In 1986 we lived in Leningrad, about 700 miles north of the radioactive sore that burst on what should have been an ordinary spring night less than a week before the annual May Day celebration. I am just a curious ethnic hyphenate, Russian-born and largely American-raised. And that the adjective Soviet is essentially synonymous with collapse.Īnd what do I know? Nothing. So we climb on, higher into the honey-colored vernal light, even as it occurs to me that Katya is not a structural engineer. My guide, Katya, who is in her early 20s, has informed me that the administrators of the Exclusion Zone that encompasses Chernobyl do not want tourists entering the buildings of Pripyat for what appears to be an unimpeachable reason: Some of them could collapse.īut the roof of this apartment building on the edge of Pripyat, the city where Chernobyl's employees lived until the spring of 1986, will provide what Katya says is the best panorama of this Ukrainian Pompeii and the infamous nuclear power plant, 1.9 miles away, that 28 years ago this week rendered the surrounding landscape uninhabitable for at least the next 20,000 years. This is sturdy Soviet concrete, dusty as death, but solid. World Ukraine Chernobyl Tourism Construction