STALIN DEATH ROAD
Transpolar Mainline was a secret project of the Northern railway that was supposed to connect the North of the Soviet Union. It was a personal project of Joseph Stalin. The project of the railway was started in 1947, just 2 years after WWII was over, and it was closed in 1953 after Stalin’s death, when 75% of the railway was built. The planned route would have run for 806 miles (1,297km). The railway was a project of the Soviet Gulag system and was made mostly with prisoner labor, particularly by the hands of political prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of them died from severe cold, permafrost, hard work and food shortages.
Railway section between Pangody and Novy Urengoy was rebuilt in the 1970s with the development of the gas deposits in the region of Yamal. The Russian government plans to spend the equivalent of $100 billion during the next five years on dozens of bridges, ports and transportation links, including the Northern Latitude Way railway, a revived train route through the frozen Arctic steppe first dug decades ago by gulag laborers.