Rock and Hard Places (24 page)

Chernobyl’s only real concession to tourism is the visitor’s centre across the road from Reactor No. 4. The centre features an excellent model of the interior of the devastated plant. The detailed diorama
includes figurines of workers huddled round the shattered reactor core: the blast blew the 1,000-tonne lid clean off it. I tell Julia, who runs the centre, that I assume that this is what it looked like just after construction of the sarcophagus was finished, in late 1986.

“No,” she says, “this is what it’s like now.”

But, I say, puzzled, there are models of people in there.

“Yes,” she says. “About 400 personnel work in the shelter. They do maintenance and monitoring.”

I contemplate, for a moment, what I’d want to be paid to set foot inside that thing for five minutes. I come up with a sum that would enable me to purchase Ukraine outright, and have it painted.

“They make maybe US $200 a month,” says Julia. Julia wears a dosimeter around her neck, one that measures cumulative radiation and is checked every month to make sure she isn’t over-exposed. Another dosimeter, mounted on the outside of the visitors’ centre, reads 1.600—more than 100 times normal background radiation.

On the walls of the centre, alongside photos of famous visitors—Al Gore, Hans Blix—are photographs of what those workers in there can see: lava-like lumps of nuclear goo, cracking support beams, sagging scaffolding. Even under ideal circumstances, almost everything built by the Soviet Union was a jerry-rigged botch, and the circumstances under which the sarcophagus was constructed may have been the least ideal in engineering history. It isn’t surprising that cracks have developed. In a brochure Julia gives me called “Shelter Object: Chronicle of Events and Facts,” the preface warns that “Development of other emergency situations is not completely excluded.”

“It’s collapsing, really,” says Julia. “There is work starting on it later this year.”

After the creaking sarcophagus has been stabilised, Julia explains, it will itself be sheltered under a new edifice—a vast concrete arch, 108 metres tall, 250 metres wide, and 100 metres long. It seems incredible to me that this is the best we can do—responding to an atomic-age accident with such basic, primitive measures.

“There’s nothing else possible,” says Julia. “More than 75 percent of the reactor has always been inaccessible, due to radiation or structural damage.”

So nobody really knows what’s going on in there.

“Not really.”

Other sights on the Chernobyl tourist trail include a lurid monument to the firefighters who fought the blaze—they comprised the majority of the thirty-one people who died of radiation exposure immediately after the explosion. There’s the tank graveyard, containing the radioactive military vehicles that transported workers to the disaster zone, and the enormous, ungainly Mi-8 helicopters which flew more than 1,800 sorties above the fire, dropping lead and sand on the burning core. There’s also the place that was once a village called Kopachi, and which is now scrub-covered hillocks planted with nuclear hazard warnings—the whole village, and substantial quantities of nuclear waste, was buried here, and all that remains are the road signs. In Ukraine, as in much of Eastern Europe, towns have signs informing you when you’ve passed their city limits. These consist of the name of the place you’ve just left, with a red line through it. Kopachi’s still stands, an unintentionally prescient monument to a town that has been crossed off the map. It’s a creepy place to be, but it’s only a warm-up.

Pripyat’s name should be better known, at least as well as those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are the only three cities to have been destroyed by nuclear power, and Pripyat, four kilometres from Reactor No. 4, is the only one that didn’t recover. On April 25, 1986, Pripyat was a model Soviet new town, purpose-built in the 1970s to house the best and brightest of the USSR’s nuclear technicians. By April 28, 1986, Pripyat was abandoned, its 47,000 people evacuated in a hastily convened fleet of buses. They never came home, and they never will. Their town was fatally poisoned, and its corpse is still slowly decomposing.

Behind the main square is a funfair, which was due to open on May 1, 1986, as part of the May Day celebrations held annually throughout the communist bloc. Yuri tells me not to tread too close to the dodgem rink. When I ask why, he holds the dosimeter against green moss which has gathered around the rink: 1.080, our highest reading of the day, even more than we’d racked up standing right outside the reactor. “Just don’t touch anything organic,” says Yuri. A few decades from now, that moss may have enslaved the human population of Earth.

Pripyat was a nice place to live, apparently. Before the accident, Sergei wanted to move here.

“One of the best places in the USSR,” he remembers. “Lots of young families—people who worked at the plant, and they earned good money. You could get imported things. Good clothes, good food.”

Sergei is keen on clothes and food. He has reported for duty today in a dapper olive-coloured suit, and he credits his survival of the radiation he absorbed in 1986, and since, to Crimean red wine.

“Everyone who drank it was okay,” he confirms.

The atomic Pompeii of Pripyat is a complete mismatch of sound and vision. To walk through a city and hear no sound at all, other than your own footsteps and the occasional tweets and buzzes of birds and insects, is as disorienting as, say, having your contemplation of a desert interrupted by a cacophony of police sirens, car stereos and Hare Krishna drums. Nothing, save for the slow reclamation of buildings by trees, has happened here for eighteen years. The hammer-and-sickle emblems still hang on the lampposts and perch astride the tallest apartment blocks—there was nobody here to discredit communism when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, or celebrate Ukraine’s independence from the USSR in 1991. In a dusty room at the back of the concert hall on the square, we find a room stacked with Soviet flags and banners acclaiming Lenin and placards bearing portraits of local Communist Party officials.

“Props for the 1986 May Day parade,” explains Yuri. “Indefinitely postponed.”

Away from Pripyat, some normal human life, of a sort, persists in the Zone. Though it is not permitted for newcomers to move into the Zone, a few of the people who lived here before April 1986, mostly elderly, have drifted back. Of the 130,000 people evacuated from the district after the accident, about 350 have returned. The village of Parishev boasts a population of eighteen, all of pensionable age. Yuri takes us to meet one of them.

Maria, seventy-five, is delighted to see us, which is understandable, as we may be the most exciting thing that has happened to her in months—a meeting with a local is a common feature of the Chernobyl day trip, but the outings are not over-subscribed. Maria lives alone in a three-room wooden house, decorated with family photos and her own tapestries. A small farmyard outside is home to chickens, geese and cats. The cats have just the one head each, and the chickens don’t
lay square eggs. The average background radiation here, according to Yuri’s dosimeter, is 0.014, about normal.

Maria produces a generous spread—vegetables, goose lard, raw eggs—which I’m not sure about at all. Yuri reassures that the vegetables are from outside the Zone, sold by a mobile shop that comes through twice a week. The eggs?

“From Maria’s chickens,” he smiles, cutting a hole in the top of one and sucking back the contents. Anxious not to offend, I accept a glass each of Maria’s excellent homemade moonshine, and birch juice—water tapped from the trunks of birch trees. This tastes like diluted furniture polish.

I ask Maria what she remembers of the accident. Yuri translates, between mouthfuls of egg.

“A sunny day, like this one,” she says. “I had been swimming in the river. This village was part of a collective farm then, and the head of the collective farm told us we had seventy-two hours to get out. We were put on buses on May 5. A year later, I came back.”

Why?

“It’s my home. I’m happy here. I have my chickens and cats, and my grandchildren come to visit.”

Weren’t you concerned about what the government was telling you?

“Those lying communists?” she cackles. “They never told the truth to anyone.”

 

IN THE CHERNOBYL Museum back in Kiev, there’s a copy of the
New York Times
, dated April 29, 1986. The front page announces that the government of the USSR had issued the following statement: “An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant as one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. A government commission has been set up.” This communiqué could charitably be described as an understatement, and more accurately as a dishonest, belief-beggaringly cynical attempt to deflect publicity from a catastrophe with global consequences.

Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl exploded at 1:23 AM on April 26, 1986. The accident occurred after a test of the cooling systems, during
which safety procedures were ignored or overridden and, once things began to fizz out of control, panicked errors were committed by the Homer Simpsonovitches on duty. The USSR did their best to keep the story secret. The same
New York Times
story reports, chillingly, “A British reporter returning from Kiev reported seeing no activity in the Ukrainian capital that would suggest any alarm.” The people of Kiev weren’t told they had anything to be alarmed about—Kiev’s May Day parade went ahead as scheduled. Sergei had told me that he’d been warned that if he spoke of what he’d seen in Chernobyl to anyone in Kiev, he’d be locked in the nuthatch. The Soviets were only shamed into their admission when abnormal radiation levels were detected in Scandinavia.

The scale of the disaster is so vast that it may never be precisely measured. What is known is dreadful enough. More than five million people, mostly in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, suffered some detriment to their health. At least 2,000 cases of thyroid cancer have been attributed to Chernobyl, and the numbers of such cancers still being found in children in towns near the Exclusion Zone may mean that more evacuations, more Pripyats, are necessary. The only good news was that the betrayal of its own people perpetrated by the complacent USSR in the days after the accident helped speed the end of the entire dreary communist experiment. The rupture in Reactor No. 4 was the first crack in the Berlin Wall.

I do eventually find a souvenir of Chernobyl. On Kiev’s famous market street Andriyivsky Uzviz, I stop at a stall specialising in the ephemera of both Ukraine’s twentieth-century occupiers. After I’ve fossicked through the Lenin badges and swastika-spangled SS cigarette cases, I ask the stallholder if he has anything relating to the nuclear plant. He nods, and shows me a medal—a scarlet and gold cross hanging from a green and red ribbon. The design in the middle of the cross consists of a blood-coloured teardrop, and some atomic symbols.

“For the Liquidators,” says the stallholder. “Twenty dollars.”

The Liquidators were the people who cleaned up the mess, and who built the sarcophagus. They were drafted from the military and other government agencies, and there were somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 of them—as is often the case where Chernobyl is concerned, nobody really knows for sure. There are both financial
and social advantages to claiming Liquidator status, and it is believed that some have contrived to get themselves falsely added to the list—the Ukrainian equivalent of hanging around in New York bars after September 11 in a rented firefighter’s costume.

“It was presented in the 1990s,” says the stallholder, while I hold the medal up to the sun. “So no radiation. Don’t worry.”

That’s not what I’m worried about. What I’m worried about is what happened to the bloke it was awarded to.

 

 

 

W
HEN PETER WEIR’S 1981 film
Gallipoli
was released in the United States, it was trailed with the slogan “From a place you’ve never heard of, comes a story you’ll never forget.” Had this sales pitch been more widely known about in my homeland, we’d have put your ambassador to sea in a longboat with a hunk of stale bread. The idea that anybody should know of Gallipoli only because it helped launch the career of Mel Gibson would be the sort of thing we’d take enormous offence at, if only we didn’t find the idea so incredible.

If you grow up in Australia, not hearing of Gallipoli is approximately as likely as not hearing of Australia. American readers desiring some perspective as to Gallipoli’s place in the Australian psyche could try imagining Valley Forge multiplied by Iwo Jima, but they’d still be struggling. Gallipoli became the most famous place in Australia, despite the apparent handicap of its situation in Turkey, when soldiers of the Australia & New Zealand Army Corps stormed Turkish defences on the peninsula on April 25, 1915; the date is a devoutly observed national holiday in both countries, known as Anzac Day.

I visited Gallipoli for the
Sunday Times
on the eighty-third anniversary of the landings, and left more bemused than ever by my country’s relationship with this bleak stretch of shoreline. My feelings about the place have become no more resolved in the decade or so since. In the early years of
the twenty-first century, the Australian government of Prime Minister John Howard swaddled itself ostentatiously in khaki—partly to shore up support for Australia’s involvement in the War on Terror, mostly as a symptom of Howard’s instinctively belligerent and defensive notions of patriotism. This sometimes made observing Anzac Day feel an act of collaboration with aspects of Australia that the country should—and can—rise above: parochialism, insularity, a certain suburban suspicion of the rest of the planet. In that same period, however, Gallipoli inspired the historian Les Carlyon’s
Gallipoli
—not just magisterial military history, but a genuine literary masterpiece—and an interesting national soul-searching prompted by the death, in May 2002, of the last surviving veteran of the campaign.