Four cities. Four stories of ambition, collapse, and the people who refused to leave. I traveled across Russia’s harshest regions to document what happens when an empire builds cities where no one should live — and then abandons them. From Vorkuta, where Gulag prisoners constructed an entire city that’s now losing residents by the thousands, to Murmansk, the Arctic’s largest city slowly falling apart under garbage and neglect. From Magadan, a port city haunted by its dark past, to the frozen settlements of Yakutia, where winter temperatures drop below -58°C (-72°F) and gold miners work year-long shifts in conditions most people can’t imagine.