Russia's icy nowhere

100,000s of political prisoners died from exposure

By Paul Moss in Vorkuta

The first thing that actually happens when you step out into the Russian city of Vorkuta into a temperature below minus 10 degrees is that the hairs inside your nose freeze up.

It's not an unpleasant sensation. Just odd. Certainly, you wonder why it suddenly feels like somebody has shoved a particularly furry pipe-cleaner up each of your nostrils.

It was with banal thoughts such as these that I arrived in the remote Russian mining town of Vorkuta, high up in the Arctic Circle, just west of the Ural Mountains.

I had come to look at a huge programme under way to shift people out of these extreme conditions and resettle them in the south.

Middle of an icy nowhere

Vorkuta was created out of nothing back in the 1930s. Not a provincial by-water, but a grand city of wide streets and imposing buildings. Like a strange polar version of a mirage, you arrive to see doric columns and great historic statues, all sitting in the middle of an icy nowhere.

But the people who built all this and worked the mines were no ordinary migrant labourers. Most were political prisoners, citizens who had fallen foul of Stalin's purges, and were now to be used as fodder for his turbo-charged industrial development programme.

Vorkuta was created out of nothing back in the 1930s

The gulag itself closed down in the 1960s, but many inmates remained. Their flats long ago repossessed by the state, they had no place to go, and no money to get there.

Pavel Negretov showed me the site where 50 of his fellow miners were shot for going on strike. It had been a futile gesture, but with 100,000s dying anyway from exposure, they had little to lose.

Now 77 years old, Pavel is in the queue to be resettled. But he insists he'll only go if they send him to Saint Petersburg.

"My children are there," he tells me. "It would be a dream." I tried hard to focus on what he was saying, but the bitter cold was beginning to penetrate all that specialist equipment I'd bought in London, and I could no longer feel my toes.

Pavel wore just a jumper, scarf and overcoat, but seemed not to notice the temperature. He gazed out at the miners' memorial, simple crosses dotted across the bare snowy landscape. "In the end," he said, "I think I too will probably die here."

33 below zero

I later found it had been 33 degrees below zero that morning. The resettlement programme is taking time. Most of the beneficiaries won't be survivors like Pavel, but their descendents. Many stayed here, along with the children of the KGB guards who ran the gulag.

"Everyone gets on perfectly well," I was told. "We all understand each other."

I went to visit another former inmate living in a village a few miles outside Vorkuta. Back in 1952, Raisa Sevastyanava was in Moscow. She lent her typewriter to a friend, who wrote something in which she referred to her drunken brother saying he could kill Stalin.

The typewriter was traced, and in those days when paranoia had become a national psychosis, Raisa was convicted of plotting to murder the great leader herself.

At the age of 22, she was sent to Vorkuta to help build the railway. For somebody who has endured so much hardship, Raisa is a feisty woman. She still works, making the fur hats which, not surprisingly, are much in demand in these parts.

She too may get the chance to be resettled, yet the idea doesn't seem to fire her with any great enthusiasm. Raisa told me she has made trips down south. "But," she says, "I don't really know anybody any more. Elsewhere in Russia, people don't speak to each other. In Vorkuta, we're a tight community."

More bewilderingly, she insists the warmer weather in the south no longer suits her. I left Raisa's flat, carefully putting on my five hi-tech thermal layers, and I tried to imagine this elderly lady working so long ago, out on the ice wearing nothing but a rudimentary convict's uniform.

People can it seems grow accustomed to the most unlikely places. But some will never find their way back home.