Emile Ducke

“My children left, but I don’t want to. I warm myself with an electric heater when there is power,” Alyona Kovalyova said.

Once a vast prison ground for political exiles, the banks of the Ket River are now home to a range of solitary settlements.

The Kolyma Highway in the Russian Far East once delivered tens of thousands of prisoners to the work camps of Stalin’s gulag. The ruins of that cruel era are still visible today.