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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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