chapter nine in the autumn of 1985 the town of pripyat was largely unknown to the world at large ; even within the soviet union it was something of a non-entity : a few more knowledgeable types in moscow might nod their head in recognition of the word , might offer the opinion that it was the name of a fairly uninteresting tributary of the dneiper river , some might go as far as to say that it was a town not so very far distant from kiev , or that it was one of the more prosperous industrial areas in the still largely agricultural ukraine .