But to men and women born in the sour hinterlands of the USSR’s factory cities, raised on the parched steppes of Kazakhstan, or among the penal colonies of Siberia, the new atomgrad was a true workers’ paradise. In home movies and snapshots, the citizens of Pripyat captured one another not as drab victims of the Socialist experiment but as carefree young people: kayaking, sailing, dancing, or posing in new outfits; their children playing on a great steel elephant or a brightly painted toy truck; cheerful optimists in the city of the future.
