The stunning news came in a terse statement from the Russian penitentiary service a year ago: Opposition leader Alexei Navalny had died in the Arctic Circle penal colony.
Located in the Yamal-Nenets region, about 1,900km north-east of Moscow and 60km north of the Arctic Circle, Kharp itself was built by Gulag prisoners. There are around 700 such penal colonies ...
The remote region is notorious for long and severe winters. Kharp is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Vorkuta, whose coal mines were part of the Soviet gulag prison-camp system.