The Lure of a Better Life, Amid Cold and Darkness<br />Last winter, temperatures plunged to minus 62 Celsius (minus 80 Fahrenheit),<br />and early winter this year has also been unforgiving, with temperatures in November already falling to around minus 20 Celsius, about 4 below Fahrenheit<br />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.”<br />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<br />that even the hardiest of Russians living elsewhere would find intolerable.<br />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.”<br />The residents of Norilsk have stayed, turning what until the 1930s had been an Arctic wilderness inhabited only by a scattering of indigenous peoples<br />into an industrial city dotted with smoke-belching chimneys amid crumbling Soviet-era apartment blocks and the ruins of former prison barracks.<br />Not bad, except for the two months of darkness and temperatures of minus 80 F.<br />NORILSK, Russia — Blessed with a cornucopia of precious metals buried beneath a desert of snow, but so bereft of sunlight<br />that nights in winter never end, Norilsk, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is a place of brutal extremes.<br />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<br />and 1956, around 250,000 died from cold, starvation or overwork.
