Yakutsk

Russia is abundant in regions that can claim to be very big, very remote and very cold, but Yakutsk takes the (frozen) biscuit. It's extreme, even by Siberian standards. Yakutia, the region of which it is the capital, covers more than a million square miles, but it is home to fewer than one million people. It boasts very few large towns, and is divided into administrative units the size of Britain, with individual regional centres that are little more than villages.

Locals claim that there are enough lakes and rivers in the region for each inhabitant to have one of each. They are fond of boasting that the region contains every element in the periodic table. According to local legend, the god of creation had been flying around the world to distribute riches and natural resources, but when he got to Yakutia he got so cold that his hands went numb and he dropped everything.

Yakutsk's remoteness is also extraordinary. It is six time zones away from Moscow, and two centuries ago it would have taken more than three months to travel between the two. Now, it takes just six hours in a ropey Tupolev plane, but tickets start at £500 return, a huge sum in a country where the average wage is £250 per month. There is no railway to Yakutsk. The other options are a 1,000-mile boat ride up the Lena river during the few months of the year when it isn't frozen, or the "Road of Bones".

The road, built by Gulag inmates, many of whom died in the process, travels 1,200 miles to Magadan on the Pacific. It is only fully traversable in winter, when the rivers freeze over (Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman tried, unsuccessfully, to cross it during more temperate months in the motorbike documentary Long Way Round). It is mostly used by truckers bringing supplies to remote villages. They don't turn off their engines for the duration of the two-week drive, and usually set out in pairs: breaking down on the little-used road would mean almost certain death.
In Yakutsk itself, most of the cars are second-hand Japanese imports; apparently, they handle the cold better than Ladas and other traditional Russian vehicles. Still, local people habitually leave the engines running if they have to stop off for half an hour, and some leave them on all day while at work to stop them conking out and to make driving bearably warm. The overworked exhausts add to the fog that clings to the city.

The region was first conquered by the Russians in the 1630s, and Yakutsk was set up as a small administrative centre. The native Yakuts, a Turkic tribe with Asiatic features who speak a language full of throaty, mooing vowels, were largely engaged in reindeer herding. They acquiesced to Russian rule without much of a fight. Even today, Yakuts make up about 40 per cent of the local population, and most are still fluent in their language, though industrialisation and collectivisation during the Soviet years mean that few still keep a nomadic lifestyle.

Until the Russian Revolution of 1917, Yakutsk remained an insignificant provincial outpost. In the 19th century it was used, like many Siberian towns, as an open prison for political dissidents. Along with its mysterious allure and vast natural resources, the prison connotations have always lent Siberia a reputation as a grim and miserable place, not just among foreigners but also among Russians. As an 1825 poem has it: "Fearing the winters/ Endless and icy/ Nobody will visit/ This wretched country/ This vast prison house for exiles." Even today, telling my Moscow friends that I was heading to Yakutsk brought stares of incredulity, as though I'd told them I was going to the Moon.

Anton Chekhov, on his journey through Siberia in 1890, painted a grim picture of the life of the prisoners held there. "They have lost whatever warmth they once had," wrote Chekhov about a group of men he encountered in Western Siberia. "The only things that remain in life for them [are] vodka, sluts, more sluts, more vodka... They are no longer human beings but wild beasts."
But for many of Siberia's political exiles – includingLenin and Stalin – their time there was little more than an extended reading holiday, albeit a chilly one. "At the time, people thought it was amazingly cruel to keep people in exile like that," says Vladimir Fyodorov, the editor of Gazeta Yakutia, the main regional newspaper. "But of course, after the horrors of Stalinism and the Gulag, it all seemed very humane."

A thoughtful, bearded ethnic Russian, Fyodorov runs the newspaper from offices in central Yakutsk that, like every building in the city, are very well heated. The paper was first set up just before the February Revolution of 1917 by political dissidents. It has changed name nine times in the subsequent 90 years, in reflection of the differing political winds.
The region is rich in gold and diamonds, which is what lay behind the Soviets' decision to turn Yakutsk into a major regional centre, first using the Gulag labour system, and later with the resettlement of thousands of volunteers seeking adventure, higher salaries and the chance to build socialism on ice. The corporate giant Alrosa, which owns Russia's diamond monopoly, is based in the region and accounts for 20 per cent of the world's supply of rough diamonds.

In time, Yakutsk was transformed into a real city with hotels, cinemas, an opera house, universities, a pizza delivery service, and even a zoo. As I'm about to learn, the inhuman temperatures and the winter fog cover are just part of daily life for its hardy residents.