The prisoners brought the road, and then the road brought more prisoners. Thousands of inmates of Stalin's gulag labor camps died building a highway across the icy, far-flung Russian region of Kolyma. The route became known as the 'Road of Bones'. It would bring over a million prisoners to work in the area’s gold, tin and uranium mines. For many, the journey across this vast landscape of harsh beauty, where winter temperatures average minus 38° Celsius, would be their last. After the camps were closed following Stalin's death, the route was used mainly by workers drawn to Kolyma by the promise of high wages. But today, fewer and fewer people come to work in this desolate region. Their settlements, scattered along the length of the 'Road of Bones', fade, and along with them fades the memory of the prisoners of the past. The scale and severity of the suffering of the camps, located in one of the most inhospitable environments known to mankind, becomes increasingly difficult to fathom. A handful of people work to preserve that memory, both in Moscow and along an updated 2,000-kilometer route, now known as the R504 Kolyma Highway. But for many in Putin's Russia, it is being drowned out by celebrations of rival memories, notably of Russia’s triumph under Stalin’s leadership over Hitler in World War II. Rejoicing over that victory, sanctified as a touchstone of national pride, has obscured the gulag’s horrors and raised Stalin’s popularity to its highest level in decades. An opinion poll published in March indicated that 76% of Russians have a favorable view of the Soviet Union, with Stalin outpacing all other Soviet leaders in public esteem. In another poll in 2018, 47% of Russians aged 18-24 said they had never heard of the political repressions of the first decades of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile the remnants of the prison camps, their walls and beams and barbed wire, sink further and further into the snow.