There was only one road in and it went past the concrete ruins of a guards’ post: a booth with broken windows, struts in the ground beside it where a barrier would have rested. Every piece of metal that could be lifted had been stripped from the place. There had been a fence once. The roof of the booth itself had been prised off.

Two slender, red and white striped factory chimneys rose up a mile out. Closer than them were three apartment blocks, hinged into shallow V shapes, pocked with hundreds of dark windows.

It had been a closed town, one of those the Soviets considered too sensitive to have people moving in and out of freely. Abandoned for a couple of decades by the looks of it. Which made the fresh tracks of a vehicle with deep tread and 10-inch-thick wheels seem curious.

The blocks came into focus as I drove in, windows smashed, faded murals flaked from the end walls: a woman with arms aloft before a globe; two miners, one with Slavic features, one Kazakh. Silver water pipes snaked above the ground. The ice that ran down from them formed a low, opalescent curtain, waist high. It was minus 3, but the wind straight off the steppe took another 10 degrees off. I was worried about the car. I’d seen them stop functioning at higher temperatures than this and had no idea what coolant or anti-freeze was in use, if any. Without transport I had a lot of snow and ghosts for company.

I drove further in, slowly. Two red-brick buildings the size of churches had collapsed into themselves, filled with piles of their own bricks. Trees grew above and through the buildings. The water pipes wound between them, scattering lagging across the ground.

In the centre was a town square. I got out of the car, pulling my scarf tight, sealing myself into my jacket. Walked past a town hall, a school with cracked plasterwork the same colour as the snow, into a park with a playground and a sculpture: a sphere of blue and white oxidised copper beside a bearded man in a suit. I cleaned the plaque at his feet. Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov. Nuclear physicist.

I laid a gloved hand on a roundabout and it turned, smoother than I’d expected. Every blank window seemed to watch me. I wondered how far I was from another living human.

You reached the factories before the mine: two roofless chemical plants, stripped like carcasses. One brown-bricked factory more intact. Squares of late sun decorated the floor inside like glowing fire pits. Fixings remained where the machines had been. Nests filled the corners, black pellet-like droppings across the floor from bats. Turbines and gangways had been left to rot. There was an office in the corner with a jacket hanging on a peg, rusted circuit boards from a computer on the floor.