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.