Siberian Dreams

Every year thousands compete to win the RGS/BBC Journey of a Lifetime award and fulfill their travel dreams. However, Andy Home's dream would be most people's nightmare. Andy went to Siberia, to the Russian industrial mining city of Norilsk where temperatures drop to minus 50, half the year is spent in perpetual darkness, and the pollution has destroyed all natural life. Once a prison camp, then a secret Soviet military city, Norilsk teetered on the edge of financial and social meltdown in the early 1990s. Now, it is owned by one of Russia's new breed of all-powerful oligarchs and is the biggest single source of common industrial metals. Andy's quest was to meet the former Soviet shock workers and ask them what life is like in 21st-century Russia. This is a fast paced, humorous, and insightful account of an extraordinary journey of a lifetime.