Chernobyl disaster: On the day of the world - changing explosion, animal shopping was held in the city, weddings and children playing

These buildings are the graves of the dreams and lives of the people who lived here. It's a big dream cemetery, if not people. From the top of an old Soviet apartment block, Serhii Plochy looks over Pripyat. “On one side looks like a normal city; on the other, you see windows without windows, streets without people and squares occupied by grass.” Now the ghost city is used by the Ukrainian Army for sniper exercises and has become a tourist attraction as well.

In the 1970 ' s, the city was home to 50,000 inhabitants, including Chernobyl's workers who were about to open in 1977. The powerful nuclear plant was a major technological innovation at the time,” said Plochy. “It was the way the whole world should go, symbol for mankind's future. ”

Workers flocked to Pripyat from all over the Soviet Union. Ukraine was a favoured country and the government had prioritized food and equipment for “nuclear cities”.

But, at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, an explosion at the fourth unit of the Chernobyll plant changed everything for the Pripyat people and the whole world. The explosion occurred because of a poor turbine test. In his book “Chernobyli: The history of Tragedy”, Plocky, describes since, first, authorities denied and blamed people for their mistakes in trying to cover up the disaster. Through research of memoraries and KGB documents, he shows that even though human error had been made, the root of the disaster was in the Soviet system.

Specifically, the authoritarian character of the communist party and the way it prioritized economic development to humanitarian and ecological concerns.

Plochy remembers the fear he had back then that radiation would contain the water. Now a history professor at Harvard, he was 29 years old and living in Ukraine. The city where I grew up was in Dnieper. The Pripyat River, from which the city was named, flows into the Dnieper. Nearly 30 million people depend on this river for water, and the main concern was no more water. “The flow of information led to a number of completely inconsistent solutions. His friends in Kiev had spread rumors that vodka would help fight radiation by holding parties where they would get drunk.

There are heroes and bad people in the book. The heroic attempt by firemen brought in to remove radioactive materials from the reactor roof. Many others received fatal doses of radiation in efforts to stop the fires distributed by other reactors. There were not only firefighters: Nearly 600 thousand people were recruited from throughout the Soviet Union to help limit the damage caused by the explosion of radiation emissions. Without such help, the results could have been catastrophic.

He adds: <x0).Authorities have done everything they can. The biggest problem was that they didn't speak that issue and they didn't release information about the world and their people, even to people in Pripya. ”

It recalls the evacuation scene of Pripyat residents a day and a half after the explosion. It was a weekend, the animal market was working two hours before the explosion, there were a few weddings in town, and the children were playing with flowers. After the KGB blast, it took full control of information between the city and the rest of the world. It was a secret ball. ”

For the then Soviet leader, he adds: “Chernobyli was not the best moment of Gorbachev. He took two weeks to address the nation for Chernobyl,”

Thirty years later Ukraine continues to have problems of the remains of radioactive.

“Chernobyli is important for the entire history of the Soviet Union,” has said Plokhy. Ukraine's “Vote of independence killed the Soviet Union. It was the second largest economy, the second largest republic. Perhaps it could have happened later in other circumstances, but you can't get Chernobyles out of history. ”