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Russia's online community has been abuzz over the past week with praise for popular YouTuber Yury Dud's documentary about life in the land of the gulag labor camps. His documentary, “Kolyma — Birthplace of Our Fear,” was viewed 9.5 million times in seven days. It’s a departure for the 32-year-old sports editor, whose 5.1 million subscribers tune in to watch him interview personalities from all walks of life about their personal lives. “Why is it that — after rappers, comedians, musicians, actors and directors — we approached this difficult and alarming subject?” Dud asks at the top of the show....

JURASSIC Park got a little bit closer to reality today with news that scientists are ‘confident' of cloning a 42,000 year old extinct species. =============================================================== The ginger-coloured foal died when it was just one or two weeks old, some time during the late Stone Age, around 42,170 years ago. But its body has been perfectly preserved in near perfect condition in Siberian permafrost, and scientists are optimistic that they will obtain enough genetic material to clone the animal and bring its extinct species back to life. The joint Russian-South Korean research team is led by South Korean cloning expert Professor...

Joseph Stalin visited Novosibirsk only once in 1928. The monument to him was dismantled, along with those in other Soviet cities, in th early 1960s. And now he is to return, though in private. Local Communists have been struggling to rebuild the statue since 2016, and their struggle eventually brings fruit. The city's mayoral office nodded, however reluctantly, to the Stalinists' demand to erect a statue of Stalin by May 9, the Russian V-Day. Unlike the huge original monument at Novosibirsk main square, the replica will be way more modest: only three metres tall, and placed in a private yard...

As more details about Chinese activities in and around Lake Baikal have surfaced, commentaries attacking them and complaining about the Russian government’s cooperation with them have appeared. But most indicative of Russian attitudes is the result of an effort by film and television stars in Russia to block Chinese plans to build a water bottling plant on Russia’s most famous lake. They have already collected more than 800,000 signatures on an online petition. This petition provides the strongest indication yet of just how angry Russians are about Chinese overreach in Russia east of the Urals. Unless Moscow limits Chinese activities...

WHERE DO FINNS COME FROM? Not long ago, cytogenetic experts stirred up a controversy with their "ground-breaking" findings on the origins of the Finnish and Sami peoples. Cytogenetics is by no means a new tool in bioanthropological research, however. As early as the 1960s and '70s, Finnish researchers made the significant discovery that one quarter of the Finns' genetic stock is Siberian, and three quarters is European in origin. The Samis, however, are of different genetic stock: a mixture of distinctly western, but also eastern elements. If we examine the genetic links between the peoples of Europe, the Samis form...

Researchers from the Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Helsinki have analyzed the first ancient DNA from mainland Finland. As described in Nature Communications, ancient DNA was extracted from bones and teeth from a 3,500 year-old burial on the Kola Peninsula, Russia, and a 1,500 year-old water burial in Finland. The results reveal the possible path along which ancient people from Siberia spread to Finland and Northwestern Russia. Researchers found the earliest evidence of Siberian ancestry in Fennoscandia in a population inhabiting the Kola Peninsula, in Northwestern Russia, dating to around 4,000 years ago. This...

The Bering land bridge was exposed at various times over an almost three million year period, when wide scale glaciation lowered sea levels by as much as 150 metres. The land bridge was part of "Beringia," which refers to the stretch of land between present day Siberia and Yukon Territory. It's been home to woolly mammoths, steppe bison and humans. Jeff Bond, a geologist with Yukon Geological Survey in Whitehorse, has produced a map showing what Beringia looked like 18,000 years ago. At that time, much of the earth was glaciated, but Beringia remained predominantly ice-free due to its arid...

The residents of two more Siberian cities have now lost the right to elect their mayor in the latest restriction of direct elections in the country. Kemerovo and Novokuznetsk, two of the largest cities in the Siberian region of Kemerovo, will now have appointed instead of elected mayors, according to new laws signed by the regional governor earlier this week. Regional lawmakers voted in April 2018 to abolish direct mayoral elections in Russia’s fourth-largest city of Yekaterinburg, leading its popular mayor Yevgeny Roizman to resign in protest. Other major cities that have abolished elections in recent years include Petrozavodsk, Novgorod...

On Jan. 22, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Academy will announce the five short documentary films up for the Oscar. Among the shortlisted films is the documentary “Women of the Gulag” by Russian-American director, Marianna Yarovskaya. It is the first time in the 91 years of the Oscar’s history that a woman director from Russia is so close to getting such prestigious award. Yarovskaya´s documentary film centers on the memories of six remarkable women survivors of the Gulag. Now in their eighties and nineties, they were sentenced to Soviet forced labor camps during the Stalin era. But...

...and it was worn by a man! The suspicion is that the tiara - or diadem - was made by Denisovans who are already known to have had the technology 50,000 or so years ago to make elegant needles out of ivory and a sophisticated and beautiful stone bracelet. The tiara maybe the oldest of its type in the world. It appears to have had a practical use: to keep hair out of the eyes; it's size indicates it was for male, not female, use. Another theory, although related to tiaras made 20,000 years later by people living around river...

VLADIMIR Putin has drafted in soldiers to investigate a “collapsed mountain” in a remote region of Siberia amid suggestions it may have been caused by a UFO crash-landing. Whatever the cause, the event resulted in a massive rockfall which has blocked the nearby Bureya river, and left several villages at risk of flooding. So much rock was shifted it would fill 13,600 Olympic-sized swimming pools, say experts. Meanwhile, the falling 34 million cubic metres of debris left a gash in a mountain which could swallow up all the water used if every American showered at the same time. A defence...

“Since the year 2000 is that history has been gradually re-politicized. And the Russians started treating history that way. They’ve become more sensitive again about discussing this sort of crimes of their past. For the Russians, understanding the history of the gulag is absolutely crucial. It is also crucial for the West" ...Under President Putin, the Stalin period has come to be viewed with ambiguity by politicians, writers, film makers, and regrettably the public. The stories of the victims of the gulag, told by simple people who had little or no understanding of why this was happening to them, make...

Gulag hunter is an unusual CV entry, admits Stepan Cernousek. "We are not like professional archaeologists from the university — it is a kind of passion which is a little strange, because the topic is very dark." Stepan is the leader of a small team of archaeologists, amateur historians, and adventurers, trekking thousands of kilometres across Siberian taiga forest and facing bears, freezing temperatures and raging rivers to preserve an increasingly forgotten part of Russia's dark past — the more than 30,000 prison camps that embodied forced labour: the gulags. "Today's Russia and its relationship with its history is awkward,"...

A new Stalin statue will be erected in Russia’s third-largest city of Novosibirsk next spring as the legacy of the Soviet dictator continues to divide society. Contemporary attitudes are split in Russia toward the historical role of Stalin, who is responsible for the deaths and suffering of millions of Soviet citizens during his rule from 1924 until his death in 1953. Polls show Russians view him as a “remarkable” figure and the younger population is unaware of Stalin-era purges, while President Vladimir Putin has dismissed attacks on Stalin as a ploy to demonize Russia. A Novosibirsk action group voted Saturday...

The deliveries promised in the deal depend on supplies from two natural gas deposits located in Siberia – the Chayanda oil and gas condensate field in Yakutia and the Kovykta gas condensate field in the Irkutsk Region. The two together have natural gas reserves of 4.1 trillion cubic meters, but neither has yet been developed. ...“a propaganda spin to justify the $70 billion price tag the state has splurged on” for construction of a pipeline to China. “Usually, the costs for similar state funded projects always overstretch the initial price tag,” ... Industry insiders say Gazprom doesn’t have the technology...

BUNGUR, Russia -- Pitted roads, intermittent electricity and water supplies, dilapidated housing, nonexistent health care -- the complaints heard in this village of 600 people near the city of Novokuznetsk are not unusual for rural Russian communities. But these villagers' approach to getting the government's attention to their woes just might be. Locals in Bungur have launched an initiative to rename their village Syria -- reasoning that if Moscow has a few tens of millions of dollars to invest in the Middle Eastern country, it might be able to spare a little investment for a Syria closer to home. "We...

Scientists are analyzing the perfectly preserved remains of a prehistoric horse in a bid to clone the now-extinct animal. Recently discovered in permafrost in the Siberian region of Yakutia, the skin, hair, hooves and tail of the carcass are all preserved. The remains are estimated to be 30,000 to 40,000 years old. Experts believe that the foal was about 2 months old when it died. Semyon Grigoryev, head of the Mammoth Museum in the regional capital of Yakutsk, was surprised to see the perfect state of the find. He noted it's the best-preserved ancient foal found to date. The Siberian...

The frozen carcass of the dark-brown baby horse is from an extinct species is up to 40,000 years old, and the animal was perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost in the Batagai crater in Yakutia, the coldest region in Russia. Leading researcher of the laboratory of Mammoth Museum Dr Semyon Grigoriev said: 'Fortunately, the animal's muscle tissues were undamaged and well preserved, so we managed to get samples of this unique find for biotechnology research.' South Korean cloning expert Professor Hwang Woo Suk, currently in Yakutsk, told The Siberian Times that a joint bid is underway to find a living...

Russia has made 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of arable land available to foreign investors – and while that could be boon for Beijing as it struggles with limited supplies of soybeans in its trade war with the US, analysts are concerned about the quality of the plots available. Valery Dubrovskiy, director of investment for the Far East Investment and Export Agency, a non-profit organisation, said on Tuesday that several Chinese companies had already expressed an interest in the deal. With the China-US trade war showing no signs of abating, and after Beijing slapped 25 per cent tariffs on...

© North-Eastern Federal University ==================================================================== A three-month-old horse that lived up to 40,000 years ago has been discovered in the mysterious Batagai depression in Russia’s Yakutia region, nicknamed the ‘Gateway to the Underworld.’ The North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk published the first photo of the “unique” discovery, which was made together with scientists from Kindai University in Japan along with a crew from Fuji TV. The horse was unearthed in perfect condition with its mane, tail and hair well preserved, as it was trapped in the permafrost for 30,000-40,000 years, scientists say. The discovery can help scientists to learn...