Lyovikha, Southern Urals

These four kids live in the crumbling mining ghost-settlement of Lyovikha, about an hour outside the southern Urals city of Nizhny Tagil. Constructed in the 1920s to house miners who plied the Urals of iron ore, today Lyovikha is a hellhole of 80-plus percent unemployment, fetus-warping alcoholism, and recreational violence. I visited the town while reporting a story on Lyovikha's most famous son: Eddie Chudinov, the ringleader of a pimp gang responsible for the deaths of dozens of area teenage girls. Though many of these girls were found in the forest bordering Lyovikha, residents like Oleg Masgalin (second from left) just shrugged it off. "There's a lot of violence here," he said. "Most people have never been sober in their lives. Come back at night and see how this place turns to Hell." The story is here.