I first travelled to Siberia in the summer of 1992, visiting Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, en route to Mongolia and China. In 1993 or 1994 I returned for work reporting on the gas industry  in and around Novy Urengoy  in Russia’s Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. I was there around June, during the white nights, when the sun barely set in this city 35 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. Later I flew to Yakutsk, the capital of the republic of Sakha (Yakutia) and onto a remote diamond factory accessible only by small plane or helicopter.  It was on these trips that I began to understand the vastness of Russia and also how bleak life can be in some of the resource rich outports. Click on a picture for a slide show with captions.