Ticket to the Arctic: Inside Russia's system of convict labour

It was a mild spring evening in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk, but Yekaterina Fatyanova was scrambling to pack winter clothes. With just a few hours' notice, the Siberian activist and part-time newspaper editor had been ordered to board a plane the next day and fly 1,500km (930 miles) north, beyond the Arctic Circle, to serve a two-year punishment for violating Russia's war censorship laws. Her destination: Norilsk, a grim, polluted city of 175,000 people that was once a notorious outpost of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's Gulag network of prison camps. Her sentence: forced labour, a punishment that involves sending convicted offenders to work for companies or local municipalities instead of confining them to prison. "I feel physically ill remembering...