Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (17 page)

In the museum in Kiev they have a mold of graphite the size of a soldier's cap, they say that if it were real, it would weigh 16 kilos, that's how dense and heavy graphite is. The radio-controlled machines they used often failed to carry out commands or did the opposite of what they were supposed to do, because their electronics were disrupted by the high radiation. The most reliable “robots” were the soldiers. They were christened the “green robots" (by the color of their uniforms). Three thousand six hundred soldiers worked on the roof of the ruined reactor. They slept on the ground, they all tell of how in the beginning they were throwing straw on the ground in the tents—and the straw was coming from stacks near the reactor.

They were young guys. They're dying now, too, but they understand that if it wasn't for them . . . These are people who came from a certain culture, the culture of the great achievement. They were a sacrifice. There was a moment when there existed the danger of a nuclear explosion, and they had to get the water out from under the reactor, so that a mixture of uranium and graphite wouldn't get into it—with the water they would have formed a critical mass. The explosion would have been between three and five megatons. This would have meant that not only Kiev and Minsk, but a large part of Europe would have been uninhabitable. Can you imagine it? A European catastrophe. So here was the task: who would dive in there and open the bolt on the safety valve? They promised them a car, an apartment, a dacha, aid for their families until the end of time. They searched for volunteers. And they found them! The boys dove, many times, and they opened that bolt, and the unit was given 7000 rubles. They forgot about the cars and apartments they promised—but that's not why they dove! Not for the material, least of all for the material promises.
[Becomes upset.]
Those people don't exist anymore, just the documents in our museum, with their names. But what if they hadn't done it? In terms of our readiness for self-sacrifice, we have no equals.

Now do you understand how I see our museum? In that urn there is some land from Chernobyl. A handful. And there's a miner's helmet. Also from there. Some farmer's equipment from the Zone. We can't let the dosimeters in here—we're glowing! But everything here needs to be real. No plaster casts. People need to believe us. And they’ll only believe the real thing, because there are too many lies around Chernobyl. There were and there are still. They've even grown funds and commercial structures . . .

Since you're writing this book, you need to have a look at some unique video footage. We're gathering it little by little. It's not a chronicle of Chernobyl, no, they wouldn't let anyone film that, it was forbidden. If anyone did manage to record any of it, the authorities immediately took the film and returned it ruined. We don't have a chronicle of how they evacuated people, how they moved out the livestock. They didn’t allow anyone to film the tragedy, only the heroics. There are some Chernobyl photo albums now, but how many video and photo cameras were broken! People were dragged through the bureaucracy. It required a lot of courage to tell the truth about Chernobyl. It still does, believe me! But you need to see this footage: the blackened faces of the firemen, like graphite. And their eyes? These are the eyes of people who already know that they're leaving us. There's one fragment showing the legs of a woman who the morning after the catastrophe went to work on her plot of land next to the atomic station. She's walking on grass covered with dew. Her legs remind you of a grate, everything’s filled with holes up to the knees. You need to see this if you’re writing this book.

I come home and I can’t take my little boy in my arms. I need to drink 50 or 100 grams of vodka before I can pick him up.

There's an entire section of the museum devoted to the helicopter pilots. There’s Colonel Vodolazhsky, a Hero of Russia, buried on Belarussian ground in the village of Zhukov Lug. After he received more than the allowable dose of radiation, he was supposed to leave right away, but he stayed and trained thirty-three more helicopter crews. He himself performed 120 flights, releasing 230 tons of cargo. He made an average of between four and five flights per day, flying at 300 meters above the reactor, with the temperature in his cabin up to 60 degrees Celsius. Imagine what was happening below as the bags of sand were being dropped from above. The activity reached 1,800 roentgen per hour; pilots began to feel it while still in the air. In order to hit the target, which was a fiery crater, they stuck their heads out of their cabins and measured it with the naked eye. There was no other way. At the meetings of government commissions, every day it was stated very simply: “We'll need to put down two to three lives for this. And for this, one life.” Simply, and every day.

Colonel Vodolazhsky died. On the card indicating the amount of radiation he received above the reactor, the doctors put down 7 bees. In fact it was 600!

And the four hundred miners who worked round the clock to blast a tunnel under the reactor? They needed a tunnel into which to pour liquid nitrogen and freeze the earthen pillow, as the engineers call it. Otherwise the reactor would have gone into the groundwater. So there were miners from Moscow, Kiev, Dniepropetrovsk. I didn’t read about them anywhere. But they were down there naked, with temperatures reaching fifty degrees Celsius, rolling little cars before them while crouching down on all fours. There were hundreds of roentgen. Now they're dying. But if they hadn’t done this? I consider them heroes, not victims, of a war, which supposedly never happened. They call it an accident, a catastrophe. But it was a war. The Chernobyl monuments look like war monuments.

There are things that aren't discussed by us, this is our Slavic modesty coming through. But you should know, since you're writing this book. Those who worked on the reactor or near it, their—they—it's a common symptom for rocketeers also, this is well-known—their urino-genital system ceases to function. But no one talks of this. It’s not accepted. I once accompanied an English journalist, he had put together some very interesting questions. Specifically on this theme—he was interested in the human aspect of the story—how it is for people at home, in their family life, in their intimate life. But he wasn't able to have a single honest conversation. He asked me to get together some helicopter pilots, to talk with them in the company of men. They came, some of them were already retired at the age of thirty-five, forty, one of them came with a broken leg, his bones had deteriorated because of the radiation. But the other guys brought him. The Englishman asks them questions: How is it now with your families, with your young wives? The helicopter pilots are silent, they came to tell about their five flights a day, and he's asking about their wives? About that? So he starts asking them one by one, and they all answer the same: We're healthy, the government values us, and in our families all is love. Not one, not a single one of them opened up to him. They leave, and I feel that he’s just crushed. “Now you understand,” he says to me, “why no one believes you? You lie to yourselves.” The meeting had taken place in a cafe, and we were being served by two pretty waitresses, and he says to them: “Could you answer a few questions for me?” And they explain everything. He says, “Do you want to get married?” “Yes, but not here. We all dream of marrying a foreigner, so we can have healthy kids.” And he gets braver: “Well, and do you have partners? How are they? Do they satisfy you? You understand, right, what I mean?” “You saw those guys,” the waitresses say, laughing, “the helicopter pilots? Six feet tall. With their shiny medals. They're nice for meetings of the presidium, but not for bed.” The Englishman photographed the waitresses and to me he repeated the same thing: “Now you understand why no one believes you? You lie to yourselves.”

He and I went to the Zone. It's a well-known statistic that there are 800 waste burial sites around Chernobyl. He was expecting some fantastically engineered structures, but these were ordinary ditches. They’re filled with “orange forest,” which was cut down in an area of 150 hectares around the reactors.
[In the days after the accident, the pines and evergreens around the reactor turned red, then orange.]
They’re filled with thousands of tons of metal and steel, small pipes, special clothing, concrete constructions. He showed me a photo from an English magazine that had a panoramic view from above. You could see thousands of individual pieces of automotive and aviation machinery, fire trucks and ambulances. The biggest graveyard is next to the reactor. He wanted to photograph it, even now, ten years later. They'd promised him more money if he got a photograph of i t. So we're going around and around, from one boss to the next, one doesn't have a map, the other doesn't have permission. We ran and ran, until suddenly I realized: that graveyard no longer exists. It's just there in their account books, but it was taken apart long ago and carried off to the market, for spare parts for the collective farm and people’s homes. Everything's been stolen and moved out. The Englishman couldn't understand this. I told him the whole truth and he didn't believe me. And even I, even when I read the bravest article, I don’t believe it, I sometimes think to myself: “What if that’s also a lie?" It’s become a cliche to mark the tragedy. A way of greeting! A scarecrow!
[He is in despair, then is silent.]

I drag everything to the museum. I bring it in. Sometimes I think, “Forget it! Run away!" I mean, how am I supposed to take this?

I had a conversation once with a young priest. We were standing at the grave of Sergeant-Major Sasha Goncharov. He’d worked on the roof of the reactor. It’s snowing and the wind is blowing. Terrible weather. The minister is reading the mourning prayer without a hat on his head. “It's like you didn't feel the weather," I said to him afterward. “It's true," he said. “In moments like that I feel all-powerful. No church rite gives me so much energy as the mourning prayer." I remember that—the words of a man who was always near death. I've often asked foreign journalists, some of whom have been here many times, why they come, why they ask to get into the Zone? It would be silly to think it was just for money or for their careers. “We like it here," they say, “we get a real burst of life-energy here." It’s an unexpected answer, no? For them, I think, the sort of person we have here, his feelings, his world, are something undiscovered and hypnotic. But I didn’t ask them to clarify whether they like us ourselves, or what they can write about us, what they can understand through us.

Why do we keep hovering around death?

Chernobyl—we won't have another world now. At first, it tore the ground from under our feet, and it flung pain at us for real, but now we realize that there won't be another world, and there’s nowhere to turn to. The sense of having settled, tragically, on this land—it's a completely different worldview. People returning from the war were called a “lost” generation. We’re also lost. The only thing that hasn't changed is human suffering. It's our only capital. It's invaluable!

I come home after everything—my wife listens to me—and then she says quietly: “I love you, but I won't let you have my son. I won’t let anyone have him. Not Chernobyl, not Chechnya. Not anyone!" The fear has already settled into her.

Sergei Sobolev, deputy head of the Executive Committee of the Shield of Chernobyl Association

___

Klavdia Barsuk, wife of a liquidator; Tamara Belookaya, doctor; Yekaterina Bobrova, transferred resident from the town ofPripyat;

Andrei Burtys, journalist; Ivan Vergeychik, pediatrician; Yelena Voronko. resident of the settlement of Bragin; Svetlana Govor, wife of a liquidator; Natalya Goncharenko, transferred resident; Tamara Dubikovskaya, resident of the settlement of Narovlya; Albert Zaritskiy, doctor;AleksandraKravtsova, doctor;EleonoraLadutenko, radiologist; Irina Lukashevich, midwife; Antonina Larivonchik, transferred resident; Anatoly Polischuk, hydro-meteorologist; Maria Saveleyeva, mother; Nina Khantsevich, wife of a liquidator.

It's been a long time since I've seen a happy pregnant woman. A happy mother. One gave birth recently, as soon as she got herself together she called, “Doctor, show me the baby! Bring him here.” She touches the head, forehead, the little body, the legs, the arms. She wants to make sure: “Doctor, did I give birth to a normal baby? Is everything all right?" They bring him in for feeding. She's afraid: “I live not far from Chernobyl. I went there to visit my mother. I got caught under that black rain.”

She tells us her dreams: that she's given birth to a calf with eight legs, or a puppy with the head of a hedgehog. Such strange dreams. Women didn't used to have such dreams. Or I never heard them. And I've been a midwife for thirty years.

I'm a schoolteacher, I teach Russian. This happened, I think, in early June, during exams. The director of the school suddenly gathers us all together and announces, “Tomorrow, everyone bring your shovels with you.” It turns out we're supposed to take off the top, contaminated layer of soil from around the school, and later on soldiers will come and pave it. The teachers have questions: “What sort of protective gear will they provide us? Will they bring special outfits, respirators?" The answer is no. “Take your shovels and dig." Only two young teachers refused, the rest went out and shoveled. A feeling of oppression but also of carrying out a necessary task—that lives within us, the need to be where it’s difficult and dangerous, to defend the motherland. Did I teach my students anything but that? To go, throw yourself on the fire, defend, sacrifice. The literature I taught wasn't about life, it was about war: Sholokhov, Serafimovich, Furmanov, Fadeev, Boris Polevoy. Only two young teachers refused. But they're from the new generation. These are already different people.

We were out there digging from morning to night. When we came home, it was strange to find that the stores were open, women were buying panty hose and perfume. We already felt like it was wartime. It made a lot more sense when there suddenly appeared lines for bread, salt, matches. Everyone rushed to dry their bread into crackers. This seemed familiar to me, even though I was born after the war. I could imagine how I'd leave my house, how the kids and I would leave, which things we’d take with us, how I'd write my mother. Although all around life was going on as before, the television was showing comedies. But we always lived in terror, we know how to live in terror, it's our natural habitat.