published in Eastern Economist #429, April 23, 2002
Some
90 km north of Kyiv lies the mouth of a river called the Prypiat. Weaving
gently northward, it meanders across southern Belarus, past the town of Mazyr.
After giving a bare little kiss to Pinsk, the Prypiat travels back southward
into Ukraine again. North of Kovel, it forks off westward and reaches its
source not far from the Polish border, at a small town called Zabuzhzhia or
beyond the mouth.
The
countryside the Prypiat wanders through is known as Polissia, the great
temperate forestland. Here, myriad edible mushrooms grow in all their glory
under tall leafy trees. Lush groundcover and sparkling sunbeams made this the
Ur-forest. Local farms once boasted healthy dairy cows, grass-munching goats
and yards full of clucking chickens.
Across
the region, this was considered the place for picking the best mushrooms,
varieties you could never find in a grocery store or even a market. Fresh as
the morning dew, tasty as a fairy tale, which is what many Ukrainians likened
the Prypiat area to.
“You
could almost imagine a little elf or a pretty fairy skipping out from behind a
tree at any moment,” says one elderly Ukrainian woman. “It was that beautiful,
that magical.”
The
inviting green landscape still looks like the perfect spot for a picnic. But
the trail of mostly deserted villages along the highway is the first sign that
it’s not. Then there’s the wired fence and the guards with machine guns
standing at the checkpoint.
Welcome
to Chornobyl.
Today
this area, starting where the Prypiat and Uzh rivers meet the Dnipro, is in the
restricted area known as the Chornobyl Zone. The 30-kilometer circle drawn
around the atomic energy plant that blew up on April 26, 1986.
“If
anyone still has a hankering to see the ‘real’ Soviet Union,” says Johannes
Andersen, a Danish writer living in Ukraine, “the Chornobyl Zone offers the
perfect encapsulation of that historical and political phenomenon.”
Clearly
many people do. Charter buses, taxis and private cars regularly bring
officials, scientists, journalists, and just plain curious folks to the Chornobyl
Atomic Energy Station and its surroundings.
You
can get more information about how to do this through your favorite journalist,
a local tour agency, or the Emergency Ministry. The cost for a rickety
soviet-era bus to take a group up is around US $30, although the ‘tour’ I went
on charged US $45 per person – without lunch. It depends somewhat on who
organizes it and how much you actually get to see.
Once
we get to the Chornobyl Center, we’re asked to don large cotton coveralls and a
white headcover. Our shoes are covered as well with disposable bags. We stash
our belongings in lockers for the duration of the tour.
In
contrast to the empty villages as we drove up, here, people walk around as if
this were any other normal industrial site. In preparation for an official
visit, squads of workers are repairing roads and fixing the landscaping.
The
slogan: SAFETY, EFFICIENCY, SOCIAL PROGRESS greets visitors in the plant’s main
entrance hall. In small letters below are listed the 300,000 ‘liquidators’ of
the accident. When we look at photos of the destroyed Nº4 reactor, we
understand what an impossible task it must have been, containing the
radioactive fire and cleaning up the hot debris in the first weeks after the
accident.
Our
group trails out onto a rail bridge over a cooling pond. The brownish water is
alive with carp spawning, females with fluorescent red pouches of roe on their
left sides. They swim almost in place facing our direction, possibly hoping
someone will feed them. Some already show the damage of mating frenzy, their
sides battered and torn.
Among
them drifts the occasional 2-meter long som with the flat mouth and whiskers of
a bottom-feeder. The bottom, of course, is where all the danger lies in this
water.
Our
next stop is the town of Prypiat. It was built in 1970 to house what was
considered the Soviet Union’s elite, the workers at the new atomic station at
Chornobyl. Today, its 16-story apartment towers stand empty and vandalized.
When we go inside we see that they are mostly 4-5 rooms with huge sunny windows
and balconies galore. It is eerie to see the detritus of so many lives still
there, dusty and still.
On
the town square, a yellow ferris wheel stands, probably just the way it was
left in 1986. Weeds have penetrated the concrete walks and roadways and
straggly grass grows among the young budding chestnut trees.
A
couple of kilometers beyond Prypiat, a “cemetery” of vehicles greets us: huge
floppy-eared helicopters, tanks, trucks, buses and cars. They’re all waiting in
tidy rows, like well-behaved children, for owners who will never reclaim them.
Their paint jobs are standing up well and no one seems to be touching the tires
or windows.
Once
we’re back in the Chornobyl Center, we’re told to wash our hands, strip off the
cotton clothes, and collect our belongings. We pass through a radiation
detector on the way out and get back on our bus.
In
the land of extremity, eating our late lunch is an almost giddily normal event.
•
–from the
notebooks of Pan. O
Recommended:
The Sky Unwashed, a novel by Chicagoan Irene Zabytko; Raspad, a film about
Chornobyl that toured the West in the early 1990s.
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