Chernobyl-2
THE ABANDONED MILITARY GHOST TOWN IN UKRAINE
Chernobyl-2 is an old Soviet town in Ukraine. It was home of the ‘Duga-1 Radar’. The military village is situated in the woods, about 10 kilometers south from Chernobyl and Pripyat. It used to be a top secret military site during the Soviet times.
Chernobyl-2 is the shadow of the small and quiet town of Chernobyl. As was customary in Soviet countries, all the secret military objects were named after the neighboring cities. Probably the military tried to confuse enemy intelligence this way.
They started to build a Duga radar station here in Chernobyl-2 in 1970. Duga-1 is one of the three Soviet ‘over the horizon’ radar stations. In this case, a system that was made for early detection of attacks by ballistic rockets. For this reason, the Duga systems were extremely powerful. This radar system was developed in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, during the Cold War.
Chernobyl-2 was a small city for families of the workers at the station. This garrison held about a thousand people. For this reason it had a small hospital, a school, kindergarten, hotel, several shops and a fire station. Life in this remote town was not boring for the families, the site had also theater, cinema, and many sport accommodations.
Chernobyl disaster
The city was evacuated in 1986 because of the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. At the end of 1987 the radar system was also partially shut down. Together with the final decision of closing the zone around the nuclear power plant, Chernobyl-2 was abandoned. I visited the town in 2014 and 2015. More reports on Chernobyl, are on my other website, www.chernobyl.one.
