Everybody out

last updated 8 January 2015

Kadykchan, Russia

The Russian government has cut off gas and oil supplies to several frigid Siberian towns in an effort to force the residents to move. Northern mining and logging towns founded by slave labor during the Stalin era are too expensive to maintain now that the Soviet subsidies are gone, and the government is trying to resettle the inhabitants. Many of them, though, refuse to leave, and insist they will brave the coming winter without heating fuel. “No one wants to die here,” local administration head Alexander Talanov told The Washington Post. “But we also have the syndrome of prisoners who spent many years in prison and don’t know how to leave.”