Posted on 03/12/2020 11:18:52 AM PDT by tlozo
Lyudmila Ivanova and her fiance came to the Arctic from a village in southern Russia in 1978 in search of a better life. Their destination was Vorkuta, a coal-mining city 90 miles north of the Arctic circle.
Vorkuta, which means “place of bears”...
Now, a better nickname may be “the fastest dying city in Russia.” The lure of higher wages and better housing is long gone, and the population has plummeted... When darkness falls, often just a handful of lights can be seen in apartment buildings of 100 units or more.
Ivanova, now 62, feels trapped. Like tens of thousands who worked at least 15 years in the far north, she has been waiting for more than two decades to be “resettled”... Of 14,000 Vorkuta residents on the list, only about 220 are resettled each year.
“I'm a hostage of the north,” Ivanova said. Despite health problems, Ivanova still works at a heating plant, earning just $440 a month — too little to afford moving without government help. “If you would have told me I'd be left high and dry … and that I wouldn't be able to move away, then I wouldn't have come here.”
Ivanova's plight clashes with Russian President Vladimir Putin's quest to conquer the warming Arctic. In April, he promised that the Northern Sea Route between Murmansk and Vladivostok would grow to rival the Suez canal as a shipping lane. Seven military bases have been built or reopened along the northern coast since 2013. Last month, the government approved huge tax breaks for oil and gas development in the Arctic.
But the paradox is that the north is emptying out even as Russia tries to develop it. Vorkuta was built during Joseph Stalin's reign on the backs of starved Gulag prisoners, 200,000 of whom died.
(Excerpt) Read more at pri.org ...
Can it be punished for not obeying the computer models?
The inmates of Kolyma had a poem about it.
Kolyma.
Kolyma.
Amazing planet.
Twelve months of winter.
The rest is summer...
What is SMOD
It's nothing like SCMODS.
Thank you for your efforts to get the truth about Communist Russia out to the public.
Yep. Those are very tough people. I read about the siege of Leningrad during World War II, if you haven’t, you probably
would enjoy it.
Read, The 900 days, imagine being under siege for over
two years. The USA has been through nothing like it.
It still is, at least in cities with functional economy. Still true for the federal workers in Vorkuta right now. I believe a cop in Vorkuta was paid no less than his NYC counterpart in 2013. And he has a right to retirement ufter just 10 years of working in such a place. The same goes for the military personnel although the pay is slightly lower than in low enforcement.
Civilians had it near as good until the economy worked.
I bet a person an article written above used to have European vacation twice a year.
There are booms and busts and it is not unique to Russia. Every country has such cities.
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