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If someone offered you money to take your Journey of a Lifetime and record
your experiences, where would you go and why?
Every year one lucky person gets to fulfill their travel dreams thanks
to the BBC and the Royal Geographical Society.
Andy Home's dream would be most other people's nightmare.
He went to Siberia. To the Russian industrial mining city of Norilsk,
where temperatures drop to -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 oligarch
and is the biggest single source of the metals we all use in our day-to-day
lives.
Andy's quest was to meet these former Soviet shock workers and ask them
what life is like now in 21st century Russia. Is it worse? It is better?
And what do the 200,000 people in Norilsk dream of?
Siberian Dreams is a fast-paced, humorous and insightful account of this
extraordinary Journey of a Lifetime.
It also throws into sharp relief the powerful forces that are battling
for control of this hidden city and asks whether we in the West should
be worried about what new Russia is emerging from the chaos of the last
decade.
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