Introducing: Deputatsky – the Deputies’ Village (but 0 deputies observed on our walkabout). | Nota Bene: Eugene Kaspersky’s Official Blog

Ahead of schedule, we were fast approaching the destination of our road trip – the northern-Russian-coastal town of Tiksi.

Already behind us were the towns/villages of Khandyga, Ust-Nera, Sasyr, Khonuu, and Syagannakh. All was hunky-dory with our Chinese vehicles. And since we made it to the town of Deputatsky much quicker than expected, of course – that meant only one thing: a walk around this village that’s some 400 kilometers inside the Arctic Circle (to give you a taster-teaser – just in case any of you, dear readers, may fancy one day visiting the place)…

Here are the aerial views from our drone:

// Deputatsky, btw, means “of the Deputies” (root noun – deputat: deputy / delegate / lawmaker / member of parliament), as in – ~the Village of the Deputies (or the Village for the Deputies). But, like I say, we didn’t see a single official of any kind on our walkabout.

It wasn’t too cold out, so out we popped for our walkabout, cameras in hand…

To the right – the town’s new (or renovated/refurbished) school building ->

The town on the whole, despite the harshest of climatic conditions, doesn’t look bad at all:

Overhead cables everywhere: ugly but inevitable in permafrost land:

The third one down isn’t a doll or a floppy-eared soft toy but…

…a mammoth! ->

Quite what the town’s industries or other sources of income are today I didn’t get to find out. They used to mine tin here, but then the mine was closed down. Folks then started to move away, and then, during the 90s, there are tales of electricity and heating being turned off and inhabitants having to use firewood to heat their apartments. As a result, yet more townsfolk left – seeing the population fall four-fold in 10 years! ->

For the last two decades or so the population has remained stable; still – quite what the locals do I didn’t get…

Town hall:

When you’ve got lots of lemons!…

That’s our olly_ru, btw, showing the locals they don’t really need sleds or…

…stools? :)

The “Olymp” sports complex:

Next up – to the nearest supermarket to stock up on supplies…

DZ is astonished at the high prices of fruit and veg:

Here’s the former tin-mining plant:

The internet tells me that this is the site of the largest tin deposits in the world. However, for some reason they smelted it elsewhere. It was transported there from here as rich/dressed ore ->

Turns out they’d take the ore more than 200 kilometers away to the river-port village of Ust-Kuyga by truck – on a road built specially for the purpose (curiously – not shown on Google Maps). Then it went on the Lena River north to the Laptev Sea; and from there by ship around the Taymyr Peninsula with an icebreaker helping out – and all this only in summer. In short – a costly process. So costly that, eventually, it was abandoned. Apparently even the enterprising Chinese found it too costly too after coming here on pre-investment fact-finding missions. Shame: all that infrastructure going to waste (.

Back in the town, here’s our hotel here are the residential blocks in which we’d two apartments booked (one in each) ->

The beady-eyed among you may have already noticed in the above pics: all large buildings here are constructed upon stilts to be able to “handle” the permafrost conditions (also – all pipes carrying water are overground) ->