Tania Kurdyavtseva and her four-year-old grandson Denis at their home in a crumbling building in Roza

The women looked like post-apocalyptic survivors as they trudged along an icy path. One pushed a cannibalised pushchair covered in planks on which she had balanced a few meagre provisions.

“This place is dying,” said Maria, 80, pausing to take a breath on the way home with two neighbours in Karabash, a town in the southern Urals region of Russia.

“They’ve closed the railway station, they’ve closed the sports centre. A lot of people have gone but we’re hanging on. Where would we go at our age?”

The air, poisoned by fumes swirling from a copper smelter, made breathing painful. Promises to relocate people from this blighted wasteland north of the border with Kazakhstan have been broken.

“I’ve got four children at home and they’re