From 1947 until 1953, tens of thousands of prisoners, many of them “politicals” convicted for “anti-Soviet acts”,...

From 1947 until 1953, tens of thousands of prisoners, many of them “politicals” convicted for “anti-Soviet acts”, were shipped to northern Russia to lay a railroad through some of the harshest terrain on Earth.

Stalin, spooked by the incursion of Nazi submarines into the Arctic during the second world war, wanted the railway in place as a means of supplying a planned naval port. The railway also would have connected northern nickel mines to Soviet factories in the west.

But just days after Stalin’s death in 1953, the project was cancelled amid the subsequent Soviet “thaw”. Since then, the railway’s gulag camps have lain abandoned, sinking further into the forest under the weight of each winter’s snow.

_Most of the railway, as evidenced by this old signal marker, has fallen into ruin.

For Snovsky, who now lives with his wife near St Petersburg, the biggest tragedy was the project’s futility: “Tens of thousands of human lives for nothing. For me, the saddest thing was that it was for nothing.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/29/the-remains-of-stalin-gulag-railroad-soviet-union-a-photo-essay