Ghost towns are becoming all the rage again, attracting those keen for new experiences and adventure. Many are abandoned villages or cities, often with substantial visible remains that offer a unique insight into the past.
Crumbling buildings, lonely cemeteries, and rusting industrial equipment mark the graves of these once thriving communities. Russia is believed to have 20,000 abandoned villages, as well as many deserted towns. One of the most intriguing and fascinating is Kadykchan in Russia’s Kolyma region, known for its harsh climate and living conditions.
The Kolyma area was discovered to have rich deposits of gold, silver, copper, uranium, cobalt, diamonds and coal.
Stalin was keen to exploit the region’s mineral riches to support the rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union.
To that effect, he set up gulags in the region, using political prisoners as slave labour to extract the minerals.
Almost a million prisoners passed through Kolyma in the quarter of a century that the camps operated here.
It is thought that at least 200,000 prisoners died in the brutal conditions – poorly fed and clothed to face winter temperatures that could sink as low as -50C.
Kadykchan started off life in 1930 as a prison camp, and was slowly converted into a town.
After the death of Stalin in 1953 and subsequent closure of the gulags, many of the former prisoners stayed on in the town to continue working the pits.
By the 1980s some 10,000 people still lived in the town, but numbers started to drop after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent economic recession.
The final nail in its coffin came when a pit explosion tragically killed six miners in 1996. The tragedy led to the closure of Mine Number 10 and the eventual relocation of the remaining population.
As of the 2010 Census, it had no recorded population and a deathly silence settled upon Kadykchan – today the largest ghost town in Siberia.
A walk through the abandoned town offers such apocalyptic sights as dilapidated, Soviet apartment blocks, decaying children’s play areas, and a cultural centre.
A bust of Lenin is still visible in the town square, a stark reminder of its Soviet past.
There are also deserted school buildings, where old textbooks litter the floor, and equipment lies smashed in the science labs.
