After the catastrophic accident in the nearby nuclear reactor, the city of Pripyat had to be completely evacuated. Some 50,000 people left their homes forever. DW visited the town with a former resident 40 years later.
https://p.dw.com/p/5ClwPThe ferris wheel in Prypiat became a global symbol of the Chernobyl disasterImage: Kyrylo Chubotin/Ukrinform/abaca/picture allianceAdvertisementAbandoned vehicles rot by the side of the road. Children's toys, the remnants of domestic appliances, crockery, and faded signs in Russian warning about the level of radioactivity lie scattered in front of the apartment blocks. The buildings are empty, the windows broken, the doors wrenched open.
Forty years ago, the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, also called "Atomgrad," was the pride of the Soviet nuclear energy industry. The future looked promising. Pripyat was just 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which the leadership of what was then the Soviet Union (USSR) planned to make the biggest of its kind. It would have a total of 12 reactors, and Pripyat was where the workers and their families would live.
When Reactor 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, the city had only existed for 16 years. Pripyat was made up of 160 buildings, with 13,500 apartments, 15 kindergartens, and five schools.
Forty years on, the buildings are derelict. Trees, shrubs and vines have taken over. Volodymyr Vorobey leads a DW reporter through the undergrowth.
"Here's Lesya Ukrainka Street, and our house, number 18A, where I lived on the ground floor with my parents and elder brother," the 58-year-old says. The stairwell is large, with big doors, wide stairs and corridors.
The door of Vorobey's former apartment stands open. He walks straight into his bedroom and picks up a record from the rubbish lying around on the floor. It reminds him of all the music his family used to listen to back then. He also remembers how much he missed the trendy new sneakers he forgot and left behind in a wardrobe when they were evacuated.
We go out onto the balcony. "That was my chair, with a padded foam seat. Here, there was a lamp … I read so many books here! We used to store preserves under this cover, it was very practical," says Vorobey.
In the dark apartment corridor, we switch on our cellphone flashlights. Vorobey spots some shoes, and says, "Those were mine. We were given those at vocational college."
A sign with all the neighbors' names still hangs in the entrance to the block. Vorobey doesn't know what happened to them after they were evacuated. He never saw any of them again.
Vorobey was 18 in April 1986. He was working as an electrician with a state company, and the day before the accident they were laying electric cables to Reactor Block 4. This was the reactor that exploded.
Vorobey didn't hear the explosion, and the following morning he tried to go to work as usual, but the buses didn't come. He and a friend walked to the power plant, and when they got there they saw the ruined building. "We didn't know then what had happened, or where exactly. It wasn't smoke that hit us, but heat. It was like a river of heat rising into the sky," Vorobey says. "A man rode by on a bike and told us it was dangerous to be here. So we went home."
It wasn't until evening that he heard from his brother, who worked at the power plant, about the accident and the imminent evacuation. "At first we thought it would just be a few days," Vorobey recalls. His family left Pripyat in the evening of April 26, on an overcrowded train. "From the train window we could see the ruined Reactor 4. We didn't think about it then; we didn't know what the consequences of this accident would be, or that we would never return home."
We walk through the center of Pripyat to the Prometheus movie theater. This is where Volodymyr Vorobey used to hang out with friends. Fallen beams block the entrance to the movie theater's main stage. On the wall of a room in front hang faded portraits of long-forgotten Communist Party bosses.
In the center of Pripyat, Soviet symbols are everywhere. Emblems of Soviet Ukraine still decorate the roofs of two apartment blocks, and on another huge metal letters spell out: "The atom should be a worker, not a soldier."
Vorobey says the whole of Soviet nuclear energy was predicated on this idea. In universities and institutes, in the training given to workers at the power plant – everyone was always told that the USSR's nuclear energy was the safest in the world. No one could ever imagine that a reactor might explode. "We were told that a radiation accident wasn't possible. Precautionary measures had been taken to cover every eventuality, and everything had been carefully calculated. It never even occurred to us that there could be an accident," says Vorobey.
This was also why the majority of the inhabitants of Pripyat and Chernobyl, including the power plant workers, knew nothing of the true dangers to health and the environment. They certainly didn't know about the extent of radioactive contamination, says Vorobey. "Anyone who did know anything passed on very little information. These were still Soviet times. A careless word could cost you your career."
Vorobey wonders whether the Chernobyl disaster might not have happened if the authoritarian Soviet leadership style had not also been in place in the nuclear industry. In addition, a similar accident in the Leningrad nuclear power plant in 1975 had been hushed up.
A year after the disaster, Vorobey was called up for military service. Later, he studied engineering and moved to Slavutych. This city was purpose-built to replace Pripyat. From there, he commuted to the Chernobyl power plant every day, and worked his way up from mechanic to foreman. He headed the department for thermal automation and metrology for 11 years.
No electricity has been produced in Chernobyl since the year 2000, but the work of decommissioning the power plant continues to this day. There are now facilities on the site to enable the safe removal of radioactive fuel and processing of radioactive waste. A new protective shield, the New Safe Confinement, was placed over the exploded Reactor 4 and the concrete "sarcophagus" hastily built to contain it in 1986. Barely six years after completion, this protective cover was damaged in a Russian drone strike in February 2025, and is now said to have lost its primary confinement capability.
Before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, tourists were able to visit Pripyat's Ferris wheel, familiar around the world as a symbol of the deserted city, on organized tours of the exclusion zone. It never came into operation, as the official opening was to be on May 1, 1986 – International Workers' Day. "Don't believe the story that no one ever went on it. Students from my vocational college, including me, were used as test subjects. So I've been on it," says Volodymyr Vorobey, smiling.
He admits that he still doesn't know what dose of radiation he was exposed to in 1986. "You can apply for a certificate that tells you, but I don't want it." How much did the nuclear disaster change his life? At 18, he says, he didn't yet have any particular plans. Now, though, looking back at the events 40 years on, it seems to him: "As if in those days everyone was moving in one direction, only to suddenly turn around and go down a different path." That's why, he says, "the history of the world, and Ukraine, might have taken a different course if the Chernobyl disaster hadn't happened."
This article was originally written in Ukrainian.
Edited by: Cathrin Schaer and Wesley Dockery
