This town in the Magadan region of Russia is called “Sinegorye” or “Blue Mountains”. A very nice name for a town, but in reality this is an almost completely abandoned place, and is now the size of a village. Its population has fallen by 70% since the collapse of the USSR and so almost 3/4 of its buildings remain empty and abandoned, including many huge apartment complexes like the one in the a picture above. Sergey, the awesome Russian blogger we so like to post here, has visited this place and says it’s very easy to say which buildings are abandoned – in the abandoned buildings all of the window glass is broken.
Sergey says that there is a strange tradition in most semi abandoned places like this – as soon as one window gets broken, shortly after all the rest of the windows shed their glass as well. This is all done mostly by local youths – as soon as they see the destruction of windows has started by someone they all join and finish it fast.
This is the town’s downtown. Here you can see the city central square and monument and buildings here are still intact.
However the main street on both sides of the main square has only empty, abandoned buildings and kids wandering around.
The main street continues.
This city used to have over 10,000 people living here. Now just of fraction of them remain.
More and more empty houses.
Some buildings have only one or two apartments occupied, the rest are abandoned with open doors and windows.
Still you can see passers-by on the streets, including young women.
Some people try to paint parts of the buildings they occupy in bright colors.
Like here, too.
A mother with kids on the streets.
Kids never see nice cars here so they wanted to take a picture.
All of the apartments in this building have been abandoned but there is a shop on the ground floor.
And here is inside of this shop – lots of very different beverages.
And some coffee.
Also sweets.
And even some produce.
Also of course lots of canned foods and pastas – the most durable foods you can preserve for years.
Some sausages. The prices, Sergey says, are higher than in Moscow which itself is a very expensive Russian city. The logistics costs here are crazy.
However to a Western eye the prices are probably rather reasonable – Cola bottle is roughly $1.50, since in general food prices in Russia are much cheaper than abroad.
Hope you liked the story and big thanks to Sergei! His website is below:
So sad to see this. The same thing is happening to our sister city in Russia..TYNDA.
This is natural and not sad at all. All good things come to an end, even cities. Lots of Ghost towns in North America, totally abandoned. This is the way of life. Glad that atleast some folks are still living in this City, impressive to see grocery store and kids etc.,
Also in USA. When a building is empty, young men break the windows.
It’s true, the ‘broken window phenomenon’ ( http://www.sociologyindex.com/broken_window_theory.htm) seems to have played a large part in Detroit, but applies across any city.
I’m impressed the food prices are so low, much lower than Canada, for example, given the remoteness of the region.
I love the Adventures of Sergei- seems like quite a trip!
Its amazing that that city still has a Chipotle.
See Gary Sellar’s comment above – this town was always going to be ‘abandoned’ when construction of the local hydroelectric power plant was complete. Also, things can’t be that terrible if they have fresh bananas and kiwis for sale (and in good condition, too)
Kiwifruit, not kiwis. Kiwis are birds.
It is fair to say, that Magadan is a country of former GULAG forced labbour camp, where lots of russian peoples lost at least part of their lives. As these camps closed after fall of CCCP, also the supporting jobs dissapeared, so people left. The dam theory doesn´t give a sense – no one will build city like this just for temporary works on dam construction.
Thx for posting!
Nice countryside and I particularly liked that shop!
This is misleading. The population decline had nothing to do with the collapse of the USSR, it was simply that the dam construction had finished and people moved away. There was no reason for people to remain here.
Population is still falling with more than 100 each year: 2501 in 2015 (this article) and 1871 now in 2020: