The most shocking "frozen world"! Why does the small town of Vorkuta in Russia have such a title?

Because the local temperature is very low, it is covered with ice and snow all year round. In the small town of Vorkuta in the Republic of Komi, Russia, the local temperature dropped to minus 50 degrees and was covered by thick ice and snow. It is reported that Vorkuta was established as a settlement in 1931. After the railway was built during World War II, it grew rapidly with the development of the coal mining industry. However, due to the closure of the local steel industry, people living along the coal mines moved away one after another. The bus transportation that once existed between the small towns in the city was also suspended due to the extreme weather. Only a few families still live here, but most of them have moved outside the Arctic Circle. The development of the small town of Vorkuta

A residential settlement was established in 1931. After the railway was built during World War II, it rose rapidly with the development of the coal mining industry and became the administrative center and main coal mining center of the Pechora Coal Mine in Russia. The city was established in 1943. There are coal machinery manufacturing, wood processing and building materials industries, as well as the Pechora Coalfield Coal Science Research Institute.

Since the 1930s, Stalin has successively driven two million workers to the Vorkuta concentration camp 2,000 kilometers away from Moscow and ordered them to mine local coal mines. 1.8 million of them died. Due to the severe cold, 150,000 people were shot to death, including German prisoners of war during World War II, Russian felons, political prisoners during the counterrevolutionary movement, and a large number of German civilians in the Soviet-occupied areas. After Stalin's death in 1953, workers in Vorkuta launched an uprising but were brutally suppressed. It was not until Stalin's successor Khrushchev relaxed the policy the following year that the workers were gradually released.

One of the most well-known enterprises is Vorkuta Coal Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Russia's Severstal Steel Group.

Specialties: moose meat, salmon, animal skins, etc. The largest park: Youth Park. The largest hotel is the Vorkuta Hotel. A double room costs 1,800 rubles per person (2011). There are restaurants, bars and shops on the first floor. There is a cleaning day once a week and there is wifi. Regarding traffic conditions, trains are the main mode of transportation connecting to the outside world. The airport is only open in spring, summer and autumn. The Vorkuta Highway is an internal road in the city, connecting various coal mines and gas fields, but does not connect to the outside world.

Vorkuta is a barren land in the Arctic Circle, about 1,900 kilometers away from Moscow. In 1921, a mining exploration team discovered coal locally. In the next 40 years, batches of prisoners were exiled here, and a coal city was built on this barren land. According to statistics, millions of prisoners have been exiled to Vorkuta in history, most of them political prisoners of various types. About 100,000 of these prisoners died from cold and disease. It was not until 1962 that Vorkuta ended its history of using labor reform prisoners as miners. ?

Relying on labor reform to make money is not Igor’s first initiative. A few years ago, a company used a well-preserved labor camp outside Perm in the Ural region of Russia to rent out houses. They rent some of the cells to academics or people interested in paying to suffer, thereby raising funds to preserve the labor camps that have become historical monuments. ?

However, not everyone thinks Igor has a good idea. The teacher Andreeva hated this practice. ?This is a blasphemy. ?Andreeva believes that it is a good thing to face up to the history of Vorkuta, but making money by attracting tourists to the labor camp is undoubtedly a desecration of the political prisoners who died. She said she would rather see the city build a museum dedicated to that period of history.

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