How This Siberian City Became A Ghost Town And Vanished Off The Maps – News18

When someone utters the word ghost town, perhaps the first thing that comes to the mind of most people would be Pripyat, the abandoned city closest to the Chernobyl power plant. The Chernobyl disaster has been made famous and well-known internationally due to a number of movies, series and documentaries made on it and the ghost town of Pripyat, which has been vacant for more than three decades, is well known. However, there are other ghost towns in existence as well, having been vacant or reduced to ruins due to either natural or man-made disasters. One of them is Kadykchan in Russia.

It is located in the far east of the country. The inhabitants of this Siberian city were forced to leave after an explosion in a mine caused it to almost completely vanish off the maps. It’s been more than 30 years since this coal mining city was last inhabited. Now, all that is left here are dilapidated buildings that look ominous.

There is yet another chilling legend associated with the abandoned city. And it is the fact that the town is on the edge of the ‘Road of Bones’. This region is also known as ‘Kolyma,’ a moniker that instilled fear in the Russian people. There is just one road that leads here and it is known as the ‘Road of Bones’ due to the fact that many people here died in labour camps under Stalin’s dictatorship.

In the 1930s, the Soviet-era dictator started mining to extract minerals, metals and gold from this uninhabited land by using forced labour. Throughout the 1930s and during the Second World War, more than a million prisoners endured Kolyma’s appalling conditions and temperatures of -50C. Two lakh of them died. After the war, 2 coal mines were opened in Kadykchan. Attracted by the promise of good pay, the prisoners were soon replaced by civilians.

In the 1970s, the city underwent significant development as the Cold War intensified. People looking for work rose in number here. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, pay for employees was no longer guaranteed and the town went into recession. The situation was so desperate that people were shooting dogs for food, according to a civilian who had talked to the BBC almost 35 years back.

It didn’t seem like it could get any worse until tragedy struck on November 25, 1996. During the busy morning shift, a methane explosion occurred in the mine and 6 people died. This forced the last operating mine in Kadykchan to shut down as well and was the final nail in the coffin. With absolutely no source of livelihood and food, the survivors left the town never to return and it has been lying desolate ever since.