In Episode 215 of The Soviet Union: The Rise of a New Empire, Lucas and Luna dig into one of the most ambitious and catastrophic projects of the Stalinist era: the Transpolar Mainline, a planned railway that was to slice across the frozen Yamal Peninsula and connect the Arctic ports of Salekhard and Igarka. Built almost entirely by gulag prisoners under the brutal conditions of the Far North, the line was meant to open up Siberia's mineral wealth and secure a strategic corridor, but it collapsed into a ghost project after Stalin's death. Drawing on survivor memoirs and recent archival findings, the episode reconstructs the daily horrors of the construction brigades, the engineering mirages that doomed the line, and the eerie afterlife of the abandoned track, now a ruin of rails and bones. Along the way, they reflect on the human cost of Soviet ambition—how a dream of steel and ice consumed tens of thousands of lives for a railway that never ran a single train. A story of permafrost, suffering, and the strange silence that follows imperial failure.
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