The 1986 nuclear disaster blighted Ukraine and changed the world. Serhii Plokhy, who won the Baillie Gifford prize for his history of the tragedy, returns to the once sought-after Soviet town
‘These buildings are the tombstones of the dreams and lives that were lived here. It’s a huge cemetery of dreams, if not of people.” From the top of an old Soviet apartment block, Serhii Plokhy looks over Pripyat. “On the one hand it looks like a normal city; on the other hand you see windows without glass, streets without people and town squares taken over by forests.” Now the ghost town is used by the Ukrainian army for sniper practice and has also become a tourist attraction.
It’s a far cry from the Pripyat founded in 1970 to support the Soviet Union’s burgeoning nuclear industry. Then, the city had a population of 50,000 and supplied the construction workers and operators for the nearby Chernobyl plant, which opened in 1977. “The nuclear power plant was a major technological innovation at the time,” says Plokhy. “It was the way to go for the entire world, a symbol of the future of humankind.”
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