Located on the southern edge of the town, this building is considerably more inviting than the surrounding dormitories, with colorful murals adorning the brick facade and welcoming lobby. The island’s only school was also the meeting house of the small but active Komsomol, or Communist Youth group. Two stories tall, it features four classrooms, a small auditorium, and a set of offices, with an intersection of hallways splitting the various rooms down the axises of the building and a single flight of stairs in the middle, pivoting ninety degrees to reach the second floor and creating a blind spot whether ascending or descending. The auditorium seems to have been largely used as a music room, with old instruments set against the wall beside a piano. The desks in the classrooms remain where one might expect them to be, and the cold has largely left most of the learning materials intact.

These six buildings loom over the town square. Standardized Soviet bloc housing, each building is four stories high and identical, differing only in their respective states of decay. Each floor is accessible by a pair of concrete stairwells on either side of a central corridor with six apartments on either side of the halls. The final flight of stairs opens out onto the roof, where backup generators and support systems for the buildings’ heating systems sit rusting and neglected. Four of the buildings seem quite well preserved, but the two closest to the approach from the docks appear to have sustained more decay and damage, with clear signs of a firefight and blast damage to some of the outer walls.

None of the apartments are locked, and some are missing doors altogether. Each apartment is a tight squeeze, with two closet-like bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, and a living room. Each floor featured a communal bathroom, which was common in buildings of that era. Many of the furnishings have been left in place, including quilts, lamps, wardrobes, bed frames, and the occasional radio or television. The furniture is often tightly packed into what little space there is, leaving little space to move, and occasionally trinkets of the past lives that called these places home can be found and read - if one knows Russian.

A single story edifice sitting in the shadow of the conveyor belt that runs past the southern edge of the town. This is the sole building in town that is directly connected onto the service road between the port and mines. An ancient-looking aerosani sits abandoned nearby, half-covered by a tattered tarp that flutters violently when the wind kicks up. The inside of the shop is still well stocked with shelves of tools and spare parts for vehicles and the island’s infrastructure. The inside of the building is about as cold as the outside; the walls are corrugated sheets, flimsy looking and lacking in insulation.

While not as large as a dormitory building, this building dominates the town’s skyline, closing off one end of the town square, opposite the sea. The ground floor opens up on all sides through a colonnade, with tiled flooring all around a fully drained swimming pool. The pool was fairly deep at six feet, and anyone not athletic enough to scale the lip of the pool will depend on one of three rusted steel ladders to escape. Adjacent to the swimming pool is a small gymnasium, featuring a basketball court and racks of vintage exercise equipment.

The second floor of the town hall is an indoor auditorium with tall curtained windows and a high ceiling. A semi circle of raised chairs sits at one end of the room, designed to hold a considerable number of occupants. The other end of the room features a wide stage with a wooden podium emblazoned with the coat of arms of the CPSU, implying this area was perhaps once used to hold meetings. A large projector screen hanging precariously halfway in front of the stage curtains alludes to its other purpose - as a movie theater.

Through a small hallway at the back of the auditorium, one can reach a short stairwell leading to a projection booth. Inside is an antiquated film projector, and a surprisingly large storage room replete with dozens of film canisters.

The remainder of the village consists of an arrangement of boardwalks, a small playground, and the town square between the dormitories. The square may once have been maintained but now is unkempt and overgrown with short arctic grass. A lifesize granite statue of Vladimir Lenin stands proudly atop a dias of stone, with the word Ле́нин etched onto it.

A few paths from the dormitories look to have been lit by ground-hugging lamps whose concrete receptacles remain in place; they all lead to The Armory. This particular building looks designed to be easily defensible with heavy steel doors, imposing looking concrete walls that curve into the ground like a bunker. The single entrance is through a thick steel door, built to withstand attempts at forced entry. Unfortunately, the locking mechanism seems to have been melted through, and no longer functions to keep the door shut.

While this was no doubt built as a redoubt for a war never fought, it seems to have been primarily used by the villagers to store supplies and stocks of firearms for fending off polar bears. The inside of the armory is poorly lit, and the thick walls create a conspicuously quiet atmosphere. Shelves of equipment line each of the rooms, with long-expired gas masks and rows of Red Army-issued cold weather gear, as well as row upon row of empty gun racks. Several stocks of standard issue Soviet rifle ammunition remain in wooden crates, though years of cold storage mean that their reliability is somewhat in question.