Abandoned vehicles rot by the roadside. Children’s toys, broken appliances, crockery and faded Russian signs warning about radiation lie scattered outside empty apartment blocks. Windows are shattered and doors torn open.
Forty years ago Pripyat, nicknamed “Atomgrad,” was a showcase of Soviet nuclear ambition. The city stood about 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the Chernobyl power plant, which Soviet leaders planned to expand to 12 reactors. Pripyat housed the workers and their families.
When Reactor 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, Pripyat was only 16 years old. The town comprised 160 buildings with 13,500 apartments, 15 kindergartens and five schools.
‘We didn’t know what the consequences would be’
Now the buildings are derelict and overtaken by trees, shrubs and vines. Volodymyr Vorobey leads a reporter through the undergrowth to his former home.
Vorobey, 58, points out Lesya Ukrainka Street and house 18A, where he lived on the ground floor with his parents and older brother. The stairwell is wide, with large doors and broad corridors. The door to his old flat hangs open. Inside he picks up a record from the rubbish, recalling the music his family listened to and the sneakers he left behind in a wardrobe when they were evacuated.
On the balcony he points to a chair with a padded seat and remembers a lamp and the many books he read there. In the dim corridor, phone flashlights reveal shoes strewn about—“Those were mine. We were given those at vocational college,” he says.
A notice board listing neighbors’ names still hangs in the entrance. Vorobey never saw most of them again after evacuation.
He was 18 in April 1986 and worked as an electrician for a state company, laying cables to Reactor 4 the day before the explosion. He didn’t hear the blast. The next morning buses weren’t running, so he and a friend walked to the power plant and saw the ruined building. “It wasn’t smoke that hit us, but heat. It was like a river of heat rising into the sky,” he recalls. A cyclist warned them it was dangerous, so they went home.
That evening his brother, who worked at the plant, told him about the accident and evacuation. They left Pripyat on an overcrowded train on April 26, expecting to be away only a few days. From the train they could see the ruined reactor, but they did not yet grasp the long-term consequences or that they would never return.
‘The atom should be a worker, not a soldier’
Walking through Pripyat’s center to the Prometheus cinema—where Vorobey used to go with friends—fallen beams block the theater’s stage and faded portraits of Communist officials hang on the walls. Soviet symbols remain across the town: emblems of Soviet Ukraine adorn apartment roofs and a metal slogan proclaims, “The atom should be a worker, not a soldier.”
Vorobey says Soviet nuclear policy was built on that conviction. Training at universities and the plant emphasized that Soviet nuclear energy was the safest, and the idea of a reactor explosion seemed impossible. “We were told that a radiation accident wasn’t possible. Precautionary measures had been taken to cover every eventuality,” he says. As a result, most residents and plant workers knew little about the true dangers of radioactive contamination. Those who did know kept quiet—“a careless word could cost you your career,” Vorobey adds.
Was a culture of obedience partly to blame for the disaster? Vorobey suggests it might. He notes that a similar accident at the Leningrad plant in 1975 had been suppressed.
A year after the disaster he was conscripted, later studied engineering and moved to Slavutych, the purpose-built city that replaced Pripyat. He commuted to Chernobyl and rose from mechanic to foreman, leading the thermal automation and metrology department for 11 years.
Chernobyl has produced no electricity since 2000, but decommissioning work continues. Facilities on site now support safe removal of radioactive fuel and processing of waste. A protective structure—the New Safe Confinement—was installed over Reactor 4 and the hastily constructed 1986 sarcophagus. In February 2025 that cover was damaged by a Russian drone strike and is reported to have lost its primary confinement capability.
‘History might have taken a different course’
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, tourists could visit Pripyat’s Ferris wheel on guided tours of the exclusion zone. The wheel never officially opened; its inauguration had been planned for May 1, 1986. Vorobey says students, including himself, were used as test riders, so he knows the story that “no one ever went on it” isn’t true.
He still does not know what radiation dose he received in 1986. “You can apply for a certificate that tells you, but I don’t want it,” he says. Reflecting on how the disaster changed his life, he notes that at 18 he had no firm plans; afterward, “it was as if everyone was moving in one direction, only to suddenly turn around and go down a different path.” He believes that without Chernobyl, the history of Ukraine—and perhaps the world—might have followed a different trajectory.
This article was originally written in Ukrainian.
Edited by: Cathrin Schaer and Wesley Dockery