It is the last "ideal" city built by the USSR. Founded in 1986 to house those displaced by the Chernobyl disaster, the town of Slavutych, in northern Ukraine, now hosts hundreds of war survivors.
Built with all the equipment typical of Soviet town planning, Slavutych was to symbolize the effort of the entire USSR to confront the worst nuclear disaster in History.
After the disaster of April 26, 1986, hundreds of thousands of people living in contaminated areas in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were evacuated, forever.
The population of Pripyat, where the plant's employees and their families lived, was notably relocated to Slavutych.
“All residents over the age of 39 are internally displaced,” summarizes the mayor, Yuriy Fomitchev, 50, to AFP.
“Here, people have been through all this and they understand us,” confirms Olga, 50, who prefers not to give her last name.
This woman with a very soft voice, who lives with her elderly and disabled mother, has just received a brand new apartment.
Four years ago, Olga fled the town of Enegodar which hosts workers from another Ukrainian nuclear power plant: that of Zaporizhia, under Russian occupation since March 2022.
After living for a year and a half in the large city of Zaporizhia, still under Ukrainian control, and being housed by another family, Olga arrived in Slavoutych in 2024.
Currently, 1,265 war displaced people live there, Mykola Kalashnyk, head of the administration of the Kiev region, where Slavoutych is located, told AFP.
This is a tiny part of the 3.7 million internally displaced people in Ukraine, according to the UN, but their presence there is particularly symbolic.
- "Friendships of the peoples" -
At its birth, Slavutych was supposed to illustrate the communist ideal of "friendship of peoples" in a USSR then shaken by serious crises which ultimately led to its collapse in 1991.
Workers and architects from eight Soviet republics (Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Ukrainian and Russian) took part in its construction in record time.
It has the typical infrastructure of the Soviet urban utopia: a massive performance hall, several schools, a stadium, a hospital and blocks of residential buildings.
But after the breakup of the USSR and the end of electricity production at the Chernobyl power plant in 2000, many residents lost their jobs and left the city, leading to its decline.
Today it only has around 20,000 people although it could accommodate up to 50,000.
In recent years, several buildings in Slavutych were abandoned.
Until the full-scale Russian invasion.
End of March 2022, Slavutych f
Enjoying Mauritius News in English?
You've used 1 of your 5 free articles today. Subscribe for unlimited access plus a daily newsletter.
