The city of Vorkuta, founded in 1943, was one of the largest centers of Gulag camps in European Russia and one of the largest coal-mining centers in Europe during the Soviet period. Vorkuta is also one of only a few major cities in the world built above the Arctic Circle. The Slavic and East European Microform Project has acquired microfilm of Zapoliar'e, the only newspaper ever published in Vorkuta and the official mouthpiece of  the city’s Communist Party, for August 1952 through December 1970.