Devil's Islands

ARCHANGEL IT may have voted for Yeltsin, but Archangel is still a very Soviet sort of place. There's a Lenin in the main square and another on the way out of town, just to make sure. Seven hundred miles north of Moscow, this once rich port city of 400,000 seems, at a glance, trapped in Brezhnev's dereliction — though there are hints of a commercial revival. There is plenty in the shops, and someone is buying all those Western cars.

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