Who was the first director of the power plant? Why did mainly young people with small children live in Pripyat? And how did the ... pool get there?
On the evening of March 6, 1986, when the revived Mikhail Gorbachev acted as the host of a reception at the Kremlin Palace for foreign guests of the congress - mostly representatives of communist parties who came to Moscow at the expense of the Soviet state - delegates left Moscow on planes, in trains and cars . Viktor Bryukhanov and other members of the Kiev delegation boarded the overnight train to the Ukrainian capital.
The next morning they were in Kiev, where they were greeted by party officials. There were hand and arm hugs and flowers for the female delegates - the next day, Saturday, March 8, it was International Women's Day, widely celebrated in the Soviet Union. A photo taken by a photojournalist at the Kiev main station on the morning of March 7 showed Briuchanov in a fur hat and sheepskin coat, surrounded by the remaining delegates; one of them was a woman holding a bouquet of carnations. Bryukhanov had to buy flowers for Valentina's wife, but the drive home would take more than two hours - the distance from Kiev to Pripyat was one hundred and fifty kilometers.
Viktor Bryukhanov - the first director of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
The driver of the company car picked him up at the station and they walked along Moskovskaya Avenue towards the PO2 highway. It led north of Kiev along the Dnieper Reservoir, which was built for the hydropower plant built there in the 1960s, then turned northeast towards the city of Ivankov, passing through birch groves, and near Chernobyl through an area of pine forests.
Bryukhanov first traveled on the Kyiv-Pripyat road by bus in the winter of 1970, when the city of Pripyat did not exist yet. He was young and full of enthusiasm. The appointment as director of a nuclear power plant at such a young age was quite an achievement, but for a while there was no plant. He had yet to build it - a power plant, his offices and a house for his family:his wife Valentina, their nine-year-old daughter Lilia, and one-year-old son Oleg. He rented a room in a run-down hotel in the small town of Chernobyl - in Russian Chernobyl - the name of which was to be given to the future power plant. He spread the papers on the bed and began analyzing preliminary versions of the construction plans and the contract for the construction of the first temporary buildings at the site chosen for the new industrial plant and the new city. Construction was to start next year.
The article is an excerpt from the book Chernobyl. The history of the nuclear catastrophe, which was published by Wydawnictwo Znak.
Meanwhile, the young Briuchanov family stayed in Słowiańsk, a city of one hundred and twenty-five thousand inhabitants in the Donetsk Coal Basin in eastern Ukraine, where he had previously worked. S Łoviansk was to become known in 2014 as the place where the Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict began and where the first people who participated in it died. The fights there were so fierce because Slavyansk was a local road and rail junction, as well as an important industrial center. That is why Bryukhanov landed there in 1966 - he worked in a power plant that generated electricity from burning local coal.
The first power plant he worked at was in Angren, near Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where he was born on December 1, 1935. He was the eldest of the children in a large working-class family that came to this city from Saratov on the Volga River. All he remembered from the years of World War II was that he was constantly hungry. At twenty-four, he graduated from the local Polytechnic Institute and went to work in nearby Angren. It was there that he met Walentyna, who also worked in the power plant; additionally, she studied in the evening at the local university. He was captivated by her eyes - as he later recalled, he felt that he could drown in them.
When Valentina first came across Wiktor's name in a local magazine, he was already making a name for himself as a competent and conscientious engineer. In just a year, he became head of his department, and Valentina thought, "God forbid I have such a surname" - it was either from the Russian word for "belly" or was simply in line with it. Soon, having met the man with this name, young, slim and energetic Wiktor, she was to forget about her fears. He won her heart by showering her with flowers as a sign of his love. Cars from the nearby Kuramińskie Mountains were bringing wild tulips, and Wiktor was bringing home enough of them to cover all the window sills with vases. A year later they got married and were very happy in Angren.
The end of life in the Bryukhanov tulip paradise came in the early morning of April 26, 1966, exactly twenty years before the Chernobyl disaster. On that Tuesday, a powerful earthquake destroyed almost the entire city center of Tashkent, Briukhanov's hometown, one hundred and twelve kilometers from Angren. More than two hundred and thirty office buildings and over seven hundred shops and cafes were either completely destroyed or rendered unusable. Somehow, only eight people died in the earthquake, but many were injured, and nearly three hundred thousand, almost a third of the city's population, woke up homeless. Among them were Wiktor's parents, whose brick house was badly damaged and was close to collapsing. It turned out to be too hard to bear for Valentina Briuchanova. What if another earthquake destroyed Angren like Tashkent? What would happen to them and their little daughter? She wanted them to move. Encouraged by his wife, Wiktor found out about jobs in power plants in other parts of the Soviet Union. It turned out that in Ukraine they are looking for people like him. The Briuchanovs packed their bags and drove to Słowiansk, where Wiktor was quickly promoted in the hierarchy to head of the turbines department, and then chief engineer of the power plant.
When the Briuchanovs arrived at the site, the Slavic power plant continued to expand. A new power unit - as Wiktor later recalled, the largest in the Soviet Union - was under construction. Bryukhanov took up the challenge and soon once again turned out to be a talented engineer and organizer. The commissioning phase of the new units was particularly challenging, but Bryukhanov dealt with the stress with ease, negotiating with construction crews who missed very important deadlines and complying with energy production standards at the same time. Bryukhanov, a hardworking, knowledgeable, and calm silent, seemed suited to such situations. Thanks to this, he was noticed in Kiev and in the spring of 1970 he was offered a job that required the qualities he showed in Slavyansk, but to a much greater extent. The authorities wanted to entrust him with the construction and management of the power plant, which was to be built near Chernobyl, away from the Uzbek and Ukrainian coal basins. This new power plant needed no coal. It was to use nuclear fuel instead.
It was not an easy decision for the young engineer. He asked his wife for advice. Valentina was afraid of this change: it was about a nuclear power plant, and Wiktor was a specialist in turbo-generators, completely unfamiliar with reactors and nuclear energy j. In Kiev, however, he was told that the power plant is a power plant. Moscow's superiors agreed. In a situation where nuclear energy was just emerging, there were few engineers who could build such power plants. Bryukhanov accepted the challenge. Before he became an expert on nuclear energy, however, he had to become an expert in construction - a difficult task and initially very thankless job. He regretted his choice at first, but later changed his mind. "I don't regret anything," he confessed to the reporter on his fiftieth birthday in December 1985.
He had even fewer reasons to regret anything in March 1986, when he returned from a party congress in Moscow and got into a service car at the Kiev train station to return to Pripyat. The Kyiv-Pripyat road was a narrow, very busy one-lane road. Both the nuclear power plant and the neighboring town were largely dependent on this route for supplies.
The driver carrying Briuchanov knew her almost by heart - his boss constantly shuttled between the two cities. Party dignitaries, ministers and heads of departments were in office in Kiev, and the director had to attend numerous meetings there. In addition, there were thousands, if not tens of thousands, of permits and other documents requiring signatures and stamps that could only be obtained in Kiev. After almost two hours driving through forested and still snow-covered areas, Briuchanov's car finally reached Chernobyl. On the left side there was a concrete structure with the name of the city and a monument to Vladimir Lenin. There was a central square in front of them, quite large for a city of no more than fourteen thousand.
Despite the construction of a nuclear power plant and the rapidly expanding city of Pripyat several kilometers to the north, Chernobyl managed to remain almost the same as it was ten, twenty or even thirty years before its name was given to the local power plant. Pripyat has become a symbol of the industrialized socialist tomorrow, while Chernobyl has remained a reflection of the rural pre-socialist past . In this city on the Pripyat River and in the port that once provided a livelihood for generations of its inhabitants, there were numerous buildings dating back to the revolution.
The settlement of Chernobyl was first mentioned in the Kiev chronicle in 1193 . It was situated in the hunting grounds of the Kiev princes, who ruled over a vast medieval state stretching from the Carpathians in the west to the Volga towns in the east. This chronicle did not explain the origins of the city's name, but scientists were finally to point to the abundance of mugwort, or Artemisia vulgaris, a shrub that is easily recognizable by the black or dark red color of the branches. The word czornyj means black in Ukrainian. T How Chernobyl or Chernobyl took its name from this shrub, which allowed future generations to associate the Chernobyl catastrophe with the biblical prophecy about a star called Wormwood.
In the Apocalypse of St. John says:
And the third angel blew his trumpet:and a great star, flaming like a torch, fell from heaven, and fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. And the name of the star is Wormwood. And a third of the waters became wormwood, and many people were stung by the waters because they had become bitter.
The mugwort after which the city of Chernobyl was named is not a shrub identical to the mugworm (Artemisia absinthium) mentioned in the Bible, but for many, including President Ronald Reagan, it was similar enough to conclude that the Chernobyl disaster was foretold in the Holy Scriptures.
Biblical prophecy aside, Chernobyl has remained in the center of the North Ukrainian wilderness almost throughout its history. From the mid-fourteenth century, the rule of the Kiev dukes over this region was replaced by the rule of the great Lithuanian dukes, and then the Polish kings. The Cossacks occupied this territory in the mid-17th century, but after a few years they had to give it back to the Poles. The city became the private property of local magnates. In general history, the memory of most of the rulers and inhabitants of Chernobyl has faded, with the exception of a young woman, Rozalia Lubomirska, the daughter of the city owner, who had the misfortune to find herself in Paris during the French Revolution. Maximilian Robespierre brought her to justice for her close ties to the royal family and for allegedly plotting against the revolution. In June 1794, she died under the guillotine in the capital of France. She was twenty-six. Her painting survived on a wall tile in her former Chernobyl palace, which was later converted into the neurology department of the local hospital.
The French Revolution led to the death of the world's most famous female inhabitant of Chernobyl, while the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 led to the liquidation of many of its rank and file . Nearly sixty percent of the town's ten thousand inhabitants were Orthodox Jews, invited there at the end of the 17th century by its Polish owners. Before the revolution, Chernobyl became known as one of the centers of Hasidism in Ukraine. The spiritual leaders of the Chernobyl Jews were rabbis from the Hasidic dynasty founded in the second half of the 18th century by Rabbi Menachem Nachum Tver, a student of Baal Shem Tov - the founder of Hasidism - who himself was one of the pioneers of this movement. Rabbi Tversky's book, Meor ejnajim (The Light of the Eyes), became a classic Hasidic text, and his sons and grandsons became rabbis in many cities of Ukraine.
Chernobyl rabbis were famous for collecting money for charity. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were many Jewish prayer houses in the city, a school for Jewish girls and a shelter. The Jews of Chernobyl suffered disproportionately during the revolution and the civil war that followed, not only by troops passing through the city, but also by gangs of marauders, whose members were often recruited by local warlords in Ukrainian and Belarusian villages in the area.
Quite a lot of local young Jews supported the Bolsheviks - a political and military force that turned out to be the most sympathetic towards the Jewish poor and offered them the shortest path to emancipation . One of the leaders of the revolutionary transformation, Stalin's right-hand man, Lazar Kaganovich, came from the Chernobyl region. In the mid-1920s, Kaganovich became the first secretary of the communist party in Ukraine and oversaw the policy of corrosion, that is, a return to the roots, which temporarily stopped the cultural Russification of the local population and fostered the development of Ukrainian and Jewish culture.
However, when Stalin's policy changed, the role Kaganowicz played in Ukraine also changed. In the early 1930s, he became one of the main perpetrators of the Holodomor, the Great Famine in Ukraine that killed nearly four million survivors of the revolution and the civil war, and the children they fathered in the following years. About a million people died in the Kiev region alone. In the home district of Kaganowicza, Chabnem, almost seventeen percent of the inhabitants died. Tens of thousands did not survive the famine and did not survive the famine of 1934 - probably in recognition of the loyalty of the son of this land, not to her, but to his boss in Moscow - of renaming Chabny to Kaganovichi-1, and the hamlet of Kabany, where in 1893 the party was born dignitary, at Kaganowicze-28.
Then came the atrocities of the Second World War. The Germans entered Chernobyl on August 25, 1941. Less than three months later, on November 19, the occupation authorities ordered the four hundred Jews who remained in the city to gather near the synagogue. Then they were taken to the area of the Jewish kolkhoz called Nowy Świat. There they were shot with machine guns in an anti-tank ditch, some of them helped to dig up on the orders of the Red Army commanders in a vain attempt to stop the Nazi invaders. It was almost the end of the Chernobyl Jewish community. When, in the winter of 1970, Bryuchanov rented a room in a hotel there, only 150 Jewish families lived in the city where Jews used to be a majority. One of the synagogues was transformed into the seat of the local military police station.
Chernobyl Jews who survived the Holocaust found refuge in partisan units located in the surrounding forests. Groups organized by communists, to which local Ukrainian and Belarusian peasants were recruited, were active in this region from the autumn of 1941. Gradually, however, the sluggish war between the communist-backed partisans and the police organized by the Germans (including local cadres) turned into a vendetta. The executions of the captured guerrillas and, when the scales of the war tipped over, the policemen took place in public, even more abusing the local population. The settling of accounts among the relatives of the people involved in this conflict was to continue long after the end of the war.
In the fall of 1943, the Red Army recaptured Chernobyl and its surroundings from the Germans after a long and bloody battle. The game was about the Chernobyl port on the Pripyat River, the city's center of economic activity, as well as bridges over the river and the nearby railway station. The Red Army suffered enormous casualties. It also lost ten of the bravest in its ranks - soldiers and officers awarded the highest state medal, the Golden Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union. The long-awaited liberation of the local population from the National Socialists brought more deaths and poverty. After the region was taken over by the Red Army, the men there were immediately called up and drafted into the army. Many of those who survived the occupation were thrown into combat without weapons, training, and even uniforms, so they were already dying on the outskirts of their towns and villages.
When Briuchanov's car was crossing the city limits, the director recognized a familiar figure on the right side of the road. It was a statue of a Soviet soldier commemorating the inhabitants of the village of Kopaczi, who died in the war, and the Red Army soldiers who died in the fights for this village in 1943. The list of the former was much longer. The soldiers who fell in the six-week battle for the city were buried in a place later called the Park of Glory. The Park Heroes' Avenue led to the obelisk with an eternal candle burning at its base. "War liberators from the working masses of the Chernobyl district, May 1977" - it was written on one of the monuments. Next to the inscription there are plates with the names of the generals of the Red Army and the names of the units they commanded in the battle for the city.
Over the years, Bryukhanov has participated in quite a number of commemorative ceremonies held at the Chernobyl Glory Park on May 9, the Soviet Victory Day. The cult of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviet-German conflict of 1941–1945 was called in Soviet jargon, commemorated only those who died wearing the uniform of the Red Army. The rest has been largely forgotten. There was no place for monuments to the victims of the Holocaust or the Holodomor . Both of these atrocities have been forgotten.
A few minutes later, Bryukhanov saw on the horizon the great white pipe of the Chernobyl cooling tower of the power plant. It was there, according to the official Soviet narrative, that the gloom of the past was receding:the miracle of technological progress was about to ensure a prosperous future for the country. To the right of the canal along which the car was traveling, the walls of the fifth power unit, still under construction, flanked by powerful, tall cranes appeared. Then the director saw the white walls of the active blocks:the third and fourth were housed in one large building; the first and second blocks were separated.
The site near the village of Kopachi was chosen for the construction of the power plant in December 1966 . The search for a suitable location began a year earlier, with a note from the deputy head of the Ukrainian government, Oleksandr Shcherban, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU). Shcherban, former vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and an early enthusiast of nuclear energy, criticized the lack of energy infrastructure in Ukraine, predicting a slowdown in the economic development of the republic if new sources of energy are not found soon.
Shcherban knew that two nuclear power plants were commissioned in Russia in 1964, and he was in favor of building three nuclear power plants in Ukraine:one in the south, one in the west, and a third near Kiev. He quickly gained the support of his superior, the head of the Ukrainian government, Volodymyr Szczerbycki, and the head of Szczerbycki, the first secretary of the KPU, Petr Szełest, who was also a member of the all-union Politburo. Szełest wrote to Moscow demanding that Szczerban's proposal be included in the national plans to build new nuclear power plants. In response, the government of the Soviet Union approved the construction of one nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Kyiv was not too disappointed with the reduction in the number of planned power plants:it was important that the republic would take advantage of the nuclear boom and obtain what was considered innovative technology at the time.
The article is an excerpt from the book Chernobyl. The story of a nuclear catastrophe, which was recently published by Wydawnictwo Znak.
In the fall of 1966, Volodymyr Szczerbycki issued a decree ordering the commencement of preparatory work for the construction of the facility, which was then called the "Central Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant". The commission established in Kiev in November of that year quickly concluded that there was no better place for its construction than the area near Kopachi. It was a fairly large settlement with over a thousand inhabitants, but sparsely populated areas were around it. Kopachi was far enough away from towns and cities, as well as from recreational areas - another site was rejected because it was too close to such an area. It was also located close to the Pripyat River, which was a necessary condition for the operation of the nuclear power plant, but it was not a swampy area. The proximity to the railway station turned out to be no less important - the railway line was built there in the first Soviet five-year period, and construction began under the rule of the land's son, Lazar Kaganowicz.
There were, admittedly, some problems with the proposed location. The groundwater level turned out to be too high and a lot of soil would have to be fertilized to provide the buildings with solid foundations. Kopachi was far from sources of supply of building materials, including aggregate and granite; only sand was available on site. Construction experts decided, however, that these problems could be solved. As the area was not very fertile, turning it into an industrial zone would have little impact on the agricultural economy. The future cooling pond - a reservoir needed for the proper functioning of the plant - was to occupy the largest part of the area intended for the construction of the power plant and the adjacent city, a total of over 1,400 hectares of pastures, one hundred and thirty hectares of forest, ninety-six hectares of arable land and fifty hectares of gardens cultivated by the local population.
Kopachi was voted the best of the sixteen locations considered by the commission. Two parts of the name of the power plant - "Central Ukrainian" - were finally changed to "Chernobyl". The "Center" has shifted to the north, towards the very border with Belarus. There is no indication that Belarusians have ever been consulted on this matter.
The construction of the power plant began under the watchful eye of Bryuchanov . In the summer of 1970, he moved his headquarters from a room rented in a hotel to an office with an area of less than six square meters in a mobile barrack for construction workers. From there, he commanded a growing group of engineers, looked after construction crews, and went to people holding high offices in Kiev and Moscow. Grigory Medvedev, who came to the Chernobyl power plant in the winter of 1971 to take the position of deputy chief engineer, had memories of the idyllic Chernobyl from the time when construction began:
A thin pine grove around and fragrant air like nowhere else. Sandy mounds overgrown with a dwarf forest, bald patches of pure yellow sand against a dark green moss background. There is no snow. Young grass warmed by the sun here and there. The silence and virginity of nature.
The silence did not last long. The 24/7 excavators quickly removed nearly seven hundred thousand cubic meters of soil for the foundations of the new power unit. In August 1972, Petro Nieporożny, the all-union minister of energy and electrification, visited the construction site to witness the first concrete foundations being poured. There were speeches and promises made, but the reactor took much longer than expected to be built and commissioned. The unit was supposed to operate in 1975, but there were difficulties with the supply of parts for the reactor and its instrumentation. In April 1975, when the original deadline was not met, Volodymyr Szczerbycki, who was promoted from the chairman of the republic's council of ministers to the position of first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, addressed Moscow directly. The situation finally started to change and the necessary equipment appeared. In August 1977, the first nuclear fuel was placed in the reactor core. In September, the reactor went into operation and was connected to the grid, and in December, Bryukhanov signed documents stating that the reactor was fully operational.
The city was booming before the catastrophe
Only then did he turn from the director responsible mainly for the construction of the power plant into the director responsible primarily for its operation. "1977 will go down in the history of Soviet nuclear energy as the year of the birth of an energy giant over Pripyat," he wrote with satisfaction in one of the leading Ukrainian newspapers at the end of the year. A new era has indeed begun . In December 1978, the second block was connected to the power grid. Three years later, in December 1981, the first kilowatt-hours of electricity was produced by block three, and block four did so in December 1983.
The December dates for completing the works and connecting the power units to the grid are no coincidence. The pressure to put the reactors into operation before the end of the calendar year was enormous - party leaders and ministerial officials wanted to include achievements in their annual reports, while construction crews and technical staff would not have received a substantial bonus if they had not completed their planned tasks by the end of the year. "Interestingly, until December 31, no one was allowed to speak out loud about the impossibility of starting energy production in a given year" - recalled Anatoly Dyatlov, a nuclear power engineer who came to Pripyat in 1972.
None of the power units has been put into operation on time. Upon his arrival, Dyatlov noticed a slogan above the entrance to the canteen, summoning construction workers and engineers to start the first reactor in 1975. After 1975 had passed and the reactor was down, "5" was changed to "6" and then to "7". Every year, a representative of the ministry came to Chernobyl and insisted on a new unrealistic deadline that could not be met, as everyone knew. "And at first there was a nervous atmosphere caused by the strong pressure on the implementation of the work schedule, which was impossible from the moment it was established," recalled Dyatlov. - Difficult work meetings and calls to work at night. Delays inevitably increased, vigilance waned, and normal work began. Until the next inspection. ”
Bryukhanov perfectly remembered the launch of each subsequent block. He often criticized construction crews. At a meeting of the party's city committee in Pripyat, he rebuked them, saying:“Incompetence in execution, that is, in factory workshops, is revealed on construction sites in the form of poor-quality parts and poor work. Let's take something as simple as determining angles. Crooked door and window openings, crooked trim pieces, plumbing pipes installed at the wrong angle ”. Bryukhanov was in a difficult position. It was he who had to sign documents confirming the satisfactory performance of the work. As for his bosses, they wanted to report on the implementation of the plans, and the construction workers wanted bonuses, but he was responsible for the good condition and safety of the power units. The problem was that the authorities were both the contractor and the recipient of the works. Dyrekcje elektrowni i budowy odpowiadały przed tymi samymi szefami w centralach partyjnych w Kijowie i Moskwie. Gdyby Briuchanow za bardzo narzekał na problemy z jakością prac wykonywanych przez dyrekcję budowy, z łatwością mógłby stracić posadę.
W końcu samochód wiozący Briuchanowa dojechał do Prypeci, miasta, które zbudowano na jego oczach i z jego czynnym udziałem. Czasem myślał, że ma już dość tego miejsca. Czuł się zmęczony i chciał spróbować czegoś innego. Zapytali go w Moskwie, czy byłby zainteresowany wyjazdem za granicę, na przykład po to, żeby pomóc w budowie elektrowni jądrowej na Kubie, gdzie sowieccy architekci i inżynierowie zaczęli w 1983 roku budować pierwszy reaktor jądrowy w tym kraju. Były to jednak chwile słabości. Briuchanow został w Prypeci.
Miasto znajdowało się zaledwie trzy i pół kilometra na północ od elektrowni. Droga z niej przechodziła w główną ulicę Prypeci, szeroką aleję Lenina, z drzewami i kwiatami zasadzonymi w pasie rozdzielającym szerokie jezdnie prowadzące do głównego placu miasta. Tam znajdował się główny gmach administracyjny, mieszczący siedzibę partii i magistrat, pałac kultury zwany „Energetykiem” oraz hotel o nazwie Polissia, czyli Polesie, nawiązującej do wielkiego obszaru rozciągającego się na terenie niemal całej północnej Ukrainy – od Dniepru na wschodzie po granicę z Polską na zachodzie. Ów plac znajdował się na przecięciu dwóch głównych alei miasta, jednej, nazwanej na cześć Lenina, i drugiej, prostopadłej, upamiętniającej twórcę sowieckiego programu jądrowego, Igora Kurczatowa. Na rogu tych dwóch ulic stał zwrócony frontem do placu prypecki Biały Dom, dziewięciokondygnacyjny budynek, w którym mieszkała miejscowa elita.
Mieszkanie Briuchanowa znajdowało się na trzecim piętrze. Było jego drugim lokum w Prypeci. Pierwsze mieściło się trochę dalej przy alei Lenina, w pierwszym budynku mieszkalnym, który zbudowano tam w 1971 roku. Żeby się do niego wprowadzić, musiał mieć wówczas zgodę sekretarza partii w Kijowie – tak trudno było o mieszkanie w tym mieście w pierwszych latach jego istnienia i tak bardzo partia dbała, żeby nie urazić klasy robotniczej, tworząc wrażenie, iż w rozdziale dóbr i przywilejów faworyzuje kadrę kierowniczą. Nowe miasto miało być urzeczywistnieniem zasad socjalizmu, nie było w nim przyzwolenia na prywatne dacze. Urbaniści przewidywali, że w 1975 roku pomieści ono blisko dwanaście tysięcy pracowników elektrowni i robotników budowlanych. Oczekiwano, że w roku 1980, gdy rozpoczną pracę bloki trzeci i czwarty, liczba mieszkańców wzrośnie do osiemnastu tysięcy; potem miała się zmniejszyć do nieco ponad siedemnastu tysięcy i pozostać na tym poziomie przez następnych pięć lat. W rzeczywistości Prypeć rozwijała się znacznie szybciej, osiągając w 1986 roku poziom niemal pięćdziesięciu tysięcy mieszkańców. Brak mieszkań nadal stanowił problem.
Przywódcy Komsomołu – Komunistycznego Związku Młodzieży – nadali miastu Prypeci i czarnobylskiej elektrowni jądrowej status komsomolskiego placu budowy, rekrutując do pracy młodych ludzi z całego Związku Sowieckiego. Większość tych, którzy przyjechali pracować w Prypeci, nie potrzebowała jednak specjalnej zachęty. Trudności z mieszkaniami w sowieckich miastach były powszechne, a w Prypeci budowano je szybciej i lepiej niż gdzie indziej. Jeśli chodziło o dostawy towarów konsumpcyjnych i produktów rolnych, miasto korzystało ze specjalnego statusu w kraju i republice, ponieważ energetyka jądrowa nadal była bardzo blisko związana z kompleksem militarno-przemysłowym obdarzonym szczególnymi przywilejami.
W połowie lat osiemdziesiątych w większości mniejszych i dużych miast Związku Sowieckiego kupno sera bądź kiełbasy stało się niemożliwe, ale w Prypeci te produkty były łatwo dostępne. Napisy w tamtejszym supermarkecie nie kłamały. Gorzej wyglądała sytuacja ze świeżym mięsem, którego braki często uzupełniano smalcem i kośćmi, ale z drugiej strony wokół miasta znajdowały się wsie, gdzie można było kupić mięso i mleko. Życie w Prypeci było stosunkowo dostatnie i wielu ludzi, zwłaszcza z pobliskich wsi, pragnęło się tam przeprowadzić. Znalazłszy się w tym mieście, często w roli robotników budowlanych, wszyscy chcieli pracować w elektrowni jądrowej, gdzie za wypełnianie i przekraczanie norm produkcyjnych można było otrzymać premie.
Większość osób przybywających do nowego miasta była młoda, stanu wolnego. Średni wiek mieszkańców Prypeci w 1986 roku wynosił dwadzieścia sześć lat. W mieście znajdowało się osiemnaście hoteli robotniczych dla singli, a większość mieszkań przeznaczano dla młodych rodzin. Nie dość że przeważająca część mieszkańców była młoda, to jeszcze ich dzieci, gdy już je mieli, były małe . W pięciu miejscowych szkołach podstawowych znajdowało się aż piętnaście klas równoległych, a w każdej uczyło się co najmniej trzydzieścioro dzieci. Natomiast w większości szkół wiejskich ledwie starczało uczniów do sformowania jednej klasy. W szkołach w innych miastach na ogół były najwyżej trzy równoległe klasy. Nic też nie wskazywało na spowolnienie tego trendu:w Prypeci co roku witano tysiąc noworodków.
W mieście znajdowały się dwa stadiony i dwa baseny pływackie, z których jeden nadawał się do rozgrywania zawodów międzynarodowych. Briuchanow był dumny z tego, co pomógł zbudować w Prypeci, denerwował go jednak fakt, że często musiał kierować fundusze elektrowni na projekty budowlane w mieście. Miasto było zarządzane oddzielnie przez kierownictwo partii i lokalne władze, ale ponieważ jego szkatuła często była pusta, podczas gdy elektrownia dysponowała ogromnym budżetem, miejscowe władze partyjne stale zabiegały u niego o dołożenie się do budowy nowych obiektów dla Prypeci. Briuchanow mógł powstrzymywać zapędy szefów miejskiego komitetu, nie mógł jednak odmówić funkcjonariuszom partyjnym na szczeblu regionu bądź republiki – przewyższali go w hierarchii partyjno-państwowej. Szczególnie namolny był pierwszy sekretarz komitetu w Kijowie, Hryhorij Rewenko, który w 1991 roku został szefem sztabu Gorbaczowa. W połowie lat osiemdziesiątych Rewenko przekonał Briuchanowa do budowy drugiego basenu, który miał spełniać standardy Światowej Federacji Pływackiej. Potem wystąpił z planem stworzenia lodowiska. Briuchanow się zjeżył:„Na całej Ukrainie nie było obiektu tej kategorii, a ja miałem go zbudować w swoim miasteczku?” – wspominał później. Mimo to przystał na tę propozycję.
Briuchanow zdawał sobie sprawę, że jego pracownicy potrzebują obiektów sportowych i będą z nich korzystać. To samo dotyczyło sklepów, jako że architekci zaplanowali tylko jeden supermarket. Miasto potrzebowało ich więcej i Briuchanow znajdował na nie pieniądze, od czasu do czasu wprowadzając w błąd banki – pożyczał fundusze na elektrownię i wydawał je na miejskie inwestycje. „Przywykliśmy do nieprawidłowości i zaczęliśmy je traktować niczym normę. Właśnie to jest takie okropne!” – skarżył się reporterowi kilka miesięcy przed moskiewskim zjazdem partii, nawiązując do konieczności zajmowania się problemami miasta, gdy jego czas i energia były potrzebne w elektrowni. „W tych kiepskich warunkach główną rzeczą jest zapewnienie niezawodności i bezpieczeństwa naszej pracy – powiedział, ciągnąc swoją litanię narzekań. – Cokolwiek się mówi, nie jesteśmy zwyczajnym przedsiębiorstwem. Nie daj Boże, żeby się nam przydarzył jakiś niefortunny wypadek – obawiam się, że nie tylko Ukraina, ale i cały Związek Sowiecki nie byłby w stanie poradzić sobie z taką katastrofą.
Na razie jednak dyrektor Briuchanow mógł zapomnieć o takich niepokojących myślach. Nareszcie był w domu. Czekał ich Międzynarodowy Dzień Kobiet, okazja, by złożyć życzenia żonie i spędzić czas z przyjaciółmi i kolegami. Córka nie mieszkała już w rodzinnym domu; wraz z mężem miała niebawem skończyć wydział medycyny w Kijowie. Briuchanowowie musieliby jej złożyć życzenia przez telefon, mieli jednak nadzieję, że niedługo będą gościli młodą parę w Prypeci. Córka spodziewała się dziecka i Briuchanow miał zostać dziadkiem. Ciężko pracował na wszystko, co osiągnął w życiu, ale musiał też przyznać, że życie źle się z nim nie obeszło. Wydawało się, że 1986 rok zaczął się szczególnie pomyślnie. Najpierw udział w zjeździe partii w Moskwie. Potem pogłoski, że ma otrzymać złoty medal Bohatera Pracy Socjalistycznej. Oznaczałoby to oczywiście konieczność przekroczenia norm produkcji energii, ale to nie była żadna nowość – przekraczał je już wcześniej .
Rankiem następnego dnia, 8 marca, główna gazeta regionalna opublikowała zdjęcie uśmiechniętego Briuchanowa w otoczeniu innych delegatów na zjazd po powrocie do Kijowa. Wyglądał na powściągliwego, może trochę zmęczonego, ale w zasadzie zadowolonego – jak człowiek panujący nad swoim losem i losem otaczających go ludzi.