The economy in remote Russian villages in the 1990s didn’t decline. It broke.
When the USSR fell and the ruble collapsed, mines and factories across Russia began to fail. Kadykchan. Vorkuta. Pikalyovo. Men who’d walked the same route to work for decades suddenly had nowhere to go. Snow crunched under their boots as they passed dead smokestacks, ice crusting eyebrows and mustaches, breath hanging in subzero air.
On the long Siberian nights, copper wire began to vanish from those same communities—anything of value often disappeared—from factory yards, warehouses, and the power lines that once lit the towns.
It wasn’t vandalism. It was survival: wire turned into dark, bitter bread, fur hats, potatoes, a few more days of vodka-softened numbness. The buildings became shells, all the metal veins pulled out.
That image stayed with me for years.
