It was a mild spring evening in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk, but Yekaterina Fatyanova was scrambling to pack winter clothes.

With just a few hours' notice, the Siberian activist and part-time newspaper editor had been ordered to board a plane the next day and fly 1,500 kilometers north, beyond the Arctic Circle, to serve a two-year punishment for violating Russia's war censorship laws.

Her destination: Norilsk, a grim, polluted city of 175,000 people that was once a notorious outpost of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's gulag network of prison camps.