Pripyat Concepts

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

by Mark O'Connell · 13 Apr 2020 · 213pp · 70,742 words

similar scenes of dour young men—a touchingly earnest British rapper, some kind of American Christian metal outfit—lip-synching against the ruined spectacle of Pripyat. I wondered what, if anything, the tour company’s intention might have been in showing us all this content. Screening the documentary made sense, in

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music videos were much more unsettling to watch, because they laid bare the ease with which the Zone, and in particular the evacuated city of Pripyat, could be used, in fact exploited, as the setting for a kind of perverse adventurism, as a deep source of dramatic, and at the same

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Europe when one of them starts pressing the case—“You guys ever heard of Chernobyl? You heard of extreme tourism?”—for a day trip to Pripyat, where they are duly menaced, and lavishly murdered, by some apparently supernatural manifestation of the nuclear disaster. I was being confronted, I realized, with a

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her village. * * * — Strictly speaking, everything here is tightly controlled. Strictly speaking, visitors are forbidden from entering any of the buildings in the abandoned city of Pripyat—all of which are in variously advanced states of decay and structural peril, many clearly ready to collapse at any moment. Igor and Vika’s

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—up the stairways to the rooftops, into the former homes and workplaces and schoolrooms of the citizens of Pripyat—some other tour company would, and what people wanted more than anything in visiting Pripyat was to enter the intimate spaces of an abandoned world. One of the Swedish men who accounted for

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about a third of the group’s number asked whether any visitors to Pripyat had been seriously injured or killed while exploring the abandoned buildings. “Not yet,” said Igor, a reply more ominous than he may have intended. He

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had expanded rapidly over the last decade or so—according to Igor, there were thirty-six thousand visitors in 2016—boosted by popular entertainments using Pripyat as a postapocalyptic verité setting. Films like Chernobyl Diaries and A Good Day to Die Hard, television shows like the History Channel’s Life After

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trailer, the music videos. This was the city’s most recognizable landmark, its most readily legible symbol of decayed utopia. Our little group wandered around Pripyat’s fairground, taking in the cinematic vista of catastrophe: the Ferris wheel, the becalmed bumper cars overgrown with moss, the swingboats half-decayed by rust

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small areas within the fairground were dangerously high: the moss on the bumper cars, for example, was among the most toxic substances in all of Pripyat, having absorbed and retained more radiation than surrounding surfaces. So moss in general was to be avoided, as were all kinds of fungi, for their

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to be a general implicit agreement that nobody would appear in anyone else’s shots, due to a mutual interest in the photographic representation of Pripyat as a maximally desolate place, an impression that would inevitably be compromised by the presence of other tourists taking photos in the backgrounds of one

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whim, I opened up Instagram on my phone—the 3G coverage in the Zone had, against all expectation, been so far uniformly excellent—and entered “Pripyat” into the search box, and then scrolled through a cascading plenitude of aesthetically uniform photos of the Ferris wheel, the bumper cars, the swingboats, along

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and large, seemed to be this: I have been here, and I have felt the melancholy weight of this poisoned place. (#Chernobyl #amazing #melancholy #nucleardisaster) Pripyat presents the adventurous tourist with a spectacle of abandonment more vivid than anyplace on Earth, a fever-dream of a world gone void. To walk

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Prayer, the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of the disaster and its aftermath.) And this is why the images from my time in Pripyat that cling most insistently to my mind are the fragmented shards of technology, the rotted remnants of our own machine age. In what had once

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I was looking at now, had stopped, whereas the one at the pool I used was, presumably, still counting its seconds. It was another place, Pripyat, another time, and yet entirely recognizable as our own. It was a vast memento mori, a seventeenth-century Vanitas on the scale of a city

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undergrowth. “Viper,” said Igor, nodding in the direction of the fugitive snake. He pronounced it “wiper.” We were standing at the entrance to one of Pripyat’s many schools, a large tile-fronted building on the side of which was a beautiful mosaic of an anthropomorphic sun gazing down at a

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felt somehow obscene to walk on these pages, but there was no way to avoid it if you wanted to move forward. Every building in Pripyat had long ago been looted by so-called stalkers—people, usually teenagers and young men, who entered the Zone illegally in order to explore and

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the chaos of strewn objects we were met with inside these places was the result not of the disaster itself, but of its aftermath. In Pripyat, you were always stepping on something that had once meant something to a person long gone. Igor bent down to pick up a colorfully illustrated

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seemed to me to encapsulate perfectly the extent to which technological progress embedded within itself the prospect of catastrophe. And it occurred to me that Pripyat was a graveyard of progress, the final resting place of the future. In a large upstairs classroom, a dozen or so toddler-size chairs were

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who was standing here in this former classroom, feeling the warm breeze stirring the air through the empty window frames. What got to me about Pripyat was not its desolation, nor even the ever-present potential for radioactive toxicity, but rather the sense of the place as fitting neatly into a

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was the abandonment of the place, its very emptiness, that, paradoxically, exerted such a powerful attraction on me, and on people like me. * * * — Among ruins, Pripyat is a special case. It’s Venice in reverse: a fully interactive virtual rendering of a world to come. Its uncanniness arises out of the

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for exercise and entertainment, cultural centers, playgrounds. And all of it was powered by the alchemy of nuclear energy. The people who designed and built Pripyat believed themselves to be designing and building the future. This is a historical irony almost too painful to contemplate. As strange as it felt to

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houses and shops, trees sprouting through the cracked sidewalks, the road itself overgrown with grass. For some reason it had not occurred to me in Pripyat that the house I myself lived in was considerably older than any of the buildings I encountered there, older than the Soviet Union itself. And

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that the foundations of Pripyat’s ruins, in fact, were laid barely a decade before I was born. * * * — At the center of the Zone is Reactor Number 4. You don

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. In Ukrainian, and in other Slavonic languages, the word for wormwood is chernobyl. (The plant grows in lavish abundance along the banks of the River Pripyat.) This matter of linguistic curiosity is frequently raised in commentaries on the accident, its apocalyptic resonances. In one of the long monologues recorded by Alexievich

Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell · 22 May 2012 · 355pp · 106,952 words

to me onshore by a smiling weekend fisherman. It shows part of the Kiev Sea, a broad, placid reservoir that greets the confluence of the Pripyat and Dnieper Rivers. I’m almost certain we’ve already reached our destination. Here, somewhere among the dragonflies and lily pads, we have crossed a

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the way of an afternoon paddle. All you need is a rowboat and some way to get to Strakholissya, the town closest to where the Pripyat River flows out of the zone. You might not even need your own rowboat. In Strakholissya, after a picnic of strawberries and sandwiches, we met

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.” He looked at me for emphasis. He was still wearing his sunglasses. Turning back to the map, he continued. “From here we will go to Pripyat. This is deserted city. Then we can approach reactor to one hundred and fifty meters.” It was the standard itinerary, allowing visitors to inhabit their

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toward a replica of the reactor’s cooling tower. It was the firemen’s memorial. In the hours immediately following the explosion, the firemen of Pripyat had responded to the fire that still burned in the reactor building, and had kept it from spreading to the adjacent reactor. Unaware at first

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the damn thing on vibrate, but all I could manage was to get lost in its impenetrable Russian menus. When we took the turnoff for Pripyat, it began to freak out in earnest. The reading ascended quickly from 50 micros through the 60s and the 80s, and into the low 100s

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of paperwork out of the stack and tucked it into the waiting hand of the guard. The sign at the checkpoint read PRIPYAT. Even more than the reactor itself, Pripyat is the centerpiece of any day trip to the Exclusion Zone. Before 1986, it was a city of nearly fifty thousand people

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shop for the area’s nuclear energy needs. It didn’t take long for the residents of Pripyat to realize there had been an accident. Anyone looking south from the upper stories of Pripyat’s tall apartment buildings could have seen smoke belching from the maw of the destroyed reactor building some

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town. The evacuation was broadened over the following days to include more than a hundred thousand people. Ultimately, more than three hundred thousand were displaced. Pripyat sat empty. In the months and years following the evacuation, it was looted and vandalized by people who were obviously unconcerned by the radioactive nature

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of their spoils, whether televisions for their own use or metal items to be sold as scrap. The evacuation and the looting turned Pripyat into what it is today: the world’s most genuinely post-apocalyptic city. In spite of what you might have seen in the movies, though

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, things can actually be pretty nice after an apocalypse—if a bit scarce in terms of human beings. The road that led us into Pripyat from the south was lined with bushes speckled with small white blossoms, the air thick with the smell of flowers. The vista opened up as

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your workplace, your friends, your entire environment? I tried to imagine the terror of that day. But in the peace that reigned over present-day Pripyat, it was difficult. I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. The trees and grass rustled in the wind. Insects buzzed past

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. He later told me how, whenever he would visit his sister in Kiev, she would make him leave his boots outside. The amusement park is Pripyat’s iconic feature, an end-times Coney Island, with a broad paved area surrounded by rides and attractions that are slowly being overcome by rust

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toys we had seen just now, fossilized in dust. Nikolai picked us up on the street, the car appearing out of nowhere, and we left Pripyat in silence. The classroom lingered in my mind. I had come to the Exclusion Zone to witness its unexpected and riotous efflorescence, and there was

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into an unpeopled world. But it was a garden fed with suffering. Although the meltdown in Chernobyl was no death sentence for the people of Pripyat—and although most of the children who attended Kindergarten No. 7 are probably alive and well today—at the bare minimum it displaced and terrorized

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oasis in the world. It had been wrenched into existence, with violence. Something had created it. On the far side of the bridge out of Pripyat, we coasted to a stop. Dennis turned to me. “Perhaps you would like to take a picture,” he said. I was confused. Why here? But

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slope and onto a long, deserted bridge that spanned the river. This was the Pripyat River, which runs right past Pripyat and the Chernobyl reactor, and into which the cooling channel from the nuclear reactor drains. The Pripyat also empties into the Dnieper River, which runs through Kiev and is the backbone of

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Zone checkpoint at entry to, 14 dead zone, 19–20, 35 distribution of contamination, 17–18 itinerary through, 15 Kolachi (buried village), 20 Pripyat (deserted city), 22–28 Pripyat River, 32–33 reactor visitor center, 29–32 Red Forest, 21 as Zone of Alienation, 34 Fort McMurray, Canada CO2 emissions from, 60

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–20 checked after Chernobyl area visit, 39 after Chernobyl accident, 29 confusing measurements of, 8 in Kiev, 14, 18 at Kolachi, 20 in Pripyat, 24–25, 27 at Pripyat turnoff, 21 in the Red Forest, 21 standards for, 18 in town of Chernobyl, 18 Sad Coal Man, 224–25, 230, 239–240

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders

by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton · 19 Sep 2016 · 1,048pp · 187,324 words

be lucky enough to receive a rare tour. Andreevsky Spusk, 2-B, Kiev. The nearest subway station is Kontraktova Ploshcha. 50.450100 30.523400 Pripyat PRIPYAT, KIEV OBLAST Pripyat’s clocks all read 11:55. That’s the moment when, on April 26, 1986, the electricity was cut following a meltdown at the

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Chernobyl nuclear reactor. A day later, Pripyat residents received the following evacuation announcement: For the attention of the residents of Pripyat! The city council informs you that due to the accident at Chernobyl Power Station in the city of

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Pripyat, the radioactive conditions in the vicinity are deteriorating … Comrades, leaving your residences temporarily, please make sure you have turned the lights, electrical equipment, and water

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off, and shut the windows. Please keep calm and orderly in the process of this short-term evacuation. Today Pripyat is a city of abandoned buildings with paint peeling away from the walls, falling in flakes onto dusty shoes, toys, and Communist propaganda posters. Outside

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, but it is possible to tour the Chernobyl area. A government-issued day pass is obtainable in Kiev. It is deemed safe to walk around Pripyat for only a few hours at a time, and several precautions must be followed to avoid contamination. Visitors must be accompanied by a tour group

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reactor from a distance of 100 meters, and even talk to the few remaining residents of Pripyat who disobeyed orders after the blast and returned to their radiation-contaminated homes. In the 30 years since Pripyat was abandoned, plants and animals have begun to thrive despite the high levels of radioactivity. Tree

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has a much greater biodiversity than it did before the disaster. Guided tours are available and depart by bus from Kiev. 51.405556 30.056944 Pripyat’s creaky Ferris wheel has been still since the Chernobyl meltdown caused the town to be abandoned in 1986. Also in Ukraine Underwater Museum Crimea

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Lady of the Lake, 377 Largo do Boticáro, 395 Mississippi River Basin Hotel, 348 Nitrate Towns, 398 Oradour-sur-Glane, 31 Plain of Jars, 174 Pripyat, 98 Ruins of le Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale, 36 Ruins of St. Peters, 20 Ruins of the MV Plassey, 14 Sacred City of Caral-Supe

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, 70 Poveglia Island, 52 Prada Marfa, 305 Pratt Institute Engine Room, 359 Prehistoric Valley, 430 Prelinger Library, 287 President’s Room, 118 Presidio Modelo, 431 Pripyat, 98 Principality of Hutt River, 27 Principality Of Sealand, 27 Prison Cell of Ludger Sylbaris, 436 Pritzker Military Museum & Library, 320 Project Hailstone, 246–47

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era

by Craig Nelson · 25 Mar 2014 · 684pp · 188,584 words

, and the Dakotas, this territory was once a great sea, and dog-day temperatures can reach 113 degrees. In 1970, on the banks of the Pripyat River sixty miles north of Kiev, the Soviets began what was planned as Europe’s greatest nuclear energy generator—the V. I. Lenin Atomic Power

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reactors burning day and night, with two more under construction and two more being planned. At the same time, Moscow built a new concrete metropolis, Pripyat, home to fifty thousand. The town and its energy complex were all that communism was supposed to achieve: grand, spacious, powerful, yet at the same

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time gemütlich. Pripyat was notable for having no shortages: plenty of roses, shoes from Czechoslovakia, and enough energy from its plant to provide for itself as well as

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.” The air, ionized, glowed in a purple haze, radiance visible, evolving to a neon pink so vibrant and so vast that everyone in Chernobyl and Pripyat came out of their homes to watch. “I can still see the bright crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn’t

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crisis session, and by Saturday noon a fact-finding team of doctors, physicists, and government officials were flying to Kiev and being ZIL-limousined to Pripyat. The group report mentions “a white pillar several hundred meters high” of fire and smoke marked by “individual spots of deep crimson luminescence . . . of burning

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need to evacuate their homes for three days, and a ten-mile-long convoy—1,216 yellow school buses and 300 supply trucks—arrived in Pripyat from Kiev. Instead of three days, though, the residents were permanently exiled. The Nazis destroyed 619 Belarusian villages in World War II; Chernobyl emptied another

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than Chernobyl itself.” The evacuated, meanwhile, seem just as miserable as anyone remaining behind in Gomel. The town of Slavutych was built solely to replace Pripyat; the major form of litter on the roads outside its housing projects are empty vodka buckets; its central square is a black-marble memorial to

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the Zone of Alienation into a tourist attraction—visit the end of the world, circa 1986, for a mere $150 a day. The ghost city Pripyat includes Soviet apartment towers listing in torpor, peregrine falcons nesting in high-rise balconies, schools sprouting stalagmites of mold, the ruins of an amusement park

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theme in, 274–75, 310–11, 367 Pousson, Jens, 177 Power, Thomas, 288 pregnancy, effects of radiation on, 215, 271, 308, 324 Preuss, Paul, 4 Pripyat, Ukraine, 314, 316, 319–20, 321, 324, 325 Project Alsos, 185, 186, 187 Public Awareness of Nuclear Science, 369 Pulitzer, Elinor, 155 Putin, Vladimir, 54

The Gun

by C. J. Chivers · 12 Oct 2010 · 845pp · 197,050 words

learning the rudiments of marching, civil defense, and first aid.25 Even students from the most privileged families participated. The program could be seen in Pripyat, founded in 1970 to support the Nuclear Power Station in the Name of Vladimir I. Lenin, which had been constructed at Chernobyl. Its citizens were

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selected from accomplished families. Theirs was to be a model city, brick-and-mortar testimony to Soviet progress and the atom’s peaceful use. In Pripyat as elsewhere, the AKM was as surely a part of the curriculum as Lenin, Pushkin, and the periodic table. In one set of evaluations, held

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, was capable. He needed seventy-five seconds—and that was the slowest of all.26 Two weeks later, the dream of Pripyat came to ruin. Reactor No. 4 exploded, bombarding Pripyat with radiation. Families were evacuated in an apocalyptic panic while the Kremlin pretended all was well. The evacuees left behind a

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-16, and the AK-47 were seventy-one seconds, eighty seconds, and thirty-four seconds, respectively.27 At sixteen years of age, the schoolboys of Pripyat were quicker than American soldiers with their own service rifles.28 Assembly-disassembly times are not the most important measure of a rifle’s design

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. 17. 25. From “Programma Doprizyvnoi Podgotovki Yunoshei,” published by the Ministry of Defense of the Soviet Union. 26. “Protocol of Pre-Draft Youth Competitions of Pripyat School No. 1.” The handwritten ledger of student performance was found by the author in June 2005 in the gymnasium of the school. Translated by

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–69, 182, 185, 217, 219, 346, 357 in World War II, 182, 185 Prague, 220, 348 Prague Spring, 348 Pratt & Whitney, 66 Pravda, 237, 239 Pripyat, 359–60 propellants: ball powder and, 293–94, 297, 301, 303–4, 316, 326 smokeless, 74, 92, 122, 135, 196 Prussians, Prussia: in Franco-Prussian

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Marines whose rifles had gone silent. (Photos courtesy of Claude Elrod) THE TEENAGERS’ WEAPON The 1986 log book of preconscription training of Soviet students in Pripyat, the worker’s town beside the nuclear reactors at Chernobyl. The book was left behind after the power station exploded, bombarding

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Pripyat with radiation, and remained on the contaminated grounds in 2005. Results of the students’ timed drills with Kalashnikov assault rifles—part of the curriculum in

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

by James Mahaffey · 15 Feb 2015

Man and Lessons in Fuel Processing Chapter 8: The Military Almost Never Lost a Nuclear Weapon Chapter 9: The China Syndrome Plays in Harrisburg and Pripyat Chapter 10: Tragedy at Fukushima Daiichi Chapter 11: Caught in the Rickover Trap Image Gallery Bibliography Index Illustration Credits Acknowledgments AUTHOR’S NOTE A TRIUMPH

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rifle and 410 shotgun with a palm-squeeze trigger that can be pulled wearing heavy mittens.) Chapter 9 The China Syndrome Plays in Harrisburg and Pripyat “The most important man in a nuclear submarine? That would be the inconspicuous seaman who goes all around the sub and drips oil in the

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insufficient thought to what happens when a reactor runs away. Chernobyl is an ancient town in the Byelorussian-Ukrainian woodlands on the banks of the Pripyat River, where the land is a featureless steppe. It is at least 1,000 years old, and was most memorable for providing Prince Svyatoslav the

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, work began on a cluster of six RBMK-1000 reactors, built on a flat spot 11 miles northwest of the town. A new, modern village, Pripyat, rose up 1.9 miles west of the sprawling plant, just outside the safety zone. Its population grew quickly to 50,000 people. Most employment

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. The accident was still a state secret, and no alerts were issued to anyone who was not in the immediate area. The entire town of Pripyat had to be evacuated, population 50,000. Buses lined up for as far as the eye could see, and residents were told to bring just

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. “It will only be for a few days,” they lied, “so don’t pack up your belongings.” Everyone had to be relocated, never to see Pripyat again. In all, 135,000 people were evacuated from the area, and it had to be fenced off. The next morning, early on April 27

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. S., Soviet, and British Nuclear Weapon Incidents and Accidents, 1945-2008. Lexington, KY: Lulu.com, 2010. Chapter 9: The China Syndrome Plays in Harrisburg and Pripyat Gray, Mike and Rosen, Ira. The Warning: Accident at Three Mile Island. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982. Medvedev, Grigori. The Truth About Chernobyl

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plutonium fires, 237-248 Poole, Jerry, 34 Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC), 225 Powers, Francis Gary, 265-266, 278 Princess Project, 123 Pripyat, Ukraine, 361, 373 Proceedings of the Physical Medical Society, 6 Project 4.1, 79-80 Project Alberta, 38 Project Alberta: The Preparation of Atomic Bombs

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

by Jimmy Soni · 22 Feb 2022 · 505pp · 161,581 words

time. PART 1 SICILIAN DEFENSE 1 BUILDING BLOCKS The February 1986 issue of Soviet Life included the ten-page glossy spread: “Peace and Plenty in Pripyat.” Pripyat was, per the article, a cosmopolitan idyll. “Today the town is made up of people belonging to more than 30 different nationalities from all over

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pushing baby carriages stroll along unhurriedly.” If the town had any problems at all, it was only that it lacked sufficient space for new arrivals. “Pripyat is currently experiencing a baby boom,” the mayor observed. “We’ve built scores of day-care centers and nursery schools, and more are on the

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way, but they still can’t cope with the demand.” The demand was understandable, because Pripyat was home to a Soviet technological marvel: the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The plant was a significant employer, and, per the article, it provided good

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confidence and assuredness of officialdom. “The odds of a meltdown,” he boasted, “are one in 10,000 years.” Just months after Soviet Life gushed about Pripyat living, of course, the town was left a smoldering, radioactive ruin. At 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, the number 4 reactor at

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the Chernobyl nuclear power plant melted down, causing an explosion that ripped the building’s thousand-ton roof clean off. Soon, Pripyat’s skies pulsed with more than four hundred times the radioactive material dropped on Hiroshima. Maksymilian “Max” Rafailovych Levchin was ten years old, and he

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with James Hogan, December 14, 2020. PART 1: SICILIAN DEFENSE 1. Building Blocks “Peace and Plenty”… “one in 10,000 years”: “Peace and Plenty in Pripyat,” Soviet Life, February 1986 (Washington, DC: Embassy of the Soviet Union in the US, 1986), 8–13. “This notion of you can tell a machine

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe

by Norman Davies · 27 Sep 2011

. All the rivers above the divide, the Nyoman (Nieman) and Dvina and their tributaries, flow to the Baltic; all rivers below the divide, like the Pripyat′ and Berezina, flow south towards the Dniepr and the Black Sea. The country’s problems, patently severe, can best be summarized by four ‘I’s

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Indo-European origin. The territory was bounded in the north-west by the Baltic Sea, in the south by the vast marshland drained by the Pripyat′ – the Pripet Marshes – in the west by the Vistula basin and in the east by the watershed of the upper Volga. In ancient times, indeed

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of the Headwaters’ in north-west Rus′ without serious interference. It was subdivided into five dependent ‘lands’ – Polatsk (Polotsk), Smalensk (Smolensk), Turaў (Turov), on the Pripyat′, Chernigaў (Chernigov), which bordered Kiev, and Navahrudak (Novogrudok), which bordered Aukštota. At some point, it lost control of Smalensk, whose ruler emerged as an independent

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in their portfolio with Jan I’s third wife in 1523. Mir was received in grant. Ołyka, on the other hand, which lay beyond the Pripyat′ in Volhynia, was discarded, and eventually became the seat of the Czartoryskis. Yet, by the 1550s, when Mikołaj ‘the Black’ and Mikołaj ‘the Red’ were

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river transport were crowned in 1785 by the opening of canal systems linking both the Nieman and the Dniepr and, via the Royal Canal, the Pripyat′ and the Bug. The grand duchy was well placed to export corn, timber and potash. The improvers aimed to direct trade both to the Vistula

The World Without Us

by Alan Weisman · 5 Aug 2008 · 482pp · 106,041 words

, and lynx and wolves followed. Dikes have slowed radioactive water, but not stopped it from reaching the nearby Pripyat River and, farther downstream, Kiev’s drinking supply. A railroad bridge leading to Pripyat, the company town where 50,000 were evacuated—some not quickly enough to keep radioactive iodine from ruining their

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areas today in Europe, watching marsh hawks, black terns, wagtails, golden and white-tailed eagles, and rare black storks sail past dead cooling towers. In Pripyat, an unlovely cluster of concrete 1970s high-rises, returning poplars, purple asters, and lilacs have split the pavement and invaded buildings. Unused asphalt streets sport

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, 74 PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), 125–26, 156, 159, 267 and plant life, 29, 31 See also petrochemicals; plastics; soil Chernobyl (Russia), 214–16, 217, 267 Pripyat, 216 wildlife, 217–18 Zone of Alienation, 215, 218 Chesser, Ronald, 217 chicha, 1, 2–3 Chile Clovis people in, 60 chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), 45

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–46, 47–48, 50–51 and AIDS, 86–87 primates baboons, 87 chimpanzees, 45, 46–47, 47–48, 50–51 gorillas, 51 spider monkeys, 3 Pripyat (Russia), 216 Rackham, Oliver, 150–51 radio-transmission towers danger to birds, 193–94 radio waves, 274 radiation, 36, 202–3 birds, effect on, 214

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations

by Norman Davies · 30 Sep 2009 · 1,309pp · 300,991 words

. All the rivers above the divide, the Nyoman (Nieman) and Dvina and their tributaries, flow to the Baltic; all rivers below the divide, like the Pripyat’ and Berezina, flow south towards the Dniepr and the Black Sea. The country’s problems, patently severe, can best be summarized by four ‘I’s

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Indo-European origin. The territory was bounded in the north-west by the Baltic Sea, in the south by the vast marshland drained by the Pripyat’ – the Pripet Marshes – in the west by the Vistula basin and in the east by the watershed of the upper Volga. In ancient times, indeed

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of the Headwaters’ in north-west Rus’ without serious interference. It was subdivided into five dependent ‘lands’ – Polatsk (Polotsk), Smalensk (Smolensk), Turayˇ (Turov), on the Pripyat’, Chernigayˇ (Chernigov), which bordered Kiev, and Navahrudak (Novogrudok), which bordered Aukštota. At some point, it lost control of Smalensk, whose ruler emerged as an independent

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in their portfolio with Jan I’s third wife in 1523. Mir was received in grant. Ołyka, on the other hand, which lay beyond the Pripyat’ in Volhynia, was discarded, and eventually became the seat of the Czartoryskis. Yet, by the 1550s, when Mikołaj ‘the Black’ and Mikołaj ‘the Red’ were

…

river transport were crowned in 1785 by the opening of canal systems linking both the Nieman and the Dniepr and, via the Royal Canal, the Pripyat’ and the Bug. The grand duchy was well placed to export corn, timber and potash. The improvers aimed to direct trade both to the Vistula

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Lonely Planet Eastern Europe

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