Stories From The End Of The World – Russia's Northernmost Point

Joining the Dots is a site with a series of articles, written by local journalists from Siberia, who have traveled to its most remote parts to document the everyday lives of the people living there. In this series, they went to Dikson – a port in the Arctic. To someone who, like me, has been dreaming about the Arctic for years, the attraction of such places is obvious — it is only there that one can experience that complete  loneliness that engulfs someone standing in a white, snow-covered land, under an equally white sky, no human habitat in sight, with the falling snow obliterating all sound. Then the only sound one can hear is one's own heartbeat, and the thoughts in one's head suddenly seem loud, like screams. Things like time become irrelevant. Maybe this is what space should feel like. Nobody can tolerate it for long. I, for instance, began talking to myself to interrupt this silence after a few minutes. This kind of feeling is present in the pictures published in this story, and, in some cases, even in the stories of people interviewed. The buildings in the town of Dikson, now mostly abandoned, are covered in frost and glisten in the light of the camera, as if frozen in time.