YAKSHINA, Russia — Broken glass cracks beneath Alisa Gorshenina’s feet as she wanders through her old kindergarten.

Passing through the abandoned classrooms, she inspects and scavenges objects that might be useful for her art — broken toys, old posters, a large paper matryoshka nesting doll.

In the empty locker room, she tries to remember which of the compartments once belonged to her. “I think it had a fish on it,” Gorshenina, 25, says.

Then she sets up her camera, puts on a mask, and poses against the painted murals in the rooms filled with scattered trash.

Many other public buildings and homes are in ruins in the village of Yakshina, where Gorshenina spent the first six years of her life.

The scenes of neglect would not look out of place in the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone or Andrei Tarkovsky’s disturbing 1979 film, "Stalker."

Yakshina is one of Russia's dying villages. Around 20,000 are now entirely abandoned, according to official figures. Around 36,000 others have fewer than 10 residents each.

Years of economic and social malaise that have devastated Russia’s rural communities are to blame.