S02E07
Reflecting on the 33rd anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, and bullet pointing the things I remember from the visit I made to the site in 2011.
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Chernobyl
Today is the 33rd anniversary of the chernobyl disaster. Before I start I want to just take a moment to think about all those that lost their lives both directly and indirectly in the immediate aftermath of the disaster but also those still affected today.
The most impactful book i have read on the event is Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich. It is an oral history of the disaster and i highly recommend it. The forthcoming Chernobyl miniseries on HBO that airs next month is loosely based on the stories within that book.
I visited the site in May of 2011. It was an overcast and gloomy day when we set off in the van from Kiev. Despite having 1000’s of photos of that day instead of looking through them this morning to conjure an episode from the ether I wanted instead to reconstruct the things that stand out in my mind from the visit. I haven’t thought about it in a long while.
Our exclusion zone passes, passports and identity documents being taken for what seemed like an age at the military post along a desolate road in the forest.
The flowers still just clinging to a memory of their shape and form at the base of the firefighters monument.
The constant crunch of broken glass under foot when exploring the town of pripyat.
The impression that Pripyat was suppose to be this sort of modern Soviet paradise…a company town, but instead it exposing that at the end of the world all there was is creeping forest and broken glass.
There really isn’t enough broken glass foley in post apocalyptic video games. It’s really conspicuous by its absence once you have experienced it.
The strange sort of dislocation walking around the big wheel and fairground site. A place that I had visited and seen so many times in media and explored in video games. A whole site as resolved dreamscape made physical and all the more surreal for it.
The tree growing from damp concrete by a window in a room three stories high inside the rotting weight of the cultural center.
Standing in front of the monument at reactor 4. its hands reaching to the heavens cradling the powerstation almost protectively from lightning cast from a bell in motion almost buffeted by an invisible storm.
The grey rusting shell of the reactor behind a chain linked fence. A pedestrian sort of barrier marking a line in the earth between you and certain death. It’s not a view you can experience anymore with the completion of the new sarcophagus. Its construction rightly called a mega project of humanity.
The sound of the light wind in my ears broken only by the alarmed chirp of the Dosimeter shouting its warning from inside the van.
And then of course there was how it made me feel. I’ve been to places of death before, old battle grounds, plague pits, graveyards or dangerous places like caves, mountain edges or exploring an old smallpox isolation hospital scheduled for demolition. Each place has a feeling, an electric closeness the clings to your skin.
But standing 150m from reactor 4 was the first time i’ve experienced a place of evil as an active force. Radiation as insipid danger, no signs of death except yellow and black warning symbols zipped tied to the fence. The narratives and expectations i bought with me going in.
It made me feel leaden and heavy. The thought of liquefied organs and blistered skin, human bravery, and excruciating pain as my feet inside my trainers wobbled and shook as a stepped out the van. Adrenaline, fear the nervousness of visiting a site of such power. Overall however i remember the the crushing weight of sadness that the site leaches from inside its leaden tomb. Miasma flowing from the rust and concrete like viscous
It was the least fun but most important part of the trip.
And lastly our ukrainian military guide Oleg being asked by someone else in the group if he was worried about radiation poisoning from living onsite inside the exclusion zone – He said he was not. and my thinking that he’d smoked like 5 twenty packs of cigarettes during the tour so he had probably other things to worry about.
The whole day now feels like a dream, 8 years on it almost feels like the time I spent inside the worlds of Stalker, the Metro games or COD 4 or the world of Roadside Picnic is or was more real than the time i actually spent there. The zone of as hyperboject. The reality of the imagine location as or more blurred with reality than it was at the time.
