Rusting cars line the streets. Toys, broken appliances, chipped crockery and faded Russian warnings about radiation litter the grounds outside empty apartment blocks. Windows are smashed, doors hang open and nature is reclaiming the concrete town.
Once nicknamed ‘Atomgrad,’ Pripyat was a symbol of Soviet faith in nuclear power. The city lay about 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the Chernobyl plant, which Soviet planners intended to expand to 12 reactors. Pripyat housed plant workers and their families. When Reactor 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, the town was only 16 years old. It consisted of 160 buildings with 13,500 apartments, 15 kindergartens and five schools.
Now the blocks stand derelict and overgrown. Volodymyr Vorobey, 58, leads a reporter through brush to the building where he grew up on Lesya Ukrainka Street, house 18A. He describes wide stairwells, heavy doors and broad corridors. The flat’s door hangs ajar. He lifts a discarded record and remembers the music his family played, the sneakers abandoned in a wardrobe when they were evacuated and a chair on the balcony where he once read by lamplight.
In the gloom, phone flashlights pick out shoes scattered in the corridor. A noticeboard with neighbors’ names is still in the entrance. Vorobey never saw most of those people again after the evacuation.
He was 18 in April 1986 and had been working as an electrician, laying cables to Reactor 4 the day before the blast. He said he did not hear an explosion. The next morning, with buses not running, he and a friend walked to the plant and saw the damaged structure. ‘It wasn’t smoke that hit us, but heat. It was like a river of heat rising into the sky,’ he recalls. Warned by a passing cyclist that it was dangerous, they returned home.
That evening his brother, who worked at the plant, told him about the accident and the evacuation that followed. They boarded an overcrowded train on April 26 expecting only a brief absence. From the carriage they could see the ruined reactor but did not yet comprehend the scale or permanence of what had happened.
Walking through the town center toward the Prometheus cinema where he used to go with friends, Vorobey points out fallen beams across the stage and faded portraits of Communist officials on the walls. Soviet iconography remains on rooftops and a metal slogan still proclaims: ‘The atom should be a worker, not a soldier.’ He says that belief shaped Soviet nuclear policy and that training at universities and the plant taught workers that a reactor explosion was inconceivable. People who understood the risks often stayed silent, he adds, because speaking out could jeopardize careers.
Vorobey suggests that a culture of obedience may have contributed to the catastrophe. He recalls that a similar accident at the Leningrad plant in 1975 was suppressed, reinforcing a pattern of secrecy.
A year after the disaster he was conscripted, later studied engineering and relocated to Slavutych, the new city built to replace Pripyat. He commuted to Chernobyl and rose from mechanic to foreman, eventually heading the thermal automation and metrology department for 11 years.
Chernobyl stopped producing electricity in 2000, but decommissioning work continues. On-site facilities now support safe removal of radioactive fuel and processing of waste. A protective arch known as the New Safe Confinement was placed over Reactor 4 and the hastily erected 1986 sarcophagus. In February 2025 that cover was reportedly damaged by a Russian drone strike and said to have lost its primary confinement capability.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, visitors could join guided tours into the exclusion zone and stand beneath Pripyat’s silent Ferris wheel, which never officially opened; its inauguration had been planned for May 1, 1986. Vorobey remembers being among students used as test riders, so the claim that ‘no one ever rode it’ is not true in his view.
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 Chernobyl altered his life, he notes that at 18 he had no fixed plans; afterward everything shifted as if a crowd suddenly turned and took a different path. He believes that, without Chernobyl, the course of Ukraine — and perhaps the wider world — might have been different.
This article was originally written in Ukrainian.