Old Kadykchan
By the Kolyma highway at Russian Far East, literally in the middle of nowhere at taiga wilderness, stands a ghost town of Kadykchan. It consists mostly of abandoned bone white housing blocks built at the 1970s, but the old part of the town was constructed in Gulag era and was made by the prisoners. Originally, in the 1930s, the site was a mining camp like so many places in Kolyma. After the World War II the prisoners began to build the town of Kadykchan for the free – or at least relatively free – workers that were meant to replace forced labour. Came the school, the dom kulturi and the first wooden houses. Kadykchan thrived, relatively speaking, until the collapse of the Soviet Union. After that the troubles began, and at the turn of the millennium the entire city was simply shut, and the entire population moved elsewhere. The empty ghost town still stands there, and nowadays the old part of Kadykchan, built partly over the former camp by the prisoners, is a rotten but beautiful memorial to the lost era of Gulag.
Advertisements Share this:
