Eight Pieces of Empire (38 page)

Except that we were deep in the heart of the “restricted zone,” the area around the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. The entire zone was evacuated after the accident—one hundred thousand residents hurriedly sent away to temporary shelters or to live with relatives and eventually given new, often shoddily built apartments in distant cities. So Nina was effectively an illegal, one of just four hundred defiant residents who had trickled back in recent years, their determination to stay and their ties to the land so deep that the authorities grudgingly acquiesced to their presence.

After all, it’s tough to argue with people hell-bent on living in a declared “radiation belt.”

Melnik is a Chernobyl icon. Irrepressive in her optimism, she preferred to talk about everything
but
the possible dangers of lingering radiation in the zone, from music to astrology. We sat in her home in the town of Chernobyl itself, drinking tea, just six miles from the now-shuttered plant covered by that giant concrete sarcophagus like a hastily erected tomb designed to prevent evil spirits, or in this case radiation, from leaking.

Everything about Melnik seemed in fact designed to project normalcy. Now around fifty, she lived alone on her street in the heart of the once-bustling town, the rest of the wooden-style Slavic houses gradually falling down, paint peeling, windows cracking, shingles falling off, beginning to lean to one side. Hers was immaculate, the floors buffed to a high gloss, the paint fresh. She talked about the other projects she was planning for the house and how the town was far from beyond repair, as if expecting an impending real estate boom in the deserted area.

She prided herself on running an organization that defended the rights of those who dared live inside the zone against warnings and official prohibitions.

It was not that Nina was a fatalist or had a death wish. She believed fervently that the emotional stress of the forced evacuation, even from areas not documented as dangerously contaminated—and the continuing prohibition from living in the zone—killed many more people than did the actual effects of radiation, which were also significant. And now she had been partially vindicated: A United Nations study in 2002 concluded that the emotional stress of resettlement, hypochondria, shattered communities, and unemployment killed or sickened many more people over the following years than the actual radiation, although it still remains to be seen what the long-term effects of the disaster will be.

Melnik exuded fearlessness about potential radiation poisoning, but also a beaming pride shared by the few residents who had trickled back to the zone.

“No one even thinks about radiation anymore,” she told me, as if I’d asked a silly question. “It’s gone out of our vocabulary.”

It was Nina Melnik, a local radio announcer, whose fate it had been to make a broadcast on that fateful April 1986 day at about one p.m., some thirty-six hours after the explosion in Chernobyl Reactor Number Four sent chunks of highly radioactive graphite shooting out of the core, resulting in a fireball and mushroom cloud nearly one thousand feet high into the air above the plant. An old-style RBMK (“High-Power Channel-Type”) Soviet reactor, Chernobyl lacked the basic disaster containment facilities that were obligatory in the West. Because of shortages,
inferior materials had sometimes been used in construction. Officials put on trial for approving the use of inferior construction materials said they had been forced to, told by higher-ups that if they did not approve their use, someone else would.

It was simple. Nina Melnik was handed a piece of paper to read over the airwaves, from a studio in the now completely abandoned town of Pripyat, less than a kilometer from the plant itself and the most contaminated area in the zone.

“Citizens of Pripyat,”
she had read.
“There has been an accident at our nuclear power station. Collect enough food and clothes for three days. Buses will be arriving at two p.m. to collect you.”

“My voice was shaking,” she told me. “I told people they would be coming back in a few days.”

It’s now been over a quarter of a century.

Scientists say people will someday be able to safely return to Pripyat, formerly home to fifty thousand people and just downwind of the plant, once the strontium-90 and cesium-137 and other radionuclides littering the soil break down enough to allow human habitation again—in an estimated thirty thousand years or so.

AS IS NOW
well established, Soviet officials, once they began to understand the gravity of the calamity, organized a herculean effort to evacuate a hundred thousand people. Yet they also took days to admit the seriousness of the meltdown at Chernobyl, as a radiation cloud spewed contamination over Belarus, other parts of Ukraine, and Europe. The Communist authorities even ordered the annual May Day parade to go ahead in nearby Kiev a few days after the disaster.

Like the fiasco in Afghanistan that showed the limits of Soviet military power, Chernobyl became the symbol of a closed system of secretiveness and the brushing-aside of safety concerns in the name of meeting arbitrary state-set targets. Chernobyl forced the government to be more candid. Both Afghanistan and Chernobyl were factors in hastening the USSR’s breakup. Indeed, one of the most lurid details of the accident was
that even while Reactor Number Four was spewing radiation all the way to Sweden, the authorities kept Reactors Number One and Two running for another day, fearing political repercussions caused by power outages.

As the reactor burned, some Pripyat residents stood on a bridge nearby, mesmerized by the glow of the bright orange flames, as if watching a fireworks display. Many of them would be dead or sick within weeks or months, victims of massive radiation poisoning that would literally peel off their skin.

THOSE WHO WANT
to visit the “exclusion zone” must make formal advance arrangements with the Ukrainian authorities. The road leading north from Kiev is deceivingly serene. Snow-covered forests dominate the drive, and we barely met another car. At the entrance to the “zone,” men with Geiger counters bent around cars coming out, checking every rocker panel, bumper, and tailpipe.

“Sometimes cars go off onto the shoulder or back roads, and they can kick up radiation,” said one. He was standing next to a sign with a symbol resembling those of the fallout shelters of my Cold War American youth.

I was met at the checkpoint by Rimma Kiselitsa, a curly-haired Chernobyl “guide” who worked fifteen-day shifts and spent the remaining fifteen of each month at her home outside the zone. “It’s forbidden to work here constantly because of the radiation risk,” she told me with obvious pride.

At the ten-kilometer circle drawn around the plant, we encountered a second, stricter checkpoint, where guards examined our papers like FBI officers checking for counterfeit currency. “This is the zone of strict control,” whispered Rimma. There was the odd falling-down building here and there, more Slavic-style wooden
izbushkas
, seemingly quickly abandoned, as if the owners had fled in the middle of the night like fugitives.

Our first stop was a special “information center” where workers who man the decommissioned plant are housed—along with the guides like
Rimma, who mostly handle scientists and researchers. Then we headed to meet Nina Melnik.

Part of Nina’s explanations about much of the zone being relatively safe soon became clearer. At the information center, Rimma had introduced me to a Ukrainian scientist brandishing a pointer and gesturing toward a map of Ukraine and Belarus. He pointed out that the original “exclusion zone” did not conform to the actual dispersion of radiation carried by winds in the days and weeks after the explosion.

“There are areas of central Ukraine where the radiation levels measured in the soil are far higher than some areas in the actual exclusion zone. The situation in southern Belarus is even worse,” he remarked, pointing to a map area highlighted in deep red.

In other words, the idea of the original exclusion zones, including the thirty-kilometer “zone of alienation,” had been more emotional than scientific constructs—clean, semiconcentric, and perhaps comforting politically, but having little to do with the actual spread of the radiation from Chernobyl. Years later, scientists redrew the zones to reflect that the area was affected unevenly and that closer proximity to the Chernobyl plant did not necessarily mean higher contamination.

Indeed—in some cases, authorities gave evacuees new housing in towns and areas that were later documented as being more contaminated than the official radiation zone around the plant.

WE LEFT FOR
Pripyat, the eerie, empty city once home to fifty thousand, just down the road from the reactor. There is none like it on earth; if a neutron bomb is ever detonated, Pripyat gives a good idea of what it would look like afterward.

Almost the entire Chernobyl community of workers, from control room engineers to workers in the reactor core to cleaners to bookkeepers, lived in Pripyat—a fairly typical Soviet-style town of high-rise prefabs, a central square, and the requisite Soviet House of Culture—until Nina Melnik’s announcement that the entire population had an hour to pack and get out.

A Ferris wheel stands in the center, finished so soon before the accident that it was never switched on. Rimma and our driver allowed me to wander around alone in the silence of the city. I walked up to the “new” cinema near the central square, as if still waiting for showings of the latest 1986 Hollywood knockoffs. I peeked into the local post office, where someone had rifled through piles of undelivered letters. Inexplicably, a dusty but glowing lightbulb hung from the ceiling, evidently never switched off or having burned out. There was not a single human being in the city, and a total silence prevailed.

“People are allowed to come back once a year to visit their old apartments, and it’s very emotional,” Nina said to me. She pointed out that scavengers had stripped out many of the appliances, even though they were likely contaminated with all manner of radiation. Thieves had even scavenged parts from cars that had been hastily buried in pits around the city after the disaster, stripping out everything from seats to engines to presumably contaminated wiring harnesses.

We visited the mini-museum at the power plant dedicated to the history of the calamity—a shrine to the heroes, from technicians to hundreds of firefighters—who fought the radiation fire after it broke out on the morning of April 26, 1986. Those at the plant during the explosion or others first on the scene were the first to die of radiation sickness.

“Why do you do this?” I asked Rimma, regarding her life choice as a Chernobyl guide. Her English and her intuition were so sharp that she probably could have landed work anywhere.

“I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world,” she said. “We are a tight community, and those who are here
want
to be here.”

WE DEPARTED THE
information center and picked up Nina Melnik at her pristine house. We set off again, this time for a village in the zone named Opachichi. We passed over rolling hills in the twilight, meeting not a single car, not a single pedestrian, not a single sign of life until we reached a house where dim light shone through the windows. There were chickens pecking about in the icy yard.

Ninety-year-old Anastasia Chikolovets and her eighty-nine-year-old husband, Kolya, met us at the door like long-lost friends. We entered a single room, where some soup was warming on an old stove, and the elderly couple began the ritual of taking care of a rare guest to the now practically abandoned village.

Anastasia asked me to help her, motioning toward a shed outside in the cold. We opened an enormous old steam trunk. Inside was a huge glass jug that looked as if it could hold ten to twenty gallons of liquid. It was Anastasia’s homemade moonshine, made from fermented leftover bread. I lifted the thing out of the steam trunk, and we laid it on the frozen ground, pouring the hooch into a smaller jug that we took back inside the house. I quipped about imbibing potentially radioactive moonshine, and both she and her husband laughed at me. “At our age, who cares about radiation?” Anastasia piped up happily. “It doesn’t matter. We’d rather die here on our own land, whatever the reason.”

She poured the bread moonshine into small shot glasses and the toasts began.

Anastasia recalled the recent history of Opachichi, where they had lived since 1946, seven years before the death of Stalin. Before “the accident,” as everyone called it, there had been twenty thousand people living here. Now there were twenty. No post office, no stores.

She talked endlessly, and joyously, of their decision to return from the antiseptic apartment they’d been given in another Ukrainian city after being forced to leave the “forbidden zone” around Chernobyl, despite the total lack of services and the abandoned aura of the place.

As she ruminated about their choice to live in practically complete isolation in Opachichi, Anastasia continued to pile the table with
salo
(cured Ukrainian pork fat), pickles, and fish.

“How do you know what’s safe to eat and what’s not?” I asked.

Anastasia ignored the question, but Rimma answered for her: Nothing was allowed to leave the exclusion zone, period. For the workers like her, everything was required to be shipped in from the outside—from bottled water to canned tuna to ice cream.

“The fish in the rivers here have all been studied. Certain types,
depending on their fat composition and physiological characteristics, don’t show any evidence of radionuclide accumulation,” she explained. “Others do. We know precisely which ones are safe and which are not. Berries and mushroom picking—that’s strictly forbidden.”

For me, it was surreal, watching humans adapt to the consequences of how their own technology had poisoned the land for generations. I tried to come up with a picture and ended up thinking of fish trying to discern which worms concealed a fisherman’s lethal hook and which were harmless.