Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

But the Politburo task force in Moscow also requisitioned an additional 13,000 newly completed apartments in Kiev and other cities across Ukraine—snatching them from under the noses of families who had spent years on waiting lists—and handed the keys to evacuees from Pripyat. Specialists from the Chernobyl plant and their families were transferred to the remaining three Ukrainian nuclear stations in Konstantinovka, Zaporizhia and Rovno, where they were given new jobs and moved into brand-new flats. When they arrived, they were not all welcomed warmly by their colleagues, who saw no justice in having to give up their hard-won places in line to fellow nuclear specialists apparently chased out of their homes by the consequences of their own incompetence. In Kiev, several large apartment construction projects that had been due for completion by winter—and would have been ripe for requisition for the evacuees—mysteriously came to a halt. In the end, many of the former residents of Pripyat were found homes in the same sprawling complex of high-rise buildings in Troieshchyna, a remote and isolated suburb on the northeastern edge of the city. There, they were shunned by their new neighbors, who both resented the refugees and feared the invisible contagion of radioactivity. At school, other children were forbidden by their parents from sharing desks with pupils evacuated from Pripyat—and not without good reason. The radiation readings in the stairwells and hallways of the new apart...