Borderland (28 page)

As I got up to leave one of the men started to laugh. ‘If I was commander of the Black Sea Fleet, you know what I’d do? I’d start a war with Turkey, then surrender, and become a Turk in a leather jacket!’ Russians wanting to turn into Turks? Admiral Nakhimov would be turning in his grave.

CHAPTER NINE

An unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics
Great Russia has welded forever to stand;
Created in struggle by will of the peoples,
United and mighty, our Soviet Land!

Hail to the Fatherland, free from oppression,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong!
The Party of Lenin, strength of the nation,
Leads us to communism steadfastly on!

–
First verse and chorus of the Soviet national anthem

Chernobyl helped us understand that we are a colony.

–
Rukh leader, April 1991

‘B
IG STOMACH, LOW
concentration,’ chuckles Stepan Lyashenko, pressing a metal funnel to his bulging waistband. The electronic read-out on the other end of the apparatus clicks up a few notches. ‘Look, Fm quite safe to eat!’

Outside the greasy windows of my hired Zhiguli, the midsummer countryside rolls bucolically by. Storks mince about between sugar-bun haystacks; a barefoot toddler splashes in a puddle; an old woman waits at a bus-stop with a goat on a bit of string. But like the establishing shots of some rustic fright-movie, behind apparent normality horror lurks: Chernobyl. What we are driving through is the so-called ‘Obligatory Evacuation Zone’ – the amoeba-shaped strip of countryside, roughly eighty miles long by twenty-five miles wide, most seriously contaminated by radioactive fallout during the nuclear explosion of 1986. ‘Obligatory evacuation’ is a euphemism: according to government promises, the whole population should have been moved out years ago, but lack of alternative housing means that over 30,000 people still live here, including several hundred in the fenced-off thirty-kilometre inner zone round Chernobyl itself.

Lyashenko is a middle-ranking
apparatchik
from the agriculture ministry. His job is to persuade the Zone’s collectives to use safer farming techniques. On his lap sits a bundle of booklets wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. Smudgily printed on rough paper, they instruct farmworkers to give up planting beans and buckwheat – both have shallow root systems, and hence take up high doses of the deadly caesium and strontium particles lurking in the topsoil – in favour of deeper-rooted beets and potatoes. But on this trip at least, not many are going to get the message. ‘I asked for 300 copies,’ Lyashenko says, ‘but there are problems with the printers, and I only got a hundred.’

Down the end of a dirt road we draw up outside a dilapidated bungalow. I try out a Geiger counter on the ground – it clicks up to forty milli-roentgens, twice as high as in Kiev. Over by a drainpipe, where rainwater off the roof collects, the readout jumps to 180. The farm’s radiologist, a red-faced man with gold teeth, explains that according to regulations, livestock should only be grazed on fields spread with lime, which soaks up radioactive particles, leaving fewer to be taken up by grass, and thence via milk and meat by human beings. ‘The most difficult thing,’ he says, ‘is stopping people grazing their cows in the woods. It’s cheap for them but it’s very dangerous, because that’s where the “traps” are, the places that have never been tested for radiation.’ What’s worse, his collective is now so short of cash that it can’t lime its fields anyway. ‘Before, we were able to treat the pastures – you could see the radiation levels going down. Now we haven’t got the money and the work has stopped.’ Lyashenko looks uncomfortable – the radiologist isn’t sticking to the script. ‘If you tested every cow near your Sellafield,’ he interrupts, like we do here, you would find your milk is even worse than ours.’

‘But what about the cows in the woods?’

A shrug. ‘What do you expect?
Babushka
controls?’

Back in the car, we pass a group of farmworkers sitting on wooden benches outside the collective’s single, boarded-up shop. I ask my driver Vlad to stop. Lyashenko climbs out too, grumpy but not saying anything. Straight away the complaints start flowing. An old man in dirty brown jacket and tracksuit trousers says, ‘The top officials don’t care about normal people – they live in Kiev and eat clean food. Here they used to send us stuff, but not any more.’ Like most of the villagers, he has his own cow, but has never had its milk tested for radioactivity. The woman sitting next to him chips in: ‘It’s really bad here – we get terrible headaches, leg pains. There’s no medicine in the shops. We thought of moving out but there’s nowhere to go. And how can you worry about the food you’re eating when you haven’t been paid for three months?’ Another woman comes up, trailed by a flock of turkey chicks. A heart-shaped religious medallion hangs round her neck, and under her arm she carries a basket of eggs.

‘Are you going to eat those?’

‘Of course!’ – a jerk of the head at Lyashenko – ‘I don’t care what they say. I’m sixty-six now, so why does it matter?’

On the way home Vlad’s Zhiguli packs up for the third time that day. By suspiciously artistic coincidence, we grind to a halt directly underneath a faded billboard bearing the message ‘UKRAINIANS! TAKE CARE OF YOUR ENVIRONMENT!’ While Vlad pokes about under the bonnet, Lyashenko and I smoke companionable cigarettes in the low evening sun. His father, it turns out, disappeared during the purges. Thirty years later the family found out that he had been shot by the NKVD. ‘The night of Chernobyl,’ he says, ‘I was twenty kilometres away, travelling on business. I didn’t know anything about the explosion until the second day – and then I only heard about it because some friends who live near the station rang me up and asked me to get them out.’ Despite all this, he had waited until 1991 to tear up his Party card, and had voted for the Communist candidate in the presidential elections.

‘The way the system treated you, why didn’t you leave the Party sooner?’

‘I couldn’t have moved up the ladder otherwise; I would have stayed in one place. The Communist idea isn’t so bad – it was just badly carried out.’

From under the bonnet, Vlad jabs an accusatory finger: ‘That’s why this place is so fucked up – these bureaucracy pigs just sit there and do nothing. Do you think he cares? No!’

Ask a Ukrainian when he stopped believing in communism, and the answers vary. A few quote the invasion of Czechoslovakia, some the Afghan war, others the discovery of Stalin’s mass graves at Bykivnya. Many, like Lyashenko, look blank, because they have not really stopped believing in communism at all. But by far the likeliest reply is ‘Chernobyl’. A saga of technical incompetence and irresponsibility, of bureaucratic sloth, mendacity and plain contempt for human life, the Chernobyl affair epitomised everything that was wrong with the Soviet Union. As Yuriy Shcherbak – a doctor turned environmental activist turned Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington – declared, ‘Chernobyl was not
like
the communist system. They were one and the same.’
¹
Imperilling everyone impartially and in the most basic and dramatic fashion, no other single piece of communist bungling did more to turn public opinion against the regime.

Chernobyl exploded at 1.23 a.m. on the night of Friday 26 April 1986. The cause was neither equipment failure nor human error, but an experiment which went wrong. In order to test how long the reactor could operate with no external power supply, engineers deliberately lifted all but six neutron-absorbing control rods out of the reactor’s core, and disabled the automatic shut-down system which would have normally come into play in case of power failure. As soon as the external electricity supply had been switched off, power levels inside the reactor core started to rise, escalating into a full-scale nuclear explosion.
²

In the months after the disaster, Shcherbak toured the hospital wards collecting interviews with engineers, doctors and firemen who had been on the scene at the time.
³
Yuriy Badayev, a 34-year-old electrical engineer, was on duty in Reactor Number Four’s information processing room, following the progress of his bosses’ experiment on his computer screens. Shortly after 1 a.m. he was amazed to see that the reactor had been closed down. Fifteen seconds later he felt two massive shocks, one a few moments after the other. The lights went out and water started pouring through the ceiling. Racing out into the corridor, he could hardly see anything for steam and dust; the doors of the elevator had been crushed shut, and the stairs were covered in rubble. Back in his own room the telephone from one of the control rooms on the floor above started ringing; he picked up the receiver, but nobody answered. Later, Badayev saw the colleague who had made that call being carried out on a stretcher, his spine crushed by falling masonry. Another engineer in the same control room died immediately, of burns.

Hryhoriy Khmel, a fifty-year-old engine-driver with the local fire brigade, spent the evening down at the station playing draughts. He had just unrolled a mattress when a call came through that Chernobyl was on fire. Two engines set off; he drove the second. They arrived at about fifteen minutes to two, some twenty minutes after the blast. Flames were coming out of the reactor-block roof and pieces of graphite were scattered everywhere, hot to the touch and crunchy underfoot. Having spent some time trying to locate the station’s hydrants – wrongly marked on the map – the younger men scaled the building and started playing twenty-metre hoses down into the burning reactor itself. After watching proceedings from the ground for some hours, Khmel was taken to the station caféteria, given ‘powders’ to eat and told to strip and wash. ‘We didn’t have much idea about radiation,’ he told Shcherbak later. ‘Whoever was working didn’t have any idea.’
⁴

In Prypyat, the next-door town where most of the station’s workforce lived, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor, Valentyn Bilo-kin, was finishing his rounds. It had been a quiet shift – a few drunks, a child with an asthma attack. Driving back to the clinic, he saw two flashes in the sky – lightning, he thought, or maybe shooting stars. Told there was a fire at Chernobyl, he packed his burns equipment into a bag and set off for the station – like the firemen, without any radiation medicines or protective clothing. When he arrived, people were running around everywhere. Nobody told him what to do, there didn’t seem to be any burns victims to treat, and there were no other doctors on site. When a group of firemen complained that they were feeling nauseous, he finally remembered some of his radiation training from medical school. ‘It seemed that I had forgotten everything,’ he told Shcherbak. ‘Who needed radiation hygiene? Hiroshima, Nagasaki, all that was so remote.’
⁵

Having realised what was wrong, he was powerless to do anything about it: ‘We had been told there were gas masks and protective suits, but there wasn’t anything of the sort, it didn’t work.’
⁶
In desperation, he rang the clinic for gauze masks, but they hadn’t got any. More firemen came up, vomiting and complaining of acute headaches, some of them too weak to stand. Bilokin gave them anti-nausea drugs to treat the symptoms, but could do nothing for the radiation itself. One eighteen-year-old, stumbling and slurring like a drunk, drifted away into a coma before his eyes. As the night wore on, Bilokin tried to persuade people to stay inside the station caféteria: ‘I chased them all back into the building, but they just came out again . . . People just didn’t fully realise what had happened.’
⁷
By dawn he was feeling ill himself, and got a lift back to the Prypyat clinic, where vodka bottles were doing the rounds. ‘Some were drunk,’ he told Shcherbak, ‘and others were running around constantly washing themselves.’
⁸
A few hours later, having distributed iodine pills among family and neighbours, he sank into a coma himself.

That same Saturday morning, the regional Party committee held a meeting in Prypyat. Though the whole town could see black smoke belching from the reactor, it was decided that there were to be no safety warnings, and no explanations. All that day – while local Party bosses were arranging for their own children to leave for holiday camps in Crimea – life in the town went on as normal. Families went shopping and walked their dogs; fishermen lugged their tackle off to the Prypyat river; couples sunbathed round the power station’s cooling ponds. Football matches went ahead, as did sixteen outdoor weddings sponsored by the Communist Youth League. The schools debated whether or not to go ahead with a planned ‘Health Run’, and settled on outdoor gymnastics instead. Off-duty station-workers who rang up the town hall asking for instructions were told that the fire was none of their business, and that all decisions would be taken by Moscow. The town’s schoolchildren had been put through their ‘civil defence’ routines, designed for nuclear attack from the West, only days before. But with a nuclear explosion on their own doorstep none of the safety procedures, not even the simplest, were carried out.