You're listening to a download from the BBC.

This is from our own correspondent.

We make an edition of the programme for BBC Radio 4,

but this is a download of a special edition broadcast on the BBC World Service.

It's presented by Owen Bennett Jones.

This week we're looking back through the archives

and replaying some dispatches from years gone by.

And there's no doubt about it, BBC correspondents

do get to the most amazing places. Back in 1994, Kevin Connolly travelled deep inside the Arctic Circle

to a city built by prisoners. He soon learned that after the fall of the Soviet Empire,

it became something of a prison to the people living there.

If you ever want to find Nodilsk on a map, not that there's any reason why you should,

trace a line with your finger across Russia from Europe towards the Pacific Ocean,

stop when you're halfway, and look up towards the North Pole.

In other words, start in the middle of nowhere and work

outwards. Do not be deceived by the streams and rivers which appear to radiate prettyly away

from Norilsk. This is a landscape which makes you feel as they are seeing it on a television set with

the colour turned down. It rolls towards the horizon in dreary shades of grey and brown under a sky the colour of cigarette ash, and that's in the summer. This far north, inside the Arctic Circle, winter lasts for ten months of every year. It's dark even during the hour or so a day which is officially described as daytime, and it's so cold that the liquid on the surface of your eyes freezes between blinks.

There are more snow plows than cars, and there's more snow than they can cope with.

In the middle of summer, there are 23 and a half hours of sunshine every day.

The local council gives the handful of foreign visitors who make it this far into the Russian interior

a souvenir packet of postcards, which includes a picture of a group of townspeople,

...