abandoned building with Aurora Borealis above it.

In Russia’s far north, legends and lives are frozen in time

A photographer returns to her roots and the haunting, stark beauty of the polar landscape.

Wind-blown snow swirls past abandoned buildings keeping cold vigil over the empty streets of Dikson. Once the centerpiece of Soviet dreams to develop the Arctic, the port town was slowly deserted after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
This story appears in the December 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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