The Lure of a Better Life, Amid Cold and Darkness
Last winter, temperatures plunged to minus 62 Celsius (minus 80 Fahrenheit),
and early winter this year has also been unforgiving, with temperatures in November already falling to around minus 20 Celsius, about 4 below Fahrenheit
One shaman in his dreams saw that the Russian god would defeat the shaman god and that only the Russian god would rule in Taimyr.”
Despite the horrendously harsh climate, choking pollution and absence of sunlight from late November until January, many residents are fiercely proud of Norilsk — and their own ability to survive in an environment
that even the hardiest of Russians living elsewhere would find intolerable.
If it had not been for Norilsk, there would have been another principle of life in the Arctic: You came, you worked, you froze — and you left.”
The residents of Norilsk have stayed, turning what until the 1930s had been an Arctic wilderness inhabited only by a scattering of indigenous peoples
into an industrial city dotted with smoke-belching chimneys amid crumbling Soviet-era apartment blocks and the ruins of former prison barracks.
Not bad, except for the two months of darkness and temperatures of minus 80 F.
NORILSK, Russia — Blessed with a cornucopia of precious metals buried beneath a desert of snow, but so bereft of sunlight
that nights in winter never end, Norilsk, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is a place of brutal extremes.
Built on the bones of slave prison laborers, Norilsk began as an outpost of Stalin’s Gulag, a place so harsh that, according to one estimate, of 650,000 prisoners who were sent here between 1935
and 1956, around 250,000 died from cold, starvation or overwork.
