On a bright Sunday morning in Kiev, outside the Minskaia metro station and in front of a Ukrainian McDonald’s, a streamlined yellow tour bus idles its engine. The driver waits for passengers heading into the exclusion zone, a radioactive no-man’s-land created two decades ago by the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
Soon about 20 people, mostly Ukrainians and Russians, gather near the bus. Two young, dark-haired men hand out white and blue radiation hazmat suits, yellow plastic slickers, and bottles of water. One of the day-trippers is Alex, born and raised in Pripyat until he was 10. Now 30, he is part of a virtual community of mostly young people who once lived in Pripyat, the forgotten city that was built in the 1970s for workers at the Chernobyl nuclear power station less than two miles away. At the time, Pripyat was called the City of the Future. Instead it was abandoned April 27, 1986, when its residents became the first and, so far, only permanent nuclear refugees in the world.
The trip, which the former Pripyat residents organized, coincided with the 20th anniversary of the explosion. It also happened to fall very close to Radonitsa, the day of remembrance of the dead, when family members visit the graves of their relatives. The entire city of Pripyat is a grave, a place that died more than 20 years ago and will never come back to life.
The "Sarcophagus" surrounding reactor 4.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia
Once we are all collected, radiation protection suits, water bottles, and lunch bags in hand, we board the bus. The organizers begin the trip by introducing themselves. People have come from all over the world, including the cities of St. Petersburg, Odessa, Vilnius, and Kiev. Most of them have never met except on their virtual community at pripyat.com. Alex, from Kiev, and Dmitri, from St. Petersburg, sit behind Christophe Bisson and me. Bisson, a French painter and philosopher, invited me to come on this trip when he and I attended a Chernobyl conference in Budapest. “I’m the only English speaker. I can translate for you,” Dmitri says.
While the bus heads north to the exclusion zone, the 18-mile-wide region around the reactor, the Web site organizers start showing Pripyat movies. After a few adjustments to the bus’s faulty video player, a small monitor begins to display gruesome scenes of the aftermath of the fire at the reactor. Scratchy black-and-white footage of the emergency workers shows graphic images of men in agony, with peeling sheets of skin and severe burns covering their bodies. Then we watch the mass exodus from Pripyat, a procession of 2,000 city and school buses inching their way out of the city like some strange funeral procession.
There are also images of April 26, the day of the blast, before residents knew of the danger. Home movies capture ordinary weddings, blurred bluish footage of brides in white dresses and smiling grooms. Only the horrific and the shocking remain in my mind. “How did people find out what had happened?” I ask Dmitri.
For 36 hours after Chernobyl’s RBMK-1000 reactor let loose a radioactive cloud, Soviet officials said nothing. Then, in the afternoon of April 27, the officials sent one person from each apartment building to hand out flyers and iodine pills to occupants. The iodine pills were useless, given too late to be effective, but the residents didn’t know that. The flyer instructed them that they would be evacuated the next morning because of an accident. They were told to bring only what they would need for three days. The 49,000 residents of Pripyat, including 15,400 children, left everything in their apartments, not knowing that they would never see their homes, their belongings, or their town again.
After the Chernobyl accident, 76 surrounding villages were also evacuated, creating their own communities of nuclear exiles. Radiation from the disaster was detected in parts of Scandinavia, Poland, the Baltic states, southern Germany, Switzerland, northern France, and England. Four days after the accident, the radioactive particles were already in Africa and China. But Pripyat was the front line. Scientists estimate that the most dangerous radioactive elements will take up to 600 years to decay sufficiently to render the town safe. Until then, spending any extended time in Pripyat is tantamount to playing roulette with your DNA.
In Pripyat, the reactor was visible from rooftops and terraces, an icon of electricity, progress, modernity itself. In the end, though, it changed the lives of the people there in ways they could never have imagined. “Ten of my closest relatives died from cancer, and they tell me it has nothing to do with radiation,” one former resident tells me. “Do you think I believe that? Of course it has to do with radiation. I will die from it too—and all for electricity.”
The bus has been traveling north for over an hour. The vast monolithic apartment complexes of Kiev have disappeared, giving way to small wood frame houses in a bucolic landscape of green and brown fields. All looks peaceful at first glance, but the exclusion zone is a dead country. Although trees and birds and animals remain, humans are gone from the landscape, except for pockets of people who have drifted back, despite the official prohibition, to live and die in their small villages. There is a silent emptiness here.
We arrive at the zone checkpoint. Everyone who enters the exclusion zone needs a special permit. If you are a refugee from Pripyat, it is easy to get. Journalists, scientists, and even some tourists are also allowed in, but all visitors must be accompanied by a guide of Chernobylinterinform, a government office that oversees Chernobyl tourism. All of us on the bus show our passports to the young Ukrainian police officers. They check our names off a list and wave us in. It is done quickly; the men seemed bored by our arrival and soon raise the gate that will allow us into the zone.
Our first destination is Chernobyl itself. Although the complex was shut down in December 2000, the reactors are still being emptied of their nuclear fuel, so they have to be maintained and checked. Thousands of workers, wearing badges to monitor their radiation exposure, remain to service the plant. They do not live in Chernobyl itself, but nearby. We stop at a near-empty grocery store, a white building that doesn’t look like a store, where there are a few glass cases with items neatly arranged—a few razor blades, three batteries, and small bags of raisins, nuts, and American candy bars. At the administration building entrance, a bronze statue of Lenin raises his hand in the direction of the power plant.
