A SIBERIAN city 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 of Russia's Far East - and has eerily been frozen in time since the Cold War. The dystopian coal-mining town has been completely deserted for decades since its last bus load of residents shipped out.
Chilling footage reveals blackened and crumbling Soviet-era concrete apartment blocks, smashed up classrooms and rusting playgrounds overrun by nature. Old-fashioned road signs are pictured, indicating the Kadykchan coal mine on the Kolyma highway. Other images show books laying scattered around the desolate buildings, and windows punched out of buildings.
The remote and abandoned city is found deep into Magadan province, an area also known as "Kolyma" - a name that used to strike fear in the hearts of Russians. It is only reachable along thousands of miles of a highway, referred to as the "Road of Bones" due to the amount of people that were worked to death or executed in labour camps. The Soviet-era despot opened up the region in the 1930s in order to extract minerals, metals and gold from its uninhabited lands using forced labour.
Opened by communist Stalin, the dictator looked to access its mineral, metal and gold deposits in order to support the ongoing industrialisation of the USSR. But the quickest way to exploit the land's materials was to use forced labour - and it came at a cost.