Free Republic

In the Russian Arctic lies buried an unfinished railway built by prisoners of Stalin's gulags. For decades, no-one talked about it. But one woman is now telling the story of the thousands who suffered there—and there is talk of bringing back to life the abandoned railway itself. … Lyudmila (Lipatova) and I had uncovered a tiny section of one of Joseph Stalin's cruelest and most ambitious projects—the Trans-Polar Main Line. It was (Stalin's) attempt to conquer the Arctic—part of what he called his Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. The scheme was supposed to link the eastern and western...

The sun sets above the Yenisei river in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, December 21, 2004. The Northern Hemisphere's winter solstice, the shortest day of the year was Tuesday, when the sun was directly over the tropic of Capricorn. (REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin)