Vorkuta

Vorkuta (????????), population about 116,000, is a coal mining community in the Komi Republic of Russia just north of the Arctic circle in the Pechora coal basin, at . It had its origin in one of the more notorious concentration camps of the Gulag which was established in 1932.

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Vorkuta became a city on November 26, 1943. Many of the concentration camps were disbanded in the 1950s, but it is reported that some in the Vorkuta area continued to operate into the 1980s; by the early part of the 21st century many of the mines have been closed as problems with high costs of operations have plagued the mine operators. At one time during the late 1980s and 1990s there were labor actions in the area by miners who had not been paid for a year. http://www.aha.ru/~mgo/vorkuta.htm.

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During the Cold War an Arctic Control Group forward staging base for strategic bombers was located at Vorkuta http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/russia/vorkuta.htm

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Coal: Coal is a fossil fuel extracted from the ground by deep mining, coal mining (open-pit mining or strip mining). It is a readily combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock. It is composed primarily of carbon and hydrocarbons, along with assorted other elements, including sulfur. Often associ...

Mining: Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth, usually (but not always) from an ore body, vein, or (coal) seam. Materials commonly recovered by mining include bauxite, coal, copper, diamonds, iron, gold, lead, manganese, magnesium, nickel, phosphate, plat...

Komi Republic: :For other uses, see Komi....