Zapolyarny is one of the Russia’s dying villages located in Komi Republic. The village is now entirely forgotten and its last 400 residents will soon leave their homes forever.
Is it hard for yourself to imagine that very soon you will leave your apartment, leave all your belongings and move to a completely different place? This is how the authorities of the polar city of Vorkuta in Komi decided to relocate 62 families from the closing village of Komsomolsky in 2022. It is also planned to relocate 300 families from the village of Zapolyarny by the end of 2025 and complete the so-called “controlled compression” program.
It seems quite recently almost 10,000 people lived here, who enjoyed all the benefits of civilization. Back in the late 1980s, there were two schools and a children’s music school, an evening school for working youth, a hospital, a polyclinic, an ambulance, a sanatorium-dispensary, a house of life, a house of culture, a restaurant, a canteen, a cafe, a pub, 5 kindergartens, a gym, an indoor skating rink, a shooting gallery, a post office, a bathhouse, a savings bank, a pharmacy, a distillery, 5 non-food stores, 6 grocery stores, a fire department and a mountain rescue platoon.
Now only ruins remain of the former luxury, which can be viewed by anyone who decides to visit Vorkuta and its famous ring. It’s not a long drive from Vorkuta to Zapolyarny, about 30 minutes from the city. Now about 400 people live in the village, and right behind the village, the GOK, or the central processing plant, smokes the sky with its high pipes, which to this day is engaged in the enrichment of coal produced by the Vorkutaugol mines, which are scattered around the district.
We find ourselves in the village in the evening. The first thing that catches your eye is complete silence and the absence of people. The deathly silence only cuts through the hum of equipment from the processing plant, which does not quiet down for a minute, howling like a wounded dog.
A small island of life in the middle of a deserted green tundra with such familiar panels and five-story buildings that we all know so well. All this looks somehow strange and unusual, especially when you realize that most of the residential buildings are abandoned.
The most lively, in our opinion, were near the Frunze Street. Two long five-storey buildings with 9 entrances, in the windows of which life still glows, and there are few cars under the windows. People still live here, but, of course, many apartments have long been abandoned by former residents, which is hinted at by the boarded-up entrances in some residential buildings.
The central Frunze Street seems to divide the village into two parts, dividing it into two halves. This street used to have all the main shops, schools and a house of culture, which we will look into a little later.
Often there are such incomprehensible electrical devices under the windows, which in fact turned out to be sensors designed to protect lifting installations from re-lifting in mines and control the position of mine moving objects, and provide self-monitoring of the serviceability of their electrical circuits.
Why are they standing under the windows? It seems to me that the local hard workers who used to work in the mines made a kind of electrical panel out of them, which they used to connect the heating of their car’s engine in winter from 220 volts.
We approach the house of culture, the doors to which have long been open to everyone, and the building itself was abandoned and looted to bare walls. In front of the recreation center there is an half-damaged car, on which, apparently, the local youth is riding from idleness.
As you know, there is no culture here, as there will not be very soon the village itself, which will be completely left to the mercy of fate in the middle of permafrost.
As a result, by 2025 the villages of Komsomolsky and Zapolyarny will be completely closed. People will be relocated to other settlements and Vorkuta itself, but many residents will simply leave for the Mainland, to other regions of our vast homeland, as most residents of this harsh polar region have already managed to do.
