent perished from forced labour in subfreezing temperatures, disease and starvation. A wreath-laying ceremony at a monument to the deportees marked the anniversary of the first transport of Poles on February 10, 1940, and survivors talked about...