round. I commented on how odd it was that there were no trees, but that there was some green. He told me that the green was where the prisoners were buried. There are graveyards everywhere. Thousands and thousands of prisoners were shipped to Norilsk – there are no roads in and out of town – and it was a one-way ticket. Nobody knows exactly how many of them perished.

In the 1990s, people in the town were allowed to put up a memorial sign for the prisoners – Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Jews, Russians – who had died there. In the port city of Magadan, I met some former prisoners who had managed to survive this hell, living in barracks without food or proper clothing, and managed to get out ofis unclear.

The centre of Norilsk looks and feels like Saint Petersburg. This is not because Stalin fantasised about building the most beautiful town in the Arctic Circle. Rather, there were talented architects among the prisoners: they made it beautiful.

The prisoners sent to gulag were often educated people. That’s how the city was built within four years and production in the plant started within two. In fact one of the founders of the city was a prisoner: Nikolay Urvantsev, a geologist and explorer with extensive knowledge of minerals in the region who was sent there from the Karaganda labour camp where he had been held on charges of wrecking and sabotage.

Talking about this aspect of Russian history is important. I don’t think the story of what happened in Stalinist