Pripyat

Construction and growth

Pripyat was founded on 4 February 1970 and its first houses, without central heating, were built in 1972. It received city status in 1979 by a decree of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. Construction was proclaimed an All-Union shock construction project, and Young Communist League volunteers from across the USSR arrived to build it. The city was officially proclaimed a city in 1979 and had grown to a population of 49,360 before its evacuation on 27 April 1986. The last census before the evacuation, in November 1985, recorded 47,500 residents of 27 nationalities, with annual growth of over 1,500 people, about 800 of them newborns.

A model of the "peaceful atom"

The immediate reason for founding the city was the construction and operation of one of Europe's largest nuclear stations, Chernobyl, the city-forming enterprise that gave Pripyat the name of a city of atomic workers. It became the ninth atomograd in the Soviet Union. Access to Pripyat, unlike cities of military importance, was not restricted before the disaster, as the Soviet Union deemed nuclear power stations safer than other types of power plants, and the slogan "peaceful atom" was popular at the time. The original plan had been to build the plant only 25 km from Kyiv, but the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and other bodies objected that this was too close, and the station and the city were built at their current locations.

Chernobyl and evacuation

Pripyat was evacuated on 27 April 1986, the day after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The report on the evacuation was broadcast on local radio at 13:10 on 27 April 1986, 36 hours after the accident. Residents were carried out on 1,225 buses and 250 trucks by 17:00 the same day. The city of Slavutych, 50 km from the station, was built to house the plant's operating staff. This 36-hour delay is documented as an instance of the Soviet authorities minimizing information and delaying evacuation.

An abandoned city

Pripyat remains inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Administratively its territory was included in Ivankiv Raion and from 2020 has belonged to Vyshhorod Raion of Kyiv Oblast. Decontamination work after the accident reduced the radiation background considerably, and today the city is a kind of open-air museum, a destination for industrial tourism and research, though illegal visitors known as stalkers also enter it. On 24 February 2022, during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, fighting began at the plant and nearby settlements including Pripyat; on 31 March 2022 the city was returned to Ukrainian control.