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The Foreign Ministry of Ukraine has suggested a provisional UN administration in Russia, beginning in a city in the Arctic region that was once a labor camp. The proposal was made by Heorhii Tykhyi, the Ministry’s spokesperson, in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s call for Ukraine to have a UN-led government to organize elections. Tykhyi made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion in a post on X. “Counter-offer: temporary UN governance in Russia, starting with Vorkuta. It seems that locals would benefit greatly from any governance other than Putin, who spends billions of dollars on his criminal war against Ukraine,” he posted...

Nazism and Communism They Endured the Communist Terror by Horst Schüler    Place of horror. A Soviet prison camp in the Vorkuta region. Our author Horst student had there for four years, forced to work - PHOTO:. PICTURE-ALLIANCE / AKG-IMAGES / A contribution to the controversy over the memory of the victims of Nazism and Stalinism: Horst Schüler responds to the historian Wolfgang Benz. The former director of the Berlin Center for Research on Antisemitism Wolfgang Benz has recently published in Tagesspiegel about the dispute over the right of interpretation of the crimes of the Nazi dictatorship and communist regimes....

VORKUTA, Russia, May 30 - This broken-down Arctic coal town does not offer much when it is comes to economic prospects. The mayor works with what he has. "My dream is to build a gulag," the mayor, Igor L. Shpektor, declared the other day in an outburst that stung like the bitter chill of late May in a place whose history is inseparable from the Soviet Union's notorious system of penal labor. He meant a gulag for tourists. "Extreme tourism," he explained.... The most significant foreign investment in Vorkuta (pronounced vor-ku-TA) since the collapse of the Soviet Union, after all,...

It felt like stepping into a Christmas card. There on the edge of one of Vorkuta's outlying settlements, just visible against the unlit black tundra stretching behind them, were a dozen reindeer harnessed to three laden sledges. It was gently snowing. A white film dusted their shaggy coats and nestled in the branches of their antlers. Some of the reindeer rested their noses on each other's backs, as though to share the weight of their heavy headgear. Others settled down in the snow, patiently waiting. The Nenets herdsman with them, Gavriil, was smoking a cigarette. He was dressed in embroidered...