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Inside the eerie Siberian ghost town that began as Stalin’s prison camp before being abandoned after a deadly mine explosion

Online Niel October 25, 2024

A Siberian town was almost completely wiped off the map after enduring years of brutality when a mine explosion forced its residents to abandon it.

The ruins of Kadykchan now haunt the landscape Russian Far East – and has been strangely frozen in time since the Cold War.

This Siberian city has been frozen in time since the Cold WarCredit: Koryo Tours

Residents were forced to flee after a deadly mine explosionCredit: YouTube / BaikalNature

What appears to be an abandoned gym in KadykchanCredit: Alamy

Road sign indicating the Kadykchan coal mine on the Kolyma highwayCredit: Alamy

What looks like the broken remains of a classroomCredit: Koryo Tours

Everything was left to rotCredit: Sometimes interesting

The dystopian coal mining town has been completely deserted for decades since its last busload of residents.

Harrowing images reveal blackened and crumbling Soviet-era concrete apartment blocks, destroyed classrooms and rusting playgrounds overrun by nature.

Old-fashioned road signs are illustrated, indicating the Kadykchan Coal Mine on the Kolyma Highway.

Other images show books scattered around deserted buildings, and windows taken out of buildings.

The remote and abandoned city lies deep in the Magadan province, an area also known as “Kolyma” – a name that used to strike fear into hearts the russians.

It is accessible only along thousands of miles of a highway, dubbed the “Road of Bones” because of the number of people who were worked to death or executed in labor camps.

The Soviet-era despot opened up the region in the 1930s to extract minerals, metals and gold from its uninhabited lands using forced labor.

Opened by communist Stalin, the dictator sought to access its mineral, metal and gold deposits to support the ongoing industrialization of the USSR.

But the fastest way to exploit the earth’s materials was to use forced labor—and it came at a cost.

Throughout the 1930s and into World War IIover a million prisoners suffered in the horrific conditions and -50C temperatures of Kolyma.

An incredible 200,000 people died horribly.

After the war, two coal mines were opened in Kadykchan and prisoners were no longer held cruelly.

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Instead, the civilians were under the impression that they would get a good salary and an apartment to live in.

As the Cold War began and began to drag on, the city really blossomed in the 1970s, becoming a place for young people to live and work, with music festivals organized and clubs open.

But in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed and the worker’s wages were no longer guaranteed.

The coal mining town fell into depression, one of the mines closed and the future looked bleak.

A former resident, Tatiana Shchepalkin, said BBC: “Salaries were not being paid and people could not even buy basic things like food.

“Imagine your husband comes home from the mine and you have nothing to feed him. The children are hungry.”

It didn’t look like it could get any worse, until tragedy struck on November 25, 1996.

A methane explosion tore through the mine during a busy morning shift and six people were killed.

The books are seen scattered inside the ruined buildingsCredit: Alamy

When the last inhabitant left, the town was set on fireCredit: Koryo Tours

The spooky remains of a playgroundCredit: Sometimes interesting

The last mine was closed for good and Kadykchan no longer had a reason to exist. The city was finished.

“Things were terrible… Things were so desperate that people were shooting dogs for food,” Tatiana recalled.

Residents quickly began packing up their lives and moving out.

Soon the city was completely empty. In turn, the local council moved in and burned down most of the buildings.

There remains Kadykchan – blackened, collapsed and given over to nature.

A man who had spent his entire life in the remote and frozen city watched the smoke burn as he left.

“Your soul refuses to believe,” Vladimir Voskresensky told the BBC.

“But it is.”

Now the only people walking among the ruins are intrepid explorers caught up in its dark history.

Elsewhere in Russia, in the shadows Ural Mountains it’s a rust the eerie location of a train graveyard built in preparation for World War 3.

The steel skeletons of dozens of steam locomotives betray a time when the specter mushroom cloud loomed dangerously close.

During the Soviet period he served as a nuclear war base – ready and waiting to knock Russia to safety if all other means of transportation have failed or been destroyed.

Time moved on, the Iron Curtain rose, diesel trains took over and the threat of nuclear war receded – leaving a graveyard on rusty tracks.

What was the Cold War?

The Cold War was a state of geopolitical tension between the powers and brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster.

It took place between the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and its satellite states) and the Western Bloc powers (the United States, its NATO allies, and others) – as a result of World War II.

A tense war timeframe recognized by historians ranges from 1947 and either 1989 or 1991.

After the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945, the uneasy wartime alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other began to unravel.

By 1948, the Soviets had installed left-wing governments in the countries of Eastern Europe that had been liberated by the Red Army.

The Americans and British feared permanent Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe and the threat of Soviet-influenced communist parties coming to power in Western European democracies.

The Soviets, on the other hand, were determined to maintain control of Eastern Europe to guard against any possible renewed threat from Germany and were intent on spreading communism throughout the world, largely for ideological reasons.

The Cold War had solidified by 1947, when US Marshall Plan aid to Western Europe brought those countries under American influence, and the Soviets installed openly communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

The Cold War reached its peak between 1948 and 1953.

Throughout the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union avoided direct military confrontation in Europe and engaged in actual combat operations only to prevent allies from defecting to the other side or to overthrow them after they did so.

The Cold War began to unravel in the late 1980s during the administration of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

He dismantled the totalitarian aspects of the Soviet system and began efforts to democratize the Soviet political system.

When the communist regimes in the Eastern European Soviet bloc countries collapsed in 1989–90, Gorbachev accepted their fall.

In late 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and from its corpse arose 15 newly independent nations, including a Russia with a democratically elected anti-communist leader.

The Cold War had come to an end.