The derelict ferris wheel and children’s swings that starkly summed up tragedy of Chernobyl

It was one of the saddest things I have ever seen. An abandoned ferris wheel, children’s swings rocking back and forth in the wind, and bumper cars pointing every which way  waiting for squealing young occupants who would never come.

This was the amusement park at Pripyat on a bleak Ukrainian March day in 1990, four years after the Chernobyl disaster. The once model ‘atomgrad’ — nuclear city — built in 1970 to house the workers of the nuclear power plant and their families, had been the pride of the old Soviet empire and with good reason.

Almost 50,000 people lived in 13,400 apartments spread across 160 high-rise blocks. The children went to 15 junior and five secondary schools and there was a hospital, three clinics, 25 shops, cafes, three swimming pools and two sports stadia, a cultural centre and cinema.

But when I got there after a 60-mile drive from Kiev (in the days when it was still pronounced Kee-ev) it was deserted save for the poor buggers who worked on the remaining reactors and in the offices. To encourage them, martial music was playing through loudspeakers along with the day’s, no doubt riveting, proceedings from the Russian Duma.

I was reminded of this last week at the celebration for David Eliades when the brilliant Kim Willsher and I were hurtling down memory lane in an ancient Lada.

It was Kim who had first alerted the Express to the terrible aftermath of the disaster, particularly among children, most unborn at the time in their mothers’ wombs while the women breathed the poison of radioactive air for two full days before evacuation.

Tiny kids with leukaemia, malformed limbs, thyroid and respiratory problems and hospitals unable to cope. I decided to go for myself to see if we could set up an appeal. What I saw I will never forget: living rooms abandoned so quickly that uneaten food was still on the tables, and children’s dolls and teddy bears waiting unloved for their owners never to return.

On the sides of the apartment blocks were not murals but passages from Stalin’s speeches about the glorious rewards of hard work. Rewards like the total silence following the explosion when the old KGB went into overdrive by keeping the deadliest secret even from the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. When he was finally told, all of Pripyat was bussed out across Ukraine but even then it was 18 days before he broadcast to his vast nation the news of the full horror that had befallen Chernobyl.

In fact, it spelled an end to USSR: within three years the Berlin Wall came down and Gorbachev was making eyes at Margaret Thatcher. It didn’t last of course and now Pripyat, which was open to carefully managed guided tours in the early 21st century, is closed again, not because of radiation (still present) but thanks to the missiles and bombs of the evil Putin.

My visit in 1990 with Kim, and Askold Krushelnycky, then working for The European, and three medics from the BMA, was, in hindsight, risky. 

Though the remains of Reactor No 4 were encased in a vast concrete sarcophagus, radiation was very high and for our tour of the remaining reactors we were equipped with state of the art safety clothing: a donkey jacket, welly boots and a sort of mini fez. Afterwards the Geiger counter registered zero. Of course it did. It wasn’t switched on.

The result was a spread and several other pieces and I was amazed at the reaction they got. Thanks to Express readers and to the unlikely combination of Mohamed Fayed and Cliff Richard, who gave money, we raised more than £1 million, worth twice that in today’s values. I went back several times to see how it could best be spent and when I returned with a shopping list from three hospitals I took it to the leading cancer specialist at the Royal Marsden.

“Ah, I see they are asking for the Rolls-Royce of equipment, much better to make the money go further with these machines”, I was told. So back at Blackfriars I talked to our purchasing director, rather more used to buying newsprint, printing presses and computers. “Fancy a challenge?”  He certainly did and the result was critical equipment worth more than double the money we had thanks to generous suppliers in Japan and Germany.

There were countless stories of genuine heroism on the night the reactor blew its top; the hundreds of fire fighters who fought to save the rest of the plant and the doctors and nurses who treated them for burns. But though only three people were killed on the night, 28 more died within three months and countless others  – the figure will never be known – died of the effects of radiation over the following decade.

What I remember most is the families of children suffering in Kiev hospitals: they had very little yet insisted we sat down to spreads of home-cooked food. And the doctors who would sweep the floors as well as treating the kids, often spending their own money when everyday items like bandages, medicines and sterilising equipment ran out.

When I went to visit one hospital on a return trip I was shocked to see a brand new edifice, more modern than any in the UK; I almost asked the driver to turn back. How could this place need money?  

Announcing myself, I was greeted by the chief doctor, a cartoon of a large Soviet woman. Or so I thought. She produced breakfast of fruit and cakes and the inevitable sweet Russian Champanski (don’t bother, it’s vile), all paid for from her own purse. “You have a beautiful new hospital, but our funds are for the many dilapidated places in dire need”, I pointed out.

The evidence was in the tour she gave me: the money had run out, the hospital was finished but there was nothing left for equipment. It was a shiny new car with no engine.

That was the old Soviet Union for you. I should have known. On the journey to Chernobyl we spotted an abandoned tank left in a hedge. Why, I asked our translator. It had run out of fuel and there was no money to pay for more.

*****

NATURE NOTES

Attenborough, one month short of 100, has done it again. His latest series, Secret Garden, aired on Sunday on BBC1 and was better than anything from the wilds of the African bush or the deepest ocean. It showed the wildlife in an Oxfordshire's mill house garden, perched by a river on both sides and prone to flooding. There were otters, kinghfishers, tiny bank voles, hedgehogs, Doris the duck and her brood, heron and bats galore. And a menacing red kite overhead looking for lunch.

Our garden on the North Downs had rabbits, mice, squirrels, foxes, a friendly badger, frogs galore and the occasional roe deer with a taste for roses. And a bat which I chased around a bedroom with a swimming pool net, losing ignominiously. 

*****

AND FINALLY

We all know Donald Trump is terribly clever because he keeps telling us but just how many Stone Ages were there? Maybe there were several Bronze and Iron Ages too. The end of the Trump Ages cannot come too soon.   

ALAN FRAME

7 April 2026