Word: siberias
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...Siberia has come to mean a land of exile, and the place easily fulfills its reputation as a metaphor for death and deprivation. Even at the peak of midsummer, a soul-chilling fog blows in off the Arctic Ocean and across the mossy tundra, muting the midnight sun above the ghostly remains of a slave-labor camp. The mist settles like a shroud over broken grave markers and bits of wooden barracks siding bleached as gray as the bones of the dead that still protrude through the earth in places. Throughout Siberia, more than 20 million perished in Stalin...
...Siberia is much, much more, however, than the locus of past political evil. For every person sent unwillingly to exile in its arctic wastelands, many others came to hunt, trap, fish, log or mine. The harsh life drove many back, but others stayed, captivated by the sublime beauty of earth's greatest northern landscape. Vitali Menshikov, an oceanographer by training, came to the Kamchatka peninsula in the Far East 27 years ago. He has returned to Leningrad only once; instead, he has used his vacations to take expeditions--61 so far--on ski and foot through this breathtaking land...
...would disagree, but, as Schaller knows, the comforting image of Siberia as the world's last pristine northern frontier also misses the mark. Kamchatka is but a tiny piece of Siberia, and elsewhere this continent-size region has been grievously wounded, and continues to be wounded today. "Let's say you decide to get away from it all in Siberia," says Alexei Yablokov, Russia's leading environmentalist and once President Boris Yeltsin's top adviser on ecology. "You travel up the Yenisey River toward the Arctic. You look across the empty tundra and think you are alone in nature, miles...
Forcing prisoners to do hard--the hardest--labor is not an action we generally associate with today's American penal system. Soviet prisons in Siberia and German labor camps during World War II come to mind much more quickly. In most American prisons, convicts can opt to work various jobs for small wages. It has been many years since Robert Eliot Burns uncovered the horrors of chain gangs in Georgia: long lines of men chained together, endless hours in the unbearable sun and whippings for workers who did not satisfy supervisors...
Whether there is surfing in Siberia: Unless you did it in the bathtub...