Vorkuta

The region is notorious for long and severe winters; the town is near Vorkuta, whose coal mines were among the harshest of the Soviet Gulag prison-camp system.

Prisoners in the Vorkuta Gulag, a major Soviet labor camp, in 1945.

In one city cited in the paper, Vorkuta, an estimated 80 percent of buildings had some deformations because of the changing permafrost.

Kovach’s father, Ivan Kovach, met Kovachova when they were prisoners in the Vorkuta gulag in northern Russia.

“But every individual has a choice in the end,” added Ms. Lasmane, who repeatedly chose to defy the Soviet authorities and, as a result, was sent three times to Soviet prison camps, including one in Vorkuta, a particularly forbidding outpost of the Gulag archipelago.