“In Russia we have two problems, fools and bad roads” said my guide, Yuiana as the car swerved right and left through a mine-field of deep potholes. We were driving West, following the Trans Siberian Railway, somewhere between Kansk and Tulun – past long forgotten villages of dilapidated wooden shacks and deserted factories and granaries – the kind of place most would classify as “the middle of nowhere.”

If you squint, you can make out what may once have been before the economic carpet was pulled out from under – quiet, agricultural townships content in their bucolic isolation. Squint harder and you can see the now abandoned, rickety mill at full capacity, churning out wheat from fertile fields. Perhaps I am trying to recreate that which never was – painting a romantics portrait of these now rotting ghost towns. Today, what is clear, what is undeniable, is the hardship that occupies these towns: poverty, unemployment and alcoholism – a tattered social fabric.

According to the 2002 census, of Russia’s 155,000 villages, 15,000 have been abandoned or reduced to just a handful of residents. Free to pursue their destinies in the free market, young Russians are heading toward the cities in search of fortune, modernity and a better life. Business and industry, also seems to have migrated or just simply closed its doors. Are we to celebrate or mourn this passing?

Traveling along, I wonder what the future hold for such towns. Will they be revived by a Russian ‘back to the land’ movement or continue to decay – physically and socially - until they are finally reclaimed by Siberia’s forest?

>From Irkutsk, Russia – happy trails.