Kadykchan

The road in is a suggestion more than a surface, frost-heaved asphalt breaking into gravel and then into nothing marked at all. Kadykchan announces itself first as a change in the horizon line: rectangular shapes where the tundra should just roll on. Up close the blocks are Soviet grey going to rust-grey, five and six storeys, windows punched out or still holding their glass in jagged collars. Snow drifts through open doorways and settles in stairwells like it has somewhere to be. The cold does the work a wrecking crew would do elsewhere. It just takes longer, and nobody is in a hurry.

The town exists because Stalin's camps needed coal and Kolyma had it. Gulag prisoners built Kadykchan in the 1940s, and it kept working long after the camps officially closed, coal-black and functional through the Soviet decades, home to several thousand people who had a school, a hospital, a House of Culture. In 1996 an explosion tore through the mine. The official record gives the event and the closure that followed — a resettlement program, families moved out, the town's utilities shut down by government order. What it does not give, not in any account that survives at street level, is a full accounting of what happened underground, or how many stayed unlisted through the years before the last power line was cut.

Apartments stand furnished. Not staged-abandoned, not looted to the studs — furnished, in the way of a house where someone meant to come back for the rest of it. Children's shoes by a door. A piano, swollen and split from thirty winters, still upright in a room with no roof left above it. Nobody who writes about Kadykchan agrees on why so much was left, or why some blocks were stripped clean while others, a hundred meters on, were not touched at all. The tundra keeps its own ledger. It isn't sharing.