So I found myself in the back of a minibus from Kiev, Annett-less but not alone. I was joined by seven other tourists, two guides (only one ever said anything), and a driver (who almost never got out of the vehicle). When he did, he buffed said vehicle fastidiously, as if trying to make amends for where he had taken it.
Chernobyl is just 170 kilometres from Kiev, a journey along mostly empty roads. Exclusion zones do wonders for reducing road traffic. Door to door, you can go from the centre of bustling Kiev to the thirty-kilometre “exclusion zone” in just two-and-a-half hours. Although the accident is usually associated with the Ukraine, in many ways, Belarus suffered far worse: 20 percent of its land is still contaminated by fallout. Head north from the exclusion zone, instead of south, and it’s a lot more than two hours before you reach a metropolis like Kiev.
Ivan, our guide, turned round from the front seat. He was a short, bald man with electric blue eyes that flirted with menace. “Just a year ago we had to pretend people were scientists,” he said, his sentences delivered in a soft voice that shunned the word the, as is common for many native Russian speakers. “Now is okay, I think.” His hypnotic eyes darted from side to side in a manner that didn’t reassure. “If authorities ask, you scientists, okay?”
“Okay,” we mumbled.
I’ve never been good at science. In fact, my high school science teacher had said he thought I’d probably end up “working in McDonald’s all my life.” While that sounds like a harsh thing for a moulder of young minds to proclaim, I bear no grudges. As a practitioner of the scientific method, he was merely forming a logical conclusion from the data at his disposal. That data said that I didn’t know my neutrons from my neurons, my electrons from my electro. The only thing periodic was how often I handed in my homework. The ruse that I was a scientist would collapse under even the most cursory of questioning. I didn’t tell Ivan this. He was busy speaking Russian with his colleagues, free of the tyranny of the.
There was great excitement in the minibus as we approached the exclusion zone. I think we were all secretly imagining visiting the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant from The Simpsons—we’d don biohazard suits and hold glowing green bars with long metal pincers. At lunchtime we’d wander nearby forests teeming with three-eyed or two-headed animals. The minibus passed the first security checkpoint and a sign you didn’t have to be a scientist to understand: a large red triangle with a yellow-and-red radiation symbol within it.
Was this a good idea? Why go to a place so many had fled? Out of the window I saw a pack of wild dogs and two horses. Animal life was flourishing in our absence. At the next checkpoint, three men in Ukrainian-army uniforms stepped out of a brick hut and presented us with health and safety waivers to sign. We had to agree not to:
“Take any items outside the zone.”
“Drink water from wells, rivers, and other open-water sources.”
“Bring in/take out of the exclusion zone any animals (dogs, cats etc).”
On leaving, we’d have to “pass compulsory radiation control of clothes, foot wear, personal items.” The waiver further stated: “If contamination exceeds the established control levels, personal clothes, foot wear, and items are subject to decontamination.”
I gulped.
“It’s fine,” said Ivan. “You get more radiation on flight than today.”
Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? It was his business to bring gullible people like me here. They certainly don’t give out forms like this on Ryanair. Which is a surprise, actually. They could certainly make money offering a biohazard suit and BLT sandwich combo.
My pen hovered over the blank signature line. I looked up at the rest of the group members, who were waiting, having already handed their forms back. They didn’t seem conflicted. I scrawled my name, dated it, and passed it back to the bored-looking guard. He checked our passports and waved us back onto the minibus.
A hundred metres down the road, we passed the real welcome sign—a white brick structure with a blue Chernobyl written in Cyrillic. The word was topped with the atomic symbol, a picture of the reactor, and the Soviet hammer and sickle. We stopped and took turns photographing each other in front of it. There were some apples lying around the sign in various stages of decay.
“I dare you five hundred euros to eat one,” said Paul, a fellow tourist. I picked it up and looked for any obvious flaws, hoping it might glow. Then I wrapped my lips around my teeth and pretended to sink them in.
“Wait!” he said, in alarm.
I laughed and dropped the apple back on the ground.
We began our tour at what has became the poster child of the disaster—Pripyat, that Soviet ghost town. Current population: zero. We pulled into what was once its town square. In the distance, more wild dogs scavenged.
The driver began buffing the front of the van with a cloth, his face just a few inches from it, whispering it sweet nothings. Ivan had us form a circle. “First, rules. No wandering off.” The group moaned. “Okay.” Ivan smirked. “A little wandering off okay. But not too deep into woods, okay?”
We liked Ivan already. He played fast and loose with our health and safety.
“That’s it? That’s all the rules?” a Polish woman asked.
“Yes. I think. Oh, don’t eat things.”
I scanned the others’ faces, looking for someone stupid enough.
“How long can we stay here?” A London stockbroker asked.
Ivan looked at the paved road we were standing on. “Here? Long time.” He got his bright-yellow Geiger counter out of his padded jacket. He showed us the reading: 0.4 μSv/h.
“Radiation here safe, see? Radiation not spread evenly. Some surface absorb it and you find much. Other places nearby, little. Here, paved road, little.” He turned around, pointing into the woods behind him, where four dogs were play-fighting. “There. Much. Come.”
He stepped off the road and into the brush. It didn’t seem like a very good idea. We did anyway. The Geiger counter began to click as we trampled over the leaves, moss, and mud that could better absorb that radioactive material. He held his meter up like a trophy to his adoring crowd. “Here is 8.1 μSv/h. See? Here we should not stay too long. One day only.” It was unclear why he’d taken all of us into the brush to prove this. Personally, I would have been willing to believe him from the surer footing provided by the asphalt.
“Ingesting just a tiny amount can be fatal,” he said, stomping back towards the road. I was learning so much. Not that it would be much use when I returned to my job at McDonald’s.
He led us through the ruins of a gym, a cinema, and, most iconic of all, Pripyat Middle School. The town’s structures still stood, but inside they were a mess of graffiti, broken glass, and signs of the looting that had gone on here over the years. In their cracks another battle was taking place between the human-made and the natural. Tree branches, weeds, and grass fought valiantly to reclaim spaces that used to belong to us. A sign warning of children crossing had been swallowed by overgrown foliage. No children crossed here anymore. Pripyat reminded me of the temples of Angkor Wat, Cambodia, where trees have so fused with the temples’ ruins that it’s hard to imagine that they weren’t always there, weren’t part of the architect’s original designs.
There was a heaviness to the silence. Other than the sound of glass and debris cracking under our feet, all was calm, still, defeated. Because the citizens of Pripyat had had such a short time to evacuate, much of their lives were still here on display, in stasis, waiting for their return. In a school classroom, bright-yellow Matematyka 3 workbooks lay atop wooden desks. The blackboard had remnants of a maths exercise scrawled upon it. Inside Matematyka 3 was a picture of children putting flowers around a portrait of Lenin. Before the accident, Chernobyl had been a big part of the propaganda of Soviet superiority. It was possible that this classroom scene had been staged; it felt a little too perfect. Some gas masks were suspended on ropes hanging from the ceiling. Others lay in a heap on the floor amongst dolls�
� heads and the shell of an old television set. Why would there be dolls’ heads here? And what had happened to their bodies and eyes? Also, why would you attach gas masks to the ceiling? You can’t see radiation.
Perhaps people had simply staged this space to make it as creepy as possible. That didn’t stop us from enthusiastically photographing it. Abandoned buildings, graffiti, gas masks, dolls’ heads with eyes removed: Chernobyl. These were the money shots. The reason people came here. For the name, story, myth, and legend. Not the less-photogenic reality.
Next, we paid a visit to the town’s former swimming pool. It was in a similarly dilapidated state, although it was actually used by the clean-up crews for recreation until ten years after the accident. There’s dispute about how many of the clean-up crew lost their lives. “Officially, death toll below one hundred,” said Ivan, with scepticism. “Unofficially, nearer million.”
You can’t get near to the reactor because of its still dangerously high radiation levels, so after the dolls’ heads and gas masks, the most important sight for the few visitors who do make it here is Pripyat’s amusement park. Coincidentally, the disaster occurred just before May Day. A celebration had been scheduled to take place, with rides and amusements set up to entertain the locals. Because of the accident, this celebration never took place. We found mildewed, faded, and ripped posters on doors and walls advertising the planned festivities. The bumper cars sat rusted to perfection, looking as if they’d crashed and skidded into retirement after having given humans thousands of hours of light, electric hedonism. In reality, they’d been turned on only very briefly, the morning after the accident, to calm and distract people while the authorities decided whether or not to evacuate them. There was just enough yellow and blue paint to imagine how they might have looked in their prime. Next to them stood an equally rusty Ferris wheel. Things aged quickly here, due to the radiation in the air. People had placed dolls and soft toys into the Ferris wheel’s yellow carriages to amp up the bleakness. I found it impossible not to imagine people on that carousel—excited children, proud parents, all circling up into the sky to get a view of the power plant where they worked, just a few kilometres away. Very few got to ride on it. Like the bumper cars, it was in use for only an hour or two, and those lucky enough to experience it ended up exposing themselves to yet more of the air’s toxicity.
On the way to the reactor we passed a few small settlements, clusters of five or six dilapidated-looking dwellings. “A few people have returned to live here,” said Ivan.
“What? Inside the exclusion zone!”
“Yes. Babushkas, mostly.”
“Do you think they’re brave or crazy?”
“Most just old. They want left alone. We help them when we can.”
We reached a good vantage point to view the sarcophagus covering the ruins of reactor #4. From this special viewing deck, some three-hundred metres away, we could get our all-important photographs. What we were seeing was still an active disaster zone, still had clean-up crews working on it each day to try to make it safe(r). While it’s estimated that 10 tons of radioactive material escaped, another 190 tons remained here under the sarcophagus, covered in some 5000 tons of sand, boron, dolomite, clay, and lead, much of it dropped from helicopters that circled briefly overhead, just long enough to throw out their contents. Many of these brave pilots died shortly afterwards from the radiation they were exposed to. In the beginning, robots were used for the clean-up work, operated from a safe distance, but even their circuits were fried by the radiation. So the authorities turned to us: bio-robots.
“People ran in, stay for one minute, ran out,” said Ivan.
“What could you do in one minute?” someone asked.
“Not much.” He smirked. “In the end, even one minute too much. Almost all people died.”
We could see the Ukrainian Government building an even bigger, thicker, new sarcophagus that was to be wheeled on top of the old one. “It’s largest moving structure on earth. Five metres thick. Thirty-one thousand tonnes. One and half billion euros. They say it finished in 2018.” Ivan chuckled. “We will see.”
Would it last until this area was safe again? Bearing in mind that the current one was showing its age after just thirty years, and the area wouldn’t be safe for almost three thousand, it seemed unlikely. But no one had a better idea. Nuclear really is the nuclear option. There’s no going back, no undo; its scars are permanent.
“This was supposed to be the world’s power station,” said Ivan, staring towards the ill-fated reactor. “They had plan to make it biggest.” He checked his Geiger counter. “We should only stay here fifteen minutes.”
We were back on the minibus in five.
For tourists, Chernobyl is not that rewarding. All the things you want to see, you can’t, because they’re too dangerous. Yet that danger doesn’t feel real, because it’s just a number on the screen of a Geiger counter. This makes you bolder than you should be. Our group trampled off the paths, climbed onto the roofs of the abandoned buildings, and fussed the stomachs and backs of the friendly dogs that sloped around us hoping for food.
An awful tragedy happened here, one that changed the world and its opinion of nuclear energy. That’s why it’s so important to keep the memory of Chernobyl alive. At Pompeii, we were the innocent victims of the natural world. With Chernobyl, the lesson is much starker. It speaks to the arrogance that we used to have, that many of us still have; the belief that we are somehow separate from and in control of the natural world.
“We knew, with certainty, with arrogant certainty, that we were in control of the power we were playing with,” said engineer Sergiy Parashy in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor. He’d been there that day. “We could make the forces of nature bend to our will. There was nothing we could not do. This was the day, of course, when we learned we were wrong.”
Arrogant certainty. I thought back to Andrea, the man I’d met in the bar in Istanbul. He wanted to know why a country became North Korea, Yemen, or Eritrea. After seeing Chernobyl, I thought this seemed like the best explanation. The wrong group gets too certain about themselves, their beliefs, and their rights. They pull society’s levers and inflict the repercussions upon everyone else. History is what happens when ego meets happenstance.
Seeing Chernobyl made me feel small, irrelevant, humble. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be arrogantly certain about anything. There are far worse things than being a Mitläufer. Of course I wanted to contribute in some way to Project Humanity, however small and inconsequential, but maybe that contribution would be best if it grew out of feelings of uncertainty, weakness, and insecurity. I no longer considered these character traits as flaws I needed to fix. They seemed in keeping with the unfathomably messy, tangled, complex world in which we live. It’s certainty we should be afraid of.
Chernobyl was a watershed moment in human hubris. The end of the rush to build bigger, better, bolder nuclear testaments to our own ego, majesty, and ideology. The disaster was large enough even to stop the beating heart of the Soviet Union. Five years after the tragedy of reactor #4, it too lay in ruins. A brutal regime, like so many before it. We could have learned something from its destruction and not rushed to simply cover over the damage and get busy repeating the same mistakes. Yet just thirty years later, Russia is back out from under its sarcophagus, marching once more through its former territories, reclaiming what it considers to be its own. Crimea has been annexed and people of the Ukraine are uneasy, expecting the rest of the country to be next. There are so many lessons to be learned at Chernobyl, and I’m not talking about those on offer in Matematyka 3. The question is whether anyone is paying attention.
I knew this wasn’t going to be a problem at my next destination. It was getting a lot of attention. I hoped it would be less depressing.
10
Liberland, Croatia/Serbia: “Hitler was also democratically elected. There is no virtue in democracy.”
Micronations, libertarians, cannabis sham
an, THE DRIVER!
It certainly wasn’t depressing, I decided, leaning against the front of the boat, looking out at the Danube, the sun warming my face. Seated behind me, in a similar state of excitement, wonder, and possibility, were five libertarians, a future diplomat to Liechtenstein, and a self-proclaimed cannabis shaman. We were going to the newest country in the world! To Liberland. Just a kilometre upstream.
The story of Liberland began one year earlier, in 2015, when Czech politician Vit Jedlička walked onto an abandoned piece of swampland on the shores of the Danube, the international border and waterway between Serbia and Croatia. Believing that a seven-square-kilometre piece of swampland there was terra nullius, available under international law, he placed a yellow flag into it and declared himself president of the Free Republic of Liberland.
A ridiculous story, right? You don’t just get to create your own country, surely? Yet away from the scrutiny and glare of popular culture, people are doing just that. Micronations, they’re usually called. Nations like Sealand (an oil rig off the coast of England), The Republic of New Atlantis (which was a bamboo-raft nation founded by Ernest Hemingway’s brother), and the Kingdom of North Sudan (created so that the founder’s seven-year-old daughter could become a princess. Disney has bought the movie rights). Much closer to my home (Wittenberg, to be precise) is Germany’s Königreich Deutschland. Its eccentric founder, Peter Fitzek, presented his Königreich Deutschland ID when arrested for driving without a licence. “The jurisdiction of the Federal Republic of Germany does not apply to other heads of state,” he claimed. It doesn’t really work like that, a judge of the German legal system informed him, by way of a three-month prison sentence. “You have built a fantasy world with a fanciful political worldview,” the judge said, making it sound like a bad thing.
Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places Page 15
