Articles and other photos about the Hotel Polissya and White House aka City Hall:

Hotel “Polissya“, was built in the 1970s, for guests of the city of Pripyat. It is located in the very center of the city and is part of a complex of buildings, which includes the Energetik Palace of Culture, a department store, a restaurant, and more. From the roof, between the Готе́ль Полісся sign, you have a beautiful view over the city and surroundings. According to the project, on the last, 7th floor of the hotel, there should have been a cafe with a summer terrace and an observation platform over the city and the Chernobyl station. From where the beautiful panoramas opened, and visitors could admire the beauties of Pripyat from such a romantic place. But the cafe was never opened.

The true purpose of the hotel was the liquidation of the accident. Probably, it was destined so. In 1986, the hotel had a dosimetric post, and the military lived here. Hotel Polissya served as the information headquarters, coordinating the work of aviation services. It was on this roof, from where the fourth block was clearly visible, academics and the military leadership, helicopters were adjusted that dumped sand, clay, and lead into the flaming reactor. The sand was typed in the city, near the Pripyat pier, dug from the shores of the Yanovsky Zaton lake. Rumor has it that in 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev (party general secretary/president) stayed at the hotel, who came to check the progress of work in Chernobyl. After the liquidation of the accident, the building was abandoned.

The hotel building itself was not well preserved, sometimes there are furniture leftovers, you can find your own atmosphere here. For example, in one of the rooms on the second floor, a famous tree grows through the floor. Probably, the most famous view of the arms of the sixteen-story buildings opens from the summer terrace, which was never opened, now a birch is growing. According to the stories, over the years, a German comes here and takes pictures of this birch from the same angle. He photographs the process of life in the city of death. Now the Polissya hotel, like many other buildings in Pripyat, is in disrepair, therefore, an official ban on entry to the buildings is in force in the Chernobyl zone. We do not recommend entering buildings on your own and traveling through the Chernobyl exclusion zone only with an official guide.

On the building of the Polissya Hotel, famous graffiti is painted – “Shadows of Hiroshima“, which depict shadows from people burned during the outbreak of a nuclear explosion.

The hotel appears in one of the locations in the game “S.T.A.L.K.E.R” and “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare“, so fans of computer games will definitely recognize this place as one of the key locations of cult games.

City Hall

Pripyat City Hall housed a number of local and regional government organizations. It was the main administrative institution of Pripyat. After the Chernobyl disaster, the offices were home to several enterprises that dealt with the aftermath of the disaster.

Firstly the City Hall housed the city’s Executive Committee. The head of the Executive Committee, the Soviet equivalent of the mayor, was Vladimir Voloshko. But more importantly, there was also an office for the city committee of the CPSU, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Due to the one-party system, the status of a CPSU member was more important than the status of the city council. Also, the Komsomol city committee, or the Leninist Ukrainian Communist Youth League, had an office here. On the top floor of the City Hall, there was a department of the KGB.

After the Chernobyl disaster, the offices were not abandoned. It was used by State Enterprise Kompleks, or in Russian «Комлпекс». It was a specialized enterprise for radioactive waste management and decontamination. Before the accident, Kompleks was an ordinary concrete plant. But after April 1986 its purpose was to clean the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone from radioactive substances. The company also owns the parking of robots and robotic equipment that worked to eliminate the accident. They are so radioactive that decontamination is not possible.

Other organizations working in the old City Hall were ПО «Комбинат» and the scientific research-to-production facility НПО «Припять». They were meant to bridge the gap between design and production, to speed up results. The building is abandoned since 2001.

• chernobyl.one/pripyat-city-hall/
• chernobyl.one/hotel-polissya-pripyat/
• chernobyladventure.com/gostinica-polese-v-pripyati
• bcd-urbex.com/pripyat-then-and-now/