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"The Visible and the Invisible in Chernobyl" Andriy Lubka
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We find the bones of lizards below the rocks of bygone ages,
In the cemeteries of our towns, one day they will find metal bones.

Bohdan Ihor Antonich (1909–1937), Ukrainian poet hailing from Lemkivshchyna

Entering the forbidden zone around the Chernobyl power plant, one feels, like it or not, like an archaeologist or even an alien from another planet who has arrived on Earth and, surprised, looks at the remnants of human civilisation. These relics are pitiful and horrible, abandoned cities are ugly, even nature has been destroyed and damaged by humankind. Yet the very experience of this culture shock is beyond doubt worth travelling to Chernobyl. Not in its capacity as a zone of radioactive contamination and horrible technogenic catastrophe, but as a museum of culture – communism, totalitarianism, and the 20th century, should we look at it in a more narrow perspective, and generally of human civilisation, if we were to tell the entire truth.

What surprises us first when we enter the Chernobyl zone by car from Kyiv is the road itself. Generally, roads in Ukraine are horrible; a normal surface can be found only in the governmental district of Kyiv and on the carriageway to Boryspil Airport, where the powers that be are frequently driven. So we explained the ideal condition of the first 21 km of the road by the fact that it leads to the residence of the deserted President Yanukovych, where the museum of Ukrainian corruption is currently being put in place. Yet lo and behold: we passed by the turn to the village of Novi Petrivtsi, where the former dictator used to spend his leisure, and the surface remains ideal up to the Zone itself. We later learnt that such quality asphalt exists thanks to the Japanese, the main investors of the sarcophagus around the former power unit, who frequently arrive here to conduct studies and inspections, and thanks to the absence of the Ukrainian locals; as they have been resettled from here, they don’t come this way. Our guide says bluntly: “if the locals had gone on living here, they would have stolen even the deadly radioactive walls of the reactor, not to mention the road.”

Pillaging and stealing

And indeed, despite the shocking scale of the catastrophe and the 30-kilometre forbidden zone, what exerts the greatest impression within the Zone is the vastness of human vice. The failure in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant occurred nearly 30 years ago. On 26 April 1986. Following the meltdown of the reactor, more than 300 Hiroshimas of radiation escaped into the environment. The communist authorities of the USSR initially tried everything to conceal the tragedy, and the traditional 1 May marches were held in the cities – including Kyiv with its population of three million at the time, situated no more than 150 km away from the epicentre of the explosion, and on the course of the winds blowing on that day. Instead of strict quarantine rules, closing the windows and avoiding fresh air, millions of people were driven away to the central squares of the cities. Walking in the first rows, under communist slogans, were children.

Yet already a few days later, once the whole world learned about the catastrophe, a decision was made to evacuate people from the 30-kilometre-wide zone around the power plant. Why it was 30 km nobody knows. The version prevalent among those who participated in the liquidation of damages says that the general who supervised it simply drew a circle on a map with compasses, and only later did it turn out that it was precisely this size. Whatever really happened, by 6 May, the authorities had moved more than 200,000 people from the Zone. More than 100 cities and villages were abandoned. Before evacuation the residents were forbidden to take away anything with the exception of documents and the most essential clothing.

I knew about this from books and documentary films, so I was greatly surprised when I made it to the Zone: there is hardly anything left in the abandoned buildings, homes, schools, shops, and factories. Looters, who were usually the liquidators themselves, stole everything. Electric wiring was taken off the poles because it is made of non-ferrous metals; all the movable objects made of metal were also taken away and sold as scrap. Not a single radiator was left in the flats of the abandoned city, not even on the 16th floor. Then they were sold in Kyiv, which experienced a construction boom after the fall of communism. Of course nobody told the buyers that the metal was radioactively contaminated. Similarly, all the plates, spoons, knives and the like were stolen from the flats, restaurants, and even from school canteens – and it’s probable that somebody is using them to this day, knowing nothing about the radiation. How many black flowers of cancer have blossomed in the people who warm themselves by these radiators, in their own homes, eat with these forks and drink from these mugs? And how many to this day look in admiration at a painting on the wall, never guessing that it previously hung on the wall of a Chernobyl resident, and therefore now radiates not with beauty but with deadly radioactivity.

So everything was taken out from the flats and sold; everything that the pillagers believed to have any value: household items, containers, clothing, washbasins, carpets, paintings, heaters, and armchairs and sofas. All that is left is the big destroyed pieces of furniture too cumbersome to transport and… books. Yes, books are what the thieves didn’t believe to be of any value, so to this day they lie on the window sills, bookcases, and the floors of school classrooms. Thus, the book again lost to the fork: is that not an accurate illustration of our times?

Communism reservation

What you certainly won’t see in the Zone is the radiation. It is invisible, and the nearly 200 old people who returned illegally and wilfully in the 1990s to live in the Zone doubt its existence altogether. Moreover, today you can come up to within a step of Unit Four, and the Geiger counter won’t start squealing. The ground surrounding the reactor was “stripped” repeatedly, and the asphalt was washed hundreds of times with a special preparation, so that now you can easily reach the place by car (you need your pass only for the security by the entrance to the Zone, and you apply for it a fortnight before your visit). Yet if you move just 2 metres away from the road or stand on the moss – the strongest devourer of radiation – its level of radiation will immediately exceed the norm by a factor of several dozen.

Due to the invisibility of the radiation, the forbidden zone is rather a reservation, not of the technogenic catastrophe but of communism and life in the 1980s. One gets the impression of having been transported by a time machine back to the Soviet Union. Because since 1986, no change has taken place here: the houses, the windows, and the infrastructure have remained Soviet. Not a single advertising banner or bright colours, everything’s grey and ugly – this is perhaps what an ideal communist city should look like. There is even a local church – an operating Orthodox church of the Moscow patriarchate. The inscription by the door reads in Russian: “Women! Before entering wipe off lipstick!” A number of times I approached the monuments and memorials in different locations in hope that I would finally find something devoted to the Chernobyl tragedy. But no: what I find everywhere is either monuments to the Heroes of the Soviet Union or things devoted to the crossing of the rivers and liberation from the hands of the Nazi occupant. The names of the streets – Lenin, Soviet. In the central square – a monument to Lenin. Time has stood still here since 26 April, 30 years ago. Everywhere on the buildings, the symbols of the already non-extant empire: hammers and sickles rust on the gates, on the anachronous “boards of glory” in the cities, in the “red corners” of schools and institutions of culture. The inscription on one of the high-rise residential blocks, set up in monumental letters, today raises no more than a wry, bitter smile: “Let the peaceful atom be a worker and not a soldier.”

The ghost city

I am haunted by thoughts about the true futility of futilities in Pripyat. It is a teenage city: after all, its construction did not start until 1974 for the personnel of the nuclear power plant. It was to be a model communist city, and this is what it has remained, although it must be emphasised that the model of socialist urban development is horrendous and abominable. The identical grey cubes of the buildings, chunky shops, nothing that catches the eye, and now deserted, it looks like a plaything or decoration. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Earth punished the Soviet Union with a nuclear catastrophe just for the fact that the communist empire destroyed the beautiful local landscape with this abhorrence of socialist realist monster.

Now it is a ghost city, as if from an apocalyptic movie. Trees grow in streets and squares, depopulated skyscrapers stand all around culture centres that exude emptiness, as do supermarkets, swimming pools, the funfair, and all the other elements of the city infrastructure. We walk there long, roam around the blocks, and peek into the schools and shops. Everything abandoned and destroyed. Initially it all seems interesting, and then inspires fear, until one gets accustomed and indifferent. After a few hours of wandering you stop being surprised that there are trees growing slap-bang in the middle of homes, and that foxes roam the main streets. The idea that such a fate could happen to any city – and that within a day it would be abandoned and orphaned – is discouraging. One will find that the memory hurts like an open wound: weren’t people born here, didn’t they love, hate, and die? And somebody else just took photographs of the area as illustrations of an urban anti-utopia.
The unquestioned champion among the photographed sites is the funfair in the very centre of Pripyat. The abandoned city that is slowly turning into a forest, and amid it the Ferris wheel, merry-go-rounds, dodgems, and long-withered wooden ponies that once gave children a happy childhood. Today they inspire with awe. The only guest, besides us, who walks the central square slowly and fearlessly, is a lean fox losing its hair, in whose eyes some kind of sadness glistens, as if the souls of all the people forcefully resettled from the area moved into that animal.

You always return to Earth

One of the greatest paradoxes which the forbidden realm surprises with is the fact that some resettled locals return from time to time to their homeland and to the cemeteries. That is, it’s clear that only a few percent return every year to the graves of their loved ones; according to our guide, no more than one in ten of the resettled, but a certain group can be distinguished among them. And the criterion here is not higher education, as one of our colleagues immediately guessed: better-educated and well-versed people were supposed to cherish memory and certain nostalgic moments in the past more. A similar failure was my hypothesis that it is the age limit that is important – the elderly who really lived here for a long time grew up, fell in love, buried their loved ones, and played at weddings, so they have more reasons to return even once a year, to remember and to ponder, while young ones have nothing to do here.

Our guide really surprised us when he said that those who return and come here are mostly people from the country. Irrespective of age or education. When we asked about the reasons, he – born in one of the villages nearby – answered: “it’s obvious. You cannot feel at home in a city, moreover, one that is so new, freshly built, grey and identical wherever you turn. What is possible within is only artificial life, that is, they assigned you a box, so you painted it, brought your things in, and you live in it, even though you could equally well live in a million other flats. It is an entirely different case in the country, where you built your house with your own hands, where for decades you picked out even the smallest stones from the garden, and planted flowers in the sunny corner of the backyard. There, everything is yours, precisely as if you grew roots there and you yourself sprang from there. And you can’t put down roots on the 16th floor; life’s too short for them to reach the Earth.”

Stalkers

Besides the resettled, the personnel of the forbidden zone, and ordinary visitors who come here out of curiosity, the Zone also attracts romantic spirits desiring danger, existential loneliness, and unorthodox landscape. They call themselves stalkers. When I asked for help and hints on my Facebook page before my trip, one of them wrote: “Man, don’t let yourself be fooled with these day excursions with guides and tour organisers. You should reach the Zone by night, only then will you feel it. You need to cross it illegally, and if you dare I can guide you and tell you everything. When you’re on your own, all the impressions become a million times sharper. Walking the abandoned villages inspires fear, because there are wolves, lynxes, and bears. You make a fire and spend the night in a forsaken cottage. You walk in the marshes of Polesia, and you risk staying forever in the mud. And in the morning you see how silver – silver, and not white or black – smoke rises above the water. This is radiation evaporating. Watch Tarkowski’s “Stalker” and you’ll understand everything.”

It sounds romantic, yet I lost my interest in such an idea once I read about the evaporating radiation. It is actually invisible, and only our imagination paints it into the landscape. And for the imagination to create such a picture and to send appropriate signals to the receptors, you don’t need a catastrophe, radiation, or a 30-kilometre zone. Still, Tarkowski shot his film in 1979, seven years before the catastrophe. Yet nobody then understood the warning: they limited themselves to the award in Cannes, no more. And even now, three decades after the tragedy, it is hard to argue that humanity has come to its senses and begun to protect the planet. There’s only one thing to rejoice in all that. In the vacant world, books will be left behind us. Everything else, crafty cleaners will have managed to grab and sell off.

Translated from the Polish by Piotr Krasnowolski

Andriy Lyubka – Ukrainian writer, poet, essayist and translator. His novel Carbide was published in English. He lives in Uzhgorod.
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