The Russian Far East is a vast rambling territory of forests, mountains, rivers and lakes which lays between Siberia and the far Pacific coast.

Almost as big as Australia, it represents more than 35% of the land mass of the entire Russian Federation but less than 5% of its population.

People in the rest of Russia have long been encouraged to think of the region - packed with natural resources like oil, gas, fisheries, gold and even diamonds - as their ‘frontier’, as thousands were once sent to prison camps in the region to dig up its resources.

Now the camps are closed, and the ‘free’ population is rapidly dwindling. The Russian Far East is in danger of turning into ‘yesterday’s frontier’.