Far beyond Russia’s major cities, in the remote upper Kolyma region of the Russian Far East, a settlement once stood as a small but important part of the Soviet Union’s industrial machine. Kadykchan was built during World War II around coal deposits, with prisoners from the Gulag system among those forced to construct the settlement and its mining infrastructure. Decades later, thousands of people lived there. Today, its empty apartment blocks, public buildings and roads remain as a stark reminder of a Soviet town that could not survive the economic system that created it.
Kadykchan emerged in the 1940s, when the Soviet Union was fighting World War II and desperately needed fuel and raw materials. Coal was discovered in the wider area in the years before the settlement was built, and the deposits became the foundation for mining activity in one of the country's most remote regions.
