Abandoned Places in Russia

Russia's abandoned landscape is defined by the scale of Soviet ambition and the completeness of its collapse. The world's largest country contains an almost incomprehensible number of abandoned places — entire cities built for industries that no longer exist, military installations that once housed tens of thousands of soldiers, scientific research facilities that pushed the boundaries of human knowledge, and the remnants of a planned economy that reshaped an entire continent.

The Soviet Union's space program left behind some of Russia's most dramatic abandoned structures. The Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where Yuri Gagarin launched into space in 1961, remains operational, but the Buran shuttle program's facilities at the cosmodrome have been abandoned since the program's cancellation in 1993. The enormous hangar that housed the Buran shuttles collapsed under the weight of snow in 2002, crushing two of the remaining orbiters. The Sputnik launch facilities, the Vostok program's infrastructure, and dozens of other space-related structures throughout Russia and the former Soviet republics stand in various states of decay.

Russia's military-industrial complex created entire closed cities — known as ZATO (Closed Administrative-Territorial Formations) — that were kept secret from the outside world and do not appear on maps. Many of these cities, built around nuclear weapons facilities, submarine bases, or research laboratories, have been partially or completely abandoned as their industries declined. Zheleznodorozhny, a former military city near Moscow, and Skala, a submarine base carved into a Norwegian-style fjord in the Russian Far East, represent the extraordinary scale of Soviet military investment and the completeness of its abandonment.

The Russian Far East contains some of the world's most remote abandoned places. The Kolyma region, site of the Soviet Union's most brutal labor camps, is dotted with the ruins of gulag facilities — barracks, watchtowers, and processing plants that processed millions of prisoners. The town of Kadykchan in Magadan Oblast, once home to 12,000 coal miners, was abandoned in the 1990s when the mine closed and the government stopped subsidizing life in the extreme cold. Its apartment blocks, cultural center, and school stand exactly as they were left, slowly being consumed by the permafrost.

Russia's industrial heartland, the Ural Mountains region, contains numerous abandoned factories and mines from the Soviet era. The Ural Heavy Machinery Plant in Yekaterinburg, once one of the world's largest heavy equipment manufacturers, has been partially abandoned as production declined. The copper smelting facilities of the Ural region, many of them dating to the eighteenth century, represent some of the oldest industrial ruins in Russia.

The country's religious heritage has also left behind numerous abandoned structures. The Soviet Union's systematic destruction of religious institutions left thousands of churches, monasteries, and synagogues in ruins. Many have been partially restored since the fall of communism, but others remain abandoned, their frescoes fading, their domes collapsing, their graveyards overgrown.