Vorkuta
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Vorkuta (Воркута́), population about 116,000, is a coal mining community in the Komi Republic of Russia just north of the Arctic circle in the Pechora coal basin, at Template:Coor dm. It had its origin in one of the more notorious concentration camps of the Gulag which was established in 1932.
Vorkuta_entrance_Labor_in_the_USSR_is_a_matter_of_honor,_glory,_pride_and_heroism.jpg
Vorkuta became a city in 1942. Many of the concentration camps were disbanded in the 1950s, but it is reported that some in the Vorkuta area continued to operate into the 1980s; by the early part of the 21st century many of the mines have been closed as problems with high costs of operations have plagued the mine operators. At one time during the 1990s there were labor actions in the area by miners who had not been paid for a year. [1] (http://www.aha.ru/~mgo/vorkuta.htm).
During the Cold War an Arctic Control Group forward staging base for strategic bombers was located at Vorkuta [2] (http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/russia/vorkuta.htm)
External links
- Contemporary photographs of the city on the webpage of the local mine rescue association (http://www.usmra.com/members/rustam/070400/vorkuta.html)
- Links to photos of Vorkuta and Usinsk, 1998 (http://wwwedu.oulu.fi/sos/tundra/kuvia.htm)
- Satellite images of the Vorkuta region (http://smisdata.iki.rssi.ru/noaa-cgi/stat_reg.pl?db=noaa®ion=vorkuta)
Adapted from the article Vorkuta (http://www.wikinfo.org/wiki.phtml?title=Vorkuta), from Wikinfo, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.cs:Vorkuta de:Workuta ru:Воркута kv:Воркута