Kadykchan in Russia's far north-east was dug out of the permafrost by Gulag prisoners in 1943 to feed a power station. Then a mine explosion and a state decision left its flats empty and its streets silent.
Above Svalbard's Isfjorden, the ruins of Grumant mark a Russian and Soviet coal town that was evacuated in the war, shelled, rebuilt, and abandoned for good in the 1960s.
Founded by Swedes in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927, Pyramiden was a showcase mining town on Spitsbergen with more than a thousand residents. Mining ended on 31 March 1998, the people left within months, and the cold has kept the town almost as they left it.
Hashima is a six-hectare rock off Nagasaki that held 5,259 people at its 1959 peak, packed into concrete apartment blocks around an undersea coal mine. Mitsubishi closed the mine in January 1974 and the island was emptied by April. It is now a World Heritage site, and its wartime forced-labour history is still disputed.
