RUSSIA // Writers, artists and other freethinkers were imprisoned within the chilly walls of this Soviet labour camp between the 1940s and the 1980s. It's one of the only remaining Gulags in the former USSR, worth visiting despite recent government efforts to make it more 'patriotic'. Visitors in the past five years have seen exhibits revamped to remove descriptions of hardship and oppression, and to emphasise that the prisoners here were criminals (rather than political dissidents). Read some outside history before you arrive; it will make the bare wooden barracks, isolation cells and barbed wire fences more poignant. Even if you don't believe in ghosts, the entire place feels haunted, especially when the skies are the iron grey of winter and the Siberian winds howl.