A former resident of the town nearest the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear explosion revisits her hometown after 25 years.
PRYPYAT, Ukraine – On April 26, 1986, I was a baby living in the city of Prypyat, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.
The next day, my mother and I were forced to evacuate the city following the explosion at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. At the time, the city had nearly 50,000 residents. Now it is a ghost town.
Now, 25 years later, I am 26 years old and I decided to revisit the town of my early childhood.
Although it is a place I don’t remember, the experience changed my life forever.
I returned not for pictures of broken dolls or abandoned schools.
I decided to revisit the town of my early childhood. Although it is a place I don’t remember, the experience changed my life forever.”
– Alina Rudya, a former Kyiv Post staff writer.
I didn’t take photos of Soviet relics, which are so popular with photographers and tourists from all over the world.
Nevertheless, when we drove into the jungle that once was the main street – named after Vladimir Lenin, of course – I was hit by a mysterious wave of nostalgia.
It was, I decided, nostalgia for the things that never happened to me here.
Lenin Street 17, apartment 24 would haunt me throughout life.
All apartments in Prypyat were burglarized and it is hard to imagine life in these empty walls. My flat was not an exception.
Alina Rudya’s father, Constantine
I found only pieces of broken furniture, old wallpaper (horrible flower design, by the way) and two kopecks on the windowsill left for me by my father in 2003, when he visited this place last.
Then I came across an old family picture on the floor.
The photograph is of me and my mom in this very room 25 years ago. It was one of my father’s favorites.”
– Alina Rudya, a former Kyiv Post staff writer.
The photograph is of me and my mom in this very room 25 years ago. It was one of my father’s favorites.
He even noted this fact on the roll of negatives, which I found in Kyiv. This is why he left it 10 years ago, hanging on the wall of what was once our living room – as a memory of happy times which these abandoned walls once saw.
This symbolic gesture is very meaningful, since my father, Constantine Rudya, dedicated his life to Chornobyl, working as a scientific director at the International Chornobyl Center.
He spent a lot of time in Chornobyl, collaborating with scientists from Germany, France, the United States and Japan. He was exposed to the radiation frequently, revisiting the sarcophagus of the fourth block on a regular basis. He died of cancer in February 2006.
A photograph of baby Alina Rudya, who is now 26, with her mother Marina. (Alina Rudya)
Before then, I never thought about the Chornobyl accident as a pivotal moment for my family. When I was little, being evacuated didn’t mean much to me.
All it meant was free food in school and trips to Germany as a part of the Children of Chornobyl program, created to help families who suffered from the nuclear catastrophe.
When I was little, being evacuated didn’t mean much to me.”– Alina Rudya, a former Kyiv Post staff writer.
I liked travelling. I liked free food. I didn’t understand what it was all about.
But now, unfortunately, I do.
My father had a lot of Japanese friends, and I can only imagine how supportive he would be of them due to the current events at the Fukushima, the plant that suffered major damage from a March earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
In 1986, my father was barely 28 years old and worked as an operator on the second block of the Chornobyl power plant. He worked there also on the night of the accident and 1.5 years after the catastrophe.
I found old films from Prypyat, dated 1983-1986, in my father’s archive. He and his co-workers and friends were playing tennis, having fun on the beach of the Prypyat River, celebrating someone’s birthday in the dormitory.
Some of these people are also not alive anymore. All that is left are memories and old photographs.
The 30-kilometer exclusion zone is each year visited by many tourists and journalists. It has become an attraction, a destination for thrill seekers.”
– Alina Rudya, a former Kyiv Post staff writer.
The 30-kilometer exclusion zone is each year visited by many tourists and journalists. It has become an attraction, a destination for thrill seekers.
I try to imagine how life would be if the accident had never happened, although – as we know now – the plant’s design was so defective that the accident was destined to happen sooner or later, according to my father’s good friend, Alexey Breus, who was an operator on the fourth block of the plant and my father’s good friend.
So I try to imagine supermarkets, nightclubs and casinos on the streets of Prypyat. I try to visualize posters of political candidates, the ATMs, the Internet cafes.
The city of Prypyat existed no more than 16 years before the accident (it was built specifically for the workers of what supposed to be the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe). Now, being stuck in the 1980s, it remains a Soviet museum.
We are used to seeing nightmarish pictures of Chornobyl and Prypyat, with the post-apocalyptic hollows of broken windows and frightening remnants of the human presence in the form of toys, old books and broken beds.
But fright is not the impression of the exclusion zone that I received. The silent and mysterious beauty of the surrounding landscape is overwhelming.
There are wild forests full of animals, a beautiful sky and a calm river which flows silently through the territory. This scene will not change for centuries.
The broken windows and abandoned buildings did not scare me. Rather, I got the shivers thinking about what the lives of the 50,000 people who once lived here would be like.
The broken windows and abandoned buildings did not scare me. Rather, I got the shivers thinking about what the lives of the 50,000 people who once lived here would be like.
– Alina Rudya, a former Kyiv Post staff writer.
What would happen if, in 1986, nothing had gone wrong?
Would I have gone to a kindergarten and then local school?
Would I have kayaked with my dad on the rivers Uzh and Prypyat?
Would I have my graduation ball in the Energetic restaurant?
Would I have grown up a small-town girl, met my first love in Prypyat, got married and had two kids by the age of 26?
Would their grandfather still be alive?
I will never know.
Dedicated to my father, Constantine Rudya (March 25, 1958 – Feb. 8, 2006).
Alina Rudya is a former Kyiv Post staff writer.
