Mogilev is presented as both a city where the first news of the Chernobyl disaster arrives at a distance and a destination for people evacuated from Pripyat. In the testimonies, relocation does not end the disaster: the city offers a place to settle, but evacuees encounter suspicion there as well as the loss of home.

A distant warning

One speaker recalls that the first reports reached Mogilev without even naming the place where the accident had happened. The event seemed far away until the speaker’s brother came home from school and reported that children were being given pills. The ordinary rhythms of the city continued: on May 1, the speaker went out and returned late, finding the bedroom window blown open by the wind. That small detail acquired significance only in retrospect. Mogilev’s first appearance is thus marked by incomplete information: signs of danger entered daily life before residents understood what had occurred or what the reports meant.

A place of resettlement

For a family evacuated from Pripyat, Mogilev became the place where they tried to begin again. During the journey, their bus stopped overnight in a village, where evacuees slept on the floor of a school or a club. One woman offered the family a bed, concerned for their boy, but her friend pulled her away, warning that the newcomers were contaminated. The episode shows how fear could turn an offer of hospitality into rejection even before the family reached its new home.

After settling in Mogilev, the family enrolled their son in school. On his first day he returned in tears: a girl seated beside him refused to sit with him because she believed he was radioactive. He was in fourth grade and the only pupil from Chernobyl in his class; other children feared him and called him Shiny. The speaker describes his childhood as ending prematurely. Mogilev therefore appears not simply as a refuge from evacuation but as the setting where an imposed identity followed a child into the classroom.

Community and the evacuee label

The testimonies place private experiences of displacement alongside an institutional presence: Natalya Arsenyevna Roslova is identified as head of the Mogilev Women’s Committee for the Children of Chernobyl. The available account identifies her role but does not detail the committee’s activities in the city. Even so, the title records an organized local focus on affected children, while the family’s school experience shows the social distance those children could face in everyday life.

Across these accounts, Mogilev has two distinct functions. It is a familiar home from which one witness remembers hearing fragmentary news, and it is a receiving city where evacuees sought a new footing. The contrast between those positions makes clear that physical resettlement could not restore ordinary life by itself: uncertainty and the stigma attached to origin traveled with the displaced.