No one in Pripyat was told that there had been a nuclear accident at the Chernobyl plant or that the air was filled with radioactive isotopes. The surrounding area should have been evacuated immediately after the accident, but the people who lived closest to the plant were not warned of the danger until two p.m. on April 27, almost thirty-six hours after the first explosion.
A few years ago, Igor helped a musician shoot a music video at Chernobyl. When this video comes on in the bus, I pick up on something I suspect Igor has not, which is that the music video’s star, Crucifix, is a Christian artist.
To a non-native speaker, his religious overtones would be easy to miss.
“We’re sleeping in the dirt of Chernobyl still tonight,” he rages into the microphone as musicians in gas masks go to town on guitars and drums. “Dying from inside, poisoned by our pride.”
The subtle language evangelicals employ can really make it hard to see the Jesus coming. But you only need to have one conversation take a surprise turn toward salvation to forever pick up on references to “free will” and a “fallen man.” I wonder if Igor repeatedly heard Crucifix blame the Chernobyl disaster on “pride” and figured it was better than letting the ax fall on the Soviet government.
When things went wrong in the Soviet Union, a significant portion of the response was devoted to covering it up.
The Chernobyl disaster was not the first accident at a Soviet nuclear power station. In fact, it wasn’t even the first accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. In 1981, a KGB report that was made public after the collapse of the Soviet Union reported that, in the Chernobyl plant’s first four years of operations, there had been twenty-nine emergency shutdowns of reactors, only eight of which were attributed to human error. The rest, it declared, were “for technical reasons.” The report goes on to warn that the plant’s “control equipment does not meet the requirements for reliability due at the nuclear power plant.”
The next year, reactor one at Chernobyl suffered a partial core meltdown.
In 1984, the KGB again recorded safety concerns at the Chernobyl plant. A report noted that “The first and second [reactor] units are less reliable in terms of environmental safety,” and “the system of cooling of main circulation pumps is insufficient (lower than norms by approximately 39%).”
This is not to say that the Soviet Union was the only country that struggled to harness nuclear energy safely. In fact, if you tally reported nuclear accidents by country, the United States comes up first.
But the key word is reported.
Sweeping things under the rug was the preferred method of problem-solving in the Soviet Union. It wasn’t always the highest echelons of government conspiring to deceive the public (though it often was). Sometimes, a cover-up emanated from a lower-level official trying to keep his superiors ignorant of a mistake that would cost him his job.
The pervasiveness of secrecy and lies kept information out of the hands of people who could use it against you, but it also kept it from people who could put it to good use. Case in point: an accident at a nuclear power station in Kursk had put the reactor under the same conditions the operators at Chernobyl were trying to test.
It’s possible that the accident at Kursk could have provided insights into potential safety issues in Chernobyl reactor four. But we’ll never know, because the accident at Kursk was kept secret, and the operators at Chernobyl were none the wiser.
The final video we have to watch before stepping out into the Exclusion Zone explains radiation and Geiger counters. We watch this while we pass through a series of military checkpoints, where our passports are compared to preapproved lists while we sit on the bus and Igor greets familiar soldiers. I realize this is his regular commute.
The point of the video is that visiting Chernobyl is very safe.
Lots of things you might encounter every day emit small doses of radiation—marble, granite (“check your countertops before you install them,” the video advises), televisions, the sun. In small doses, radiation isn’t especially harmful. You get exposed to higher levels of radiation when you do things like sit for an X-ray or fly across an ocean, but this is not thought to carry increased health risk. While it’s hard to measure how much radiation your body absorbs, a Geiger counter is a small, handheld device that allows you to measure how much radiation something is giving off.
The Geiger counters most tour companies in the Exclusion Zone use are small devices the size of a walkie-talkie and covered in yellow plastic. They emit a high-pitched beeping noise that seems more for effect than functionality, because the beep doesn’t change with the radiation reading. In the video, we see a Geiger counter take readings in various locations: downtown Kiev, the entrance to the Exclusion Zone, various points within the Exclusion Zone. The readouts are all more or less the same, which might have reassured us if we had any idea what they meant. Next to the infamous reactor four, the Geiger reading jumps to three. Is three a low reading, or a high one? It doesn’t say. Three is a small number if you’re talking about slices of pizza, but a big number if you’re talking about late-night calls to an ex-boyfriend.
Flying from Kiev to Toronto exposes you to ten times more radiation than a day trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the video assures us. This doesn’t seem right, but we’ll go with it.
Because I had kind of assumed the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was shut down and sealed off shortly after releasing vast quantities of radiation into the atmosphere, I’m somewhat taken aback when Misha casually mentions that we’ll be visiting the reactor.
“Like, the . . . bad one?” someone asks.
Misha shrugs. “Why not? People are still working there, you know.”
We did not know that.
Misha is our guide in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (through some murky arrangement, companies like Igor’s have to hire guides like Misha once they cross into the Exclusion Zone), and half of Misha’s job seems to be responding to our incredulity with practiced nonchalance.
“The Exclusion Zone today is one of the safest places to live,” Misha declares, offering no supporting evidence. “You don’t believe me?” He reaches up and plucks an apple from a tree growing less than a mile from the nuclear reactor. He takes a bite. “You see?” he continues. “Very safe.”
We all stare, unconvinced that he has proven anything, or that he understands how radiation poisoning works.
But this does get to a larger point, which is that the most surprising thing about the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is the degree to which it is not actually abandoned. This is only surprising because articles about Chernobyl tend to have titles like, “Abandoned: Visiting the Ruins of the World’s Worst Nuclear Disaster, Which Is Surrounded by Places That Have Been Completely Abandoned, Which Means the Buildings Are Still There, But the People Aren’t,” or, if it’s a nature magazine, something more fuzzy, like, “The Animals Have Returned to Chernobyl—And They’re Looking for Revenge.”
On the main street in the city of Chernobyl, it’s pretty much business as usual. Cars drive by on the street; in government buildings, public employees still administrate the surrounding region.
I had pictured Chernobyl as a deserted, postapocalyptic wasteland, possibly covered in fog. I did not picture a thriving nightlife scene, which is what Misha misses most while he’s gone.
I had also assumed that Chernobyl was one place, and also the place where the nuclear meltdown happened, but that, too, is not quite accurate. Chernobyl is the name of the region in which the eponymous power plant is located, and it’s also the name of the region’s capital city. But the city of Chernobyl is nine miles away from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which sits on the outskirts of the former city of Pripyat.
As the settlement closest to the reactor, Pripyat is the place that’s been most thoroughly abandoned in the wake of the accident. Many power-plant employees lived in Pripyat, which was a Soviet “model city,” constructed for the purpose of housing plant workers and their families. Bec
ause the Soviet government took such pride in its nuclear program, it endowed Pripyat with the best amenities. The children of Pripyat studied at gleaming schools and their parents swam laps in one of the city’s three swimming pools. A newly constructed amusement park was scheduled to open five days after the accident.
On April 27, 1986, a full day after the accident, the Soviet government finally began evacuating Pripyat and the surrounding areas. At first, residents were told that the evacuation would be temporary—families, thinking they’d be gone for a few weeks at most, didn’t bother taking all their belongings with them.
When the extent and severity of contamination became clear, the Exclusion Zone was expanded and rendered something closer to permanent. It was cordoned off and closed to the public.
But it was never really abandoned. Perhaps because a picture of workers swimming in a pool a mile and a half away from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant a handful of years after the accident is less exciting than a photograph of an abandoned amusement park, this detail does not always make it into the aforementioned magazine articles.
The explosion occurred in reactor four, which was connected to reactor three by a vent building. You might expect that, given that the greatest nuclear disaster in the history of mankind occurred mere feet from reactor three, reactor three would have been immediately evacuated and abandoned. But you would be wrong, because reactor three continued operating, which is to say, using nuclear fission to generate electricity, for fourteen years after the accident.
The plant didn’t enter the decommissioning phase until April of 2015, six months before I arrive. People still go to work every day at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
Well, not every day.
If you work in the Exclusion Zone, you pretty much have to live there, too, but safety regulations prohibit employees from living and working in the Zone full-time. Most workers have some setup like two weeks on, two weeks off, and they’re supposed to spend the off weeks outside the Zone.
But Misha hates this. His friends are here, his apartment is here, his favorite bar is here.
“Sometimes,” he finally admits, after I’ve asked him five million questions, “I sneak back in early.”
We drive to the main square in Chernobyl, where it feels like it could be a slow Tuesday morning anywhere. This seems to disappoint Janice.
At the nearby memorial, Misha makes an offhand comment about how Sweden forced the Soviet Union to admit to the accident. His tone is so different from Igor’s defense of Gorbachev at the rest stop that I ask for clarification. Misha explains how the Soviet government didn’t want to tell people what happened; Igor jumps in and adamantly disagrees. “No, they plan to say,” Igor corrects.
Thus begins a daylong power struggle between Misha and Igor.
The difference between the way Misha and Igor interpret what happened at Chernobyl is this: Misha blames the government; Igor blames the reactor. Misha criticizes the authorities; Igor defends them.
Igor is in his early forties. He grew up in Kiev when it was still the Soviet Union. Misha, in contrast, was born in a town not far from the Chernobyl reactor, two years after the accident. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Ukrainian government expanded the Exclusion Zone to include the town in which Misha and his parents lived, and so they were forced to move. This isn’t as bad as what happened to many people in Pripyat, who were evacuated in 1986 to towns that became part of the expanded Exclusion Zone after Ukraine gained independence, which meant those families had to relocate twice.
I wonder if this explains the difference in worldview. Igor was raised under a government that provided; Misha saw the havoc it wreaked.
“I don’t believe authorities,” Misha says. “They did lie, they lie now, and they will lie in the future.” It’s half English lesson, half political statement. Janice laughs. “Why are you laughing?” Misha snaps.
Everyone marvels at our good fortune to have been blessed with perfect weather. It’s a cold, gray day, the sky a drop cloth of clouds. The occasional flock of crows rises and scatters. The gloominess is the perfect backdrop for taking photos of derelict structures, which seems to be why everyone is here.
“It would suck to visit on a sunny day,” someone muses as we pull up at an abandoned day-care center on the edge of Pripyat.
On the outside, it’s not much to look at: a two-story building slowly in the process of becoming a one-story building.
Inside, it’s exactly what you’d hope for: peeling walls and a carpet of leaves and shattered glass, a room of rusting cots with grotesque, weathered dolls sitting up on the crumbling mattresses, waving. It’s almost like the room has been staged for a horror movie, which, I quickly realize, it has.
It’s just a little too perfect: the toys arranged as though a child fled in the middle of playing with them, the books opened to pages with uncanny resonance: emergency instructions for evacuating a school bus, a little boy’s handwriting. The group lustily whips out cameras and begins snapping photos of the doll with the face blackened by smoke or the cot that’s been overturned in the middle of the room.
I don’t even have to ask Misha if recent visitors have rearranged everything to maximize creepiness: I know that they have. Most people come here to take pictures of battered dolls with wild hair and eerie smiles.
Another group joins us at the day-care center: a group of Germans in army fatigues. I ask Misha about them. “Chernobyl freaks,” he says. “They’ve been here fifteen times.”
“How do you know that?” I ask.
“Their guide told me.”
Why am I here? I wonder as I wander through empty rooms with scattered paper and overturned buckets of blocks. Morbid curiosity? Regular curiosity? Fear of missing out on radioactive waste? Am I just drawn to anything that calls itself “abandoned”? Is there something inherently interesting about a place where people once lived and now do not?
In Igor’s Chernobyl videos, one of Crucifix’s guides had a moment of pensiveness, overlooking the ruins of Pripyat. “This is what it will look like when there are no people,” he mused.
I can’t help but think that will only be true if a nonhuman race figures out how to turn the ruins of our civilization into a tourist attraction. Because even if you dismiss all the staging, the improbable dolls sitting up on their cots, there’s also a sense that the tragedy is being overshadowed by highlighting only what it left behind.
All the uninhabited structures are being attacked, on all sides, by plants: trees that take root in the middle of lecture halls, vines slowly consuming what were once walls. But somehow this isn’t enough for the tourists, which, I presume, is why someone has taken the liberty of firing a rifle into the day-care walls, leaving bullet holes that Misha points out to us. Janice gasps and lunges for her camera.
Before we leave the day-care center, Misha calls us over to an unremarkable patch of grass: he wants to show us a hot spot. He holds the Geiger counter over the spot as the number leaps up, and we all ohh and ahh, more impressed than concerned for our health. The Geiger counter, I realize, is not to keep us safe. It adds to the ambience. It’s what we paid to see.
I ask Misha why he started working as a Chernobyl guide. I expect him to give some pat answer about sharing his culture or meeting people from all over the world, but to my surprise, he gives it to me straight. “It’s good money,” he says, “and you don’t have to work very much.”
Because of the regulations forbidding most people from living in the Exclusion Zone, Chernobyl guides get a lot of time off. Their schedules are either four days on, three days off, or fifteen days on, fifteen days off. Most people come Monday morning and leave Thursday night, Misha says, which is why today, Friday, everything feels so deserted. “I work half the time of a normal worker,” Misha continues, “plus I must have forty-six days of holiday each year.”
“This is for people who come from very far to work here,” Igor explains.
“No,” Mis
ha snaps, “the authorities don’t care about normal people like us.”
“How many people died here?” Janice is calling over to us.
The square that we’re standing on joins what used to be a hotel, restaurant, and civic center. Trees have pushed up through cracks in the concrete, amassed twenty-nine years of growth, and, because it is late October, exploded in autumnal foliage. If anyone died here, it was from the intersection of communism and capitalism.
“No one,” Misha calls back.
Ultimately, the version of Chernobyl I’d heard strikes me as a game of telephone. Many of the most haunting images of “abandoned” Chernobyl lose much of their power when captioned with the real story. There’s an indoor swimming pool that has long been drained and now sits, bone-dry, littered with leaves and graffiti and a shopping cart.
“Actually, the workers used this pool for many years after the accident,” Misha explains.
There’s the shuttered amusement park that makes for great photos, but wan’t technically abandoned. “They never opened it,” Misha tells us.
There is the high school with hundreds of gas masks covering the floor. Most people would see this and think they were dropped by fleeing students who’d been wearing them to protect against radiation.
“Every school in the Soviet Union must have gas masks,” Misha says, shaking his head. “They were just, like, sitting in some box, and somebody put them all over the ground.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Some people who want to, you know, undermine the feeling of the Exclusion Zone.”
Misha has been saying this all day. The people who wear surplus army uniforms, for example, are undermining the accident. At first I missed the malapropism; later, I realize he means underline.
But I don’t correct him, because in some ways he’s right. Maybe these people aren’t trying to undermine the Chernobyl disaster. But at the end of the day, that’s what they’re doing.
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