Picture the instruction. Pack for two or three days. Bring your documents, a change of clothes, enough food for the trip. Then the bus pulls away from your village and you never see the house again.

That was what residents of Pripyat were told after reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded on 26 April 1986. About 116,000 people were evacuated in 1986, and roughly 220,000 more were later relocated from contaminated areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

Weeks later, some of them started returning.

A quick note before going further: the research on the people who returned is mostly observational, and patterns seen across a small, aging, self-selected population cannot show that living in a contaminated area was safe.

Who came back, and why they walked home

The returnees have a name: samosely, or self-settlers. Roughly 1,200 returned to the exclusion zone in the first years after the evacuation, mostly without permission, heading for their old villages and gardens. They were largely older people who had been born and raised there and wanted to spend their remaining years at home.

The first returns came fast. Families from Cheremoshna and Nivetske reportedly came back on 21 June 1986, barely two months after the explosion. What pulled them was not necessarily ignorance of the risk. Home, for some people late in life, weighed more than a danger they could not see, smell, or feel. Holly Morris, director of the documentary The Babushkas of Chernobyl, put it simply: “In the end, home trumped radiation.”

From turning them back to leaving them alone

At first, authorities turned returnees around at checkpoints and removed some again. It did not hold. Older residents kept coming back, and enforcement gradually softened. Morris describes the attitude in blunt terms: officials would let old people return because they were expected to die soon but be happy at home.

The tolerance eventually became semi-official. In 2012, the local administration unofficially allowed elderly self-settlers to remain while ordering younger residents to leave. The old could see out their lives; the young were supposed to build theirs somewhere else.

Old, mostly women, mostly widows

The returnees were mostly over 50 when they came back, with almost half settling in Chernobyl town itself. Decades later, the survivors were overwhelmingly female: reporting in 2015 described almost all of those remaining as women, many of them widows in their seventies and eighties.

Part of why the count only falls is that almost nobody replaces those who die. This was never a community capable of renewing itself. It was an aging group living out the remainder of their lives in the place they had chosen.

Did staying actually cost them?

Claims that the self-settlers outlived evacuees have been repeated for years, usually tracing back to observations by journalist Alexander Anisimov rather than a controlled epidemiological study. 

More recent research is not a clean bill of health. A 2021 paper reviewing medical and dosimetric evidence reported that long-term residence in the exclusion zone affected the physical and mental health of self-settlers and was associated with atypical aging. The group was small, exposures varied sharply by location and diet, and there was no comparable randomized population against which to measure them.

International reviews of Chernobyl’s consequences found widespread psychological stress among affected populations, worsened by the disruption of social networks and traditional ways of life.

That does not mean the zone was safe. It means radiation risk and the damage of forced displacement can exist at the same time.

What remains now

The count has continued to fall. There were about 314 self-settlers in 2007 and around 130 in 2018. Recent estimates differ according to who is counted: reporting has ranged from roughly 25 to about 100.

The broad reason for the decline is less dramatic than the disaster that created the zone. The returnees were already old, almost no younger people joined them, and births were virtually nonexistent.

Radiation exposure cannot be dismissed as harmless, and individual causes of death cannot be inferred from the population count. But the community has mostly disappeared because an elderly population aged, died, and was not replaced.