A Soviet era propaganda installation depicting Vladimir Lenin is seen on a hill in the township of Kajy-Say, some 300 km east of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The population of the once bustling township has shrunk to about 2,500 from 15,000, its abandoned Soviet-built apartment houses gape with broken windows, and unemployed locals eke out a living by dismantling idle industrial buildings for construction materials. Paying no heed to radioactivity signs, some locals dig into uranium tailings, looking for machinery buried in Soviet times to extract non-ferrous metals which they sell as scrap. Words read "Forward to the victory of communism!". Reuters/Shamil Zhumatov