There are many good reasons why people don’t want to live in the frozen ghost village of Severny, but that just makes the northern Russian community a great destination to visit with a drone.
The Moscow-based drone photographer Maria Passer visited Severny this February. Temperatures were -40 degrees F. It’s not ideal for drone flying, but it’s a good thing for us she did, since we get to see these other-worldly images. And Severny is just one of several ghost towns towns surrounding the coal-mining center of Vorkuta.
It used to be infamous for its labor camps where convicts worked the mines, but when the camps closed, people enthusiastically moved to the area for work. It was a short spree, however. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the mines began to close. Faced with no job opportunities, many people just packed it in.
“To attract miners to live in hard climate conditions the salaries here were…
