Clues abounded, chiefly from defectors and former Gulag inmates who reached the West.

ECONOMIST: Americans in the Gulag

Or the 50-something Novosibirsk professor whose family had been shipped to a Gulag-built town, after WWII, who sadly confessed that, though he tried, he could not stomach heavy metal.

BBC: Riding the virtual Trans-Siberian

Naive as he is about finding fish, he writes well about the Russians he meets, from his friend Yuri Brodsky who has spent 25 years cataloguing the history of the first Soviet gulag on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea to Fyodorovich, a trapper, who survived the camps in Siberia and stayed on to live like a hermit in the boundless far eastern taiga.

ECONOMIST: Exotic sports: A new angle on Russia��s crisis | The