Yakutsk is a Russian port city on the Lena River, in east Siberia. It’s home to the Mammoth Museum, with millennia-old fossils of woolly mammoths. The Melnikov Permafrost Institute Underground Laboratory has a tunnel showcasing fossils, including a mammoth calf, in below-freezing temperatures. The Yakut State Museum of History and Culture of the Northern Peoples houses Ice Age fossils, including mammoths and rhinos. There are several theaters in Yakutsk: the State Russian Drama Theater, named after A. S. Pushkin; the Sakha Theater, named after P. A. Oiyunsky; the Suorun Omoloon Young Spectator's Theater; and the State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater, named after D. K. Sivtsev. The annual Ysyakh summer festival takes place the last weekend in June. The traditional Yakut summer solstice festivities include a celebration of the revival and renewal of the nature, fertility and beginning of a new year. It is accompanied by national Yakut rituals and ceremonies, folk dancing, horse racing, Yakut ethnic music and singing, national cuisine, and competitions in traditional Yakut sports. There is a local punk scene in Yakutsk, with many bands. The city has an increasingly vibrant film industry that has been gaining international recognition over recent years for its unique style and the way its filmmakers portray the region and its people. The regional film industry has come to be nicknamed "Sakhawood".
The region is rich in gold and diamonds, which is what lay behind the Soviets' decision to turn Yakutsk into a major regional centre, first using the Gulag labour system, and later with the resettlement of thousands of volunteers seeking adventure, higher salaries and the chance to build socialism on ice. The corporate giant Alrosa, which owns Russia's diamond monopoly, is based in the region and accounts for 20 per cent of the world's supply of rough diamonds. In time, Yakutsk was transformed into a real city with hotels, cinemas, an opera house, universities, a pizza delivery service, and even a zoo. Until the Russian Revolution of 1917, Yakutsk remained an insignificant provincial outpost. In the 19th century it was used, like many Siberian towns, as an open prison for political dissidents. Along with its mysterious allure and vast natural resources, the prison connotations have always lent Siberia a reputation as a grim and miserable place, not just among foreigners but also among Russians. As an 1825 poem has it: "Fearing the winters/ Endless and icy/ Nobody will visit/ This wretched country/ This vast prison house for exiles."
