Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (6 page)

*

I was called. My assignment was not to let any of the old inhabitants back into the evacuated villages. We set up roadblocks, built observation posts. They called us "partisans," for some reason. It's peacetime, and we’re standing there in military fatigues. The farmers didn’t understand why, for example, they couldn't take a bucket from their yard, or a pitcher, saw, axe. Why they couldn't harvest the crops. How do you tell them? And in fact it was like this: on one side of the road there were soldiers, keeping people out, and on the other side cows were grazing, the harvesters were buzzing, the grain was being shipped. The old women would come and cry: “Boys, let us in. It’s our land. Our houses." They'd bring eggs, bacon, homemade vodka. They cried over their poisoned land. Their furniture. Their things.

Your mind would turn over. The order of things was shaken. A woman would milk her cow, and next to her there'd be a soldier to make sure that when she was done milking, she poured the milk out on the ground. An old woman carries a basket of eggs, and next to her there’s a soldier to make sure she buries them. The farmers were raising their precious potatoes, harvesting them very quietly, but in fact they had to be buried. The worst part was, the least comprehensible part, everything was so—beautiful! That was the worst. All around, it was just beautiful. I would never see such people again. Everyone’s faces just looked crazy. Their faces did, and so did ours.

*

I’m a soldier. If I'm ordered to do something, I need to do it. But I felt this desire to be a hero, too. You were supposed to. The political workers gave speeches. There were items on the radio and television. Different people reacted differently: some wanted to be interviewed, show up on television, and some just saw it as their job, and then a third type—I met people like this, they felt they were doing heroic work. We were well paid, but it was as if that didn't matter. My salary was 400 rubles, whereas there I got 1000 (that’s in those Soviet rubles). Later people said, “They got piles of money and now they come back and get the first cars, the first furniture sets." Of course it stings. Because there was that heroic aspect, also.

I was scared before I went there. For a little while. But then when I got there the fear went away. It was all orders, work, tasks. I wanted to see the reactor from above, from a helicopter—I wanted to see what had really happened in there. But that was forbidden. On my medical card they wrote that I got 21 roentgen, but I'm not sure that's right. The procedure was very simple: you flew to the provincial capital, Chernobyl (which is a small provincial town, by the way, not something enormous, as I'd imagined), there's a man there with a dosimeter, 10-15 kilometers away from the power station, he measures the background radiation. These measurements would then be multiplied by the number of hours that we flew each day. But I would go from there to the reactor, and some days there'd be 80 roentgen, some days 120. Sometimes at night I'd circle over the reactor for two hours. We photographed it with infrared lighting, but the pieces of scattered graphite on the film were, like, radiated—you couldn't see them during the day.

I talked to some scientists. One told me, “I could lick your helicopter with my tongue and nothing would happen to me." Another said, “You're flying without protection? You don't want to live too long? Big mistake! Cover yourselves!" We lined the helicopter seats with lead, made ourselves some lead vests, but it turns out those protect you from one type of ray, but not from another. We flew from morning to night. There was nothing spectacular in it. Just work, hard work. At night we watched television—the World Cup was on, so we talked a lot about soccer.

We started thinking about it—I guess it must have been—three years later. One of the guys got sick, then another. Someone died. Another went insane and killed himself. That's when we started thinking. But we'll only really understand in about 20-30 years. For me, Afghanistan (I was there two years) and then Chernobyl (I was there three months), are the most memorable moments of my life.

I didn’t tell my parents I'd been sent to Chernobyl. My brother happened to be reading
Izvestia
one day and saw my picture. He brought it to our mom. “Look," he says, “he's a hero!" My mother started crying.

*

We were driving, and you know what I saw? By the side of the road? Under a ray of light—this thin little sliver of light—something crystal. These . . . We were going in the direction of

Kalinkovich, through Mozyr. Something glistened. We talked about it—in the village where we worked, we all noticed there were tiny little holes in the leaves, especially on the cherry trees. We’d pick cucumbers and tomatoes—and the leaves would have these black holes. We'd curse and eat them.

I went. I didn't have to go. I volunteered. At first you didn't see any indifferent people there, it was only later that you saw the emptiness in their eyes, when they got used to it. I was after a medal? I wanted benefits? Bullshit! I didn't need anything for myself An apartment, a car—what else? Right, a dacha. I had all those things. But they appealed to our sense of masculinity. Manly men were going off to do this important thing. And everyone else? They can hide under women’s skirts, if they want. There were guys with pregnant wives, others had little babies, a third had burns. They all cursed to themselves and came anyway.

We came home. I took off all the clothes that I'd worn there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain . . . You can write the rest of this yourself. I don’t want to talk anymore.

*

I had just come home from Afghanistan. I wanted to live a little, get married. I wanted to get married right away. And suddenly here’s this announcement with a red banner, “Special Call-Up,” come to this address within the hour. Right away my mother started crying. She thought I was being called up again for the war.

Where are we going? Why? There was no information at all.

At the Slutsk station, we changed trains, they gave us equipment, and then we were told that we were going to the Khoyniki regional center. We got to Khoyniki, and people there didn't know anything. They took us further, to a village, and there’s a wedding going on: young people dancing, music, vodka. Just a normal marriage. And we have an order: get rid of the topsoil to the depth of one spade.

On May 9, V-Day, a general came. They lined us up, congratulated us on the holiday. One of the guys got up the courage and asked, “Why aren’t they telling us the radiation levels? What kind of doses are we getting?" Just one guy. Well, after the general left, the brigadier called him in and gave him hell. “That's a provocation! You’re an alarmist!" A few days later they gave us some gas masks, but no one used them. They showed us dosimeters a couple of times, but they never actually handed them to us. Once every three months they let us go home for a few days. We had one goal then: to buy vodka. I lugged back two backpacks filled with bottles. The guys raised me up on their shoulders.

Before we went home we were called in to talk to a KGB man. He was very convincing when he said we shouldn't talk to anyone, anywhere, about what we'd seen. When I made it back from Afghanistan, I knew that I’d live. Here it was the opposite: it'd kill you only after you got home.

What do I remember? What stuck in my memory?

I've spent all day riding through all the villages, measuring the radiation. And not one of the women offers me an apple. The men are less afraid: they'll come up to me and offer some vodka, some lard. Let's eat. It's awkward to turn them down, but then eating pure cesium doesn’t sound so great, either. So I drink, but I don't eat.

But in one village they do sit me down at the table—grilled lamb and everything. The host gets a little drunk and admits it was a young lamb. “I had to slaughter him. I couldn't stand to look at him anymore. He was the ugliest damn thing! Almost makes me not want to eat him." Me: I just drink a whole glass of vodka real quick. After hearing that . . .

It was ten years ago. It’s as if it never happened, and if I hadn’t gotten sick, I'd have forgotten by now.

You have to serve the motherland! Serving—that’s a big deal. I received: underwear, boots, cap, pants, belt, clothing sack. And off you go! They gave me a dump truck. I moved concrete. There it was—and there it wasn’t. We were young, unmarried. We didn't take any gas masks. There was one guy— he was older. He always wore his mask. But we didn’t. The traffic guys didn’t wear theirs. We were in the driver’s cabin, but they were out in radioactive dust eight hours a day. Everyone got paid well: three times your salary plus vacation pay. We used it. We knew that vodka helped. It removed the stress. It’s no wonder they gave people those 100 grams of vodka during the war. And then it was just like home: a drunk traffic cop fines a drunk driver.

Don’t call these the “wonders of Soviet heroism" when you write about it. Those wonders really did exist. But first there had to be incompetence, negligence, and only after those did you get wonders: covering the embrasure, throwing yourself in front of a machine gun. But that those orders should never have been given, that there shouldn’t have been any need, no one writes about that. They flung us there, like sand onto the reactor. Every day they’d put out a new “Action Update": “men are working courageously and selflessly," “we will survive and triumph."

They gave me a medal and one thousand rubles.

*

At first there was disbelief, there was the sense that it was a game. But it was a real war, an atomic war. We had no idea— what's dangerous and what’s not, what should we watch out for, and what to ignore? No one knew.

It was a real evacuation, right to the train stations. What happened at the stations? We helped push kids through the windows of the train cars. We made the lines orderly—for tickets at the ticket window, for iodine at the pharmacy. In the lines people swore at one another and fought. They broke the doors down on stores and stands. They broke the metal grates in the windows.

Then there were the people from other places. They lived in clubs, schools, kindergartens. They walked around half-starving. Everyone’s money ran out pretty fast. They bought up everything from the stores. I'll never forget the women who did the laundry. There were no washing machines, no one thought to bring those, so they washed by hand. All the women were elderly. Their hands were covered with boils and scabs. The laundry wasn't just dirty, it also had a few dozen roentgen. “Boys, have something to eat." “Boys, take a nap." “Boys, you’re young, be careful." They felt sorry for us, they cried for us.

Are they still alive?

Every April 26, we get together, the guys who were there. We remember how it was. You were a soldier, at war, you were necessary. We forget the bad parts and remember that. We remember that they couldn't have made it without us. Our system, it's a military system, essentially, and it works great in emergencies. You're finally free there, and necessary. Freedom! And in those times the Russian shows how great he is. How unique. We'll never be Dutch or German. And we'll never have proper asphalt and manicured lawns. But there'll always be plenty of heroes.

*

They made the call, and I went. I had to! I was a member of the Party. Communists, march! That's how it was. I was a police officer—senior lieutenant. They promised me another “star." This was June of 1987. You were supposed to get a physical, but they just sent me without it. Someone, you know, got off, brought a note from his doctor that he had an ulcer, and I went in his place. It was urgent!
[Laughs]
There were already jokes. Guy comes home from work, says to his wife, “They told me that tomorrow I either go to Chernobyl or hand in my Party card." “But you’re not in the Party." “Right, so I’m wondering: how do I get a Party card by tomorrow morning?"

We went as soldiers, but at first they organized us into a masonry brigade. We built a pharmacy. Right away I felt weak and sleepy all the time. I told the doctor I was fine, it was just the heat. The cafeteria had meat, milk, sour cream from the collective farm, and we ate it all. The doctor didn't say anything. They'd make the food, he'd check with his book that everything was fine, but he never took any samples. We noticed that. That's how it was. We were desperate. Then the strawberries started coming, and there was honey everywhere.

The looters had already been there. We boarded up windows and doors. The stores were all looted, the grates on the windows broken in, flour and sugar on the floor, candy. Cans everywhere. One village got evacuated, and then five to ten kilometers over, the next village didn't. They brought all the stuff over from the evacuated village. That's how it was. We're guarding the place, and the former head of the collective farm arrives with some of the local people, they’ve already been resettled, they have new homes, but they've come back to collect the crops and sow new ones. They drove the straw out in bales. We found sewing machines and motorcycles in the bales. There was a barter system—they give you a bottle of homemade vodka, you give them permission to transport the television. We were selling and trading tractors and sowing machines. One bottle, or ten bottles. No one was interested in money.
[Laughs.)
It was like Communism. There was a tax for everything: a canister of gas—that’s half a liter of vodka; an astrakhan fur coat—two liters; and motorcycles—variable. I spent six months there, that was the assignment. And then replacements came. We actually stayed a little longer, because the troops from the Baltic states refused to come. That's how it was. But I know people robbed the place, took out everything they could lift and carry. They transported the Zone back here. You can find it at the markets, the pawn shops, at people's dachas. The only thing that remained behind the wire was the land. And the graves. And our health. And our faith. Or my faith.

*

We got to the place. Got our equipment. “Just an accident," the captain tells us. “Happened a long time ago. Three months. It's not dangerous anymore." “It's fine," says the sergeant. “Just wash your hands before you eat."