Eight Pieces of Empire

by Lawrence Scott Sheets

  The next day, a perfect sunny Sunday morning, I headed farther north to seek out my goal, the Ultas. About half of them live in the village of Val, a down-at-the-heels-looking hamlet, more Russian-style izbushkas, simple wood-frame houses. Pristine snow reached their rooftops. My taxi driver let me out of his car at eight a.m. Except for the incessant barking of dogs, there was not a soul stirring, and amid the silence, the crackling of my feet in the snow sounded like glass being smashed. I knew no one in Val and had no leads, save for the name of the head of a local reindeer collective that Limanzo had given me. Even then, I didn’t have his address. I knocked on the first door that I saw.

  A woman in a flowery robe opened it gradually, for some reason laughing that someone would knock on the door at eight a.m. on a Sunday morning in the middle of a subarctic, bone-chilling winter. She invited me in for tea. I declined, telling her I needed to find the reindeer herd man, Borisov. She made a motion to the left and then said turn right and then straight and to the left at the end of the road again. I got lost, and repeated this exercise at several other houses, until I finally found Alexander Borisov’s humble abode.

  I walked into the yard, which was guarded by a half-feral yapping dog. I knocked a few times. A scruffy-looking man, an acquaintance of Borisov’s, opened the door and invited me in.

  Borisov was still asleep, it turned out. There were the remnants of a birthday party from the previous night on a wooden table—nearly empty bottles of vodka and some half-eaten cake. Borisov had not been warned of my arrival. His friend roused him, and Borisov emerged, his hair tousled, eyes glued half shut, the remainder of his face inviting and warm. His first question was to ask me what the hell I was doing in Val on a Sunday morning. It seemed not too many outsiders visited.

  Before the advent of Soviet rule, the Ultas had for centuries lived on nomadic reindeer herding, passing the winter months grazing them, and trading their meat or deriving sustenance from it during the summer. But the freedom to move about at will ended with forced collectivization. The reindeer herding continued, but in a more regimented form.

  It was one of the ironies of the empire that although the Ultas were subject to collectivization (and the repression of their native language), state subsidies kept the reindeer business alive, even thriving.

  Before the Soviet breakup, there had been fifteen thousand head of reindeer tended by hundreds of herders. Now, Borisov said, there were just a few hundred head looked after by a mere fifteen men or so. On the day I visited, they were somewhere out in the frozen lands on snowmobiles, plying their trade, perhaps dozens, perhaps more than a hundred miles away.

  Borisov got dressed and started telling me about the post-Soviet fate of the collective. Our interview started with the obligatory morning shot of vodka.

  “We are a dying people,” he told me, without any sense of regret or overemphasis, as if speaking of an empirical inevitability. “Without reindeer herding, Ultas will cease being Ultas,” he said. When I asked about what his forebears had done for a living, he almost fell off his chair in laughter. “We are Ultas,” he said.

  I eyed a few reading items on a bookshelf. There was a magazine about race car driving, which Borisov was eager to talk about, although he conceded he’d never been close to a race car and the only road in the town was a dirt one. There was also an Ulta-Russian dictionary. I picked it up and started leafing through it. Borisov expressed the same sort of amusement that the Nivkhs had about my interest in their language. He gave me a few rough translations from Ulta into Russian. He conceded that only one thousand of the dictionaries had been printed—the work of a quixotic Russian linguist. Despite its rarity, Borisov insisted I take it as a gift—he had no real need for it, he insisted. That was clear—it looked as if it had never been cracked open. He signed it and eagerly put it into my hands.

  I had more questions about Ulta traditions, folklore, and the language of the Ultas. Borisov admitted he was no folklore expert. He was a reindeer collective boss, and his mission was to resurrect the trade. Then he directed me to a house nearby, where he said I’d find a woman who was the local expert on the Ulta language and folklore. He warmly escorted me to the door and insisted I return during the summer, when he said the wildflowers were in bloom, the berries would be ripe for picking, and the nights were long and full of partying.

  Borisov’s dog was a poodle compared to the one I encountered at the house of Elena Bibikova, which was so large and ferocious it looked like it had been feasting on reindeer carcasses 24/7.

  Bibikova, a slight woman with characteristic Asiatic features and a face etched with deep age lines, opened the door a crack. Without asking who I was, she invited me into her home, decorated with handmade curtains and dominated by the hiss of a natural gas heater. She explained that out of the people living in the village, only a dozen or so still spoke Ulta fluently, all of them elderly. She was the expert among them: the keeper of the language, so to speak.

  Bibikova was incredibly patient, as evidenced by her gentle methods of dealing with her husband, Vanya. By now it was ten a.m., and Vanya was already smashed on cheap vodka, a remedy for unemployment and resignation. He called the rotgut asetonka—acetone, or paint thinner, and just such an aroma filled the house. Vanya invited me to join him in a round of his paint-thinner stash, but I was already staggering from the chief reindeer herder’s toasts. I told Bibikova that I preferred some green tea.

  We finished our tea (Vanya declined, calling green tea “atrocious stuff”), and Elena said she needed to go to her sister’s house, across the street. She volunteered, with a bit of resignation, that “somebody has to take care of him [Vanya]. He has this mania—he doesn’t sleep at night—only in the mornings. So I turn the gas off at night. I had to visit a relative in another town a few weeks ago, and I called the house to check on him. Vanya didn’t answer.” She thought perhaps he’d burnt the place to the ground. When she returned the house was intact, but the door was open—Vanya had simply wandered off to a buddy’s house to find another bottle.

  “When they get up in the morning here, they think only about one thing: where to go and drink—nothing else,” said Bibikova. Again, it was the paradox of the Soviet system. Without the state subsidies that had kept the reindeer trade going—or at least made it dependent on the government—the Ultas’ way of life had been ravaged. In this unforgiving, monotone climate, alcohol was the natural way of self-medication, and the parallels with disproportionately high levels of alcoholism among US Native Americans, equally displaced, were obvious.

  Elena Bibikova was the only one in the village I met who seemed to recognize the significance of the impending loss of the language and identity of the Ultas. There were so many paradoxes at work. The development of energy-rich Sakhalin Island was as inevitable as the Ultas’ inevitable abandonment of their nomad culture. Then again, the empire, with its mass of subsidies, had kept the Ulta way of life alive, by subsidizing their otherwise unprofitable reindeer-herding industry. Now those subsidies and preferences were gone, and the only ones left who cared were fighting a losing battle.

  “I try to organize classes to teach Ulta to our young people, but most parents here say ‘what’s the point?’ They’d rather their kids learn English than Ulta. We don’t even have a system for teaching our language. Our language is dying. Nobody needs it.”

  Bibikova struggled on nonetheless. She composed simple ballads about Ulta life, reflecting on their customs of berry picking, and the precollectivization era of the months away from the village roaming the taiga forests, keeping camp while the Ulta men herded, and, of course, her singing of ballads.

  “When our people rode in the sleds or the men would sit around, we would sing these songs. They were called ‘ya-ya.’ … I even made some up myself. I’d sing them to my sisters. When I was naughty, my mom told me: ‘You don’t want to do anything but sing!’ ”

  Bibikova sang a song she had written herself, one she taught to the Ulta children in the village,
or at least to those whose attention she could hold:

  Ultay die risu

  Ultay die risu

  Ultay die rikhu

  Ge-aya!

  “We the Ulta people have lost our language.… People, do not lose your language. Speak it.”

  Bibikova betrayed no resentment that she was among only a handful of people still speaking Ulta fluently, all of them over sixty. “When we die, the Ulta language will die with us,” she said.

  Given her sense of conviction, I did not believe her.

  HOME, SWEET CHERNOBYL

  It was a bitterly cold, crisp December day, but Nina Melnik was determined to show me her snow-covered rose backyard garden, her new shed made of cedar, her Russian-style banya (“your skin will feel like a newborn’s”), and her prized peach trees. It could have been anywhere in the vastness of pristine, pine-covered northern Ukraine.

  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.