Failure of Communism Museum

On November 13, 2004, my wife and I toured the Chornobyl nuclear dead zone (usually transliterated from Russian as Chernobyl). With us were our buddy Kostya and Lesya’s coworker, Vasiliy.

Our radioactive day actually began while we were still on the road to Chornobyl. I have mentioned the strange Ukrainian proclivity for song remixes in other travel posts, but it seemed that the nearer we approached Chornobyl, the more the songs mutated. Just after we left the outskirts of Kyiv, I heard a Jungle remix of Stairway to Heaven, sung by a lounge singer with a voice uncannily like that of Sheryl Crow. An hour later, as we approached the boarder of the restricted area, the music descended into a thumping base dance mix of... California Dreamin’. During our day in the dead zone, I would feel confounded, saddened, incensed, but never again as damaged by unseen particles floating through the air as just before radio coverage gave out.

Lungs of the World

At the border of the restricted area, the guards phoned the Chornobyl headquarters of the tour company we were using. Our guide warned us that the guards had wide latitude to turn us back. We already knew: the last time we’d attempted to visit, the agency had called to postpone because an official government delegation was touring the site. This set of guards seemed to us to take a long time in talking.

We were in luck. They hashed out the details with our guide and waved us through. No need even for the bribes one came to expect during the Kuchma days.


The Chornobyl area Our guide was to meet us on the border of the town of Chornobyl, which is not actually the famed “ghost town” created by the accident. The ghost town is the much smaller town of Prypat, located directly next to the reactor. In the satellite image to the left, Prypat is the cluster of buildings adjacent to the reactor. (image: Wikipedia, please click on any of the thumbnails in this document to see the full pictures)

Even before meeting our guide, we were amazed at the amount of life there is in the area. When we first got in, we saw almost a dozen stray dogs, a cute little puppy, and a stray cat. In the man-made lake formerly used to cool the many reactors in the area, there were carp almost as big as the stray cats. Large populations of wild boar, moose, and wolves, are said to live there as well as the endangered Przhevalski horses, released back into the area as an experiment by extraordinarily clever biologists and ecologists.

As Mary Mycio, an expert on Chornobyl, said of the area:

There are no mutants. In the wild, mutants die. And if the animals live long enough to reproduce, they are biologically successful—even if they may be dying earlier because of radiation-related ailments.

For this reason, the Chornobyl zone is home to one of the healthiest ecosystems in Eastern Europe, because what the animals might be losing from radiation ailments, they are gaining with interest in hunting-free living. The plants also were thriving. Again and again I would look around and see trees and bushes bursting out on all sides, tearing up the concrete and breaking through the buildings in their haste to reclaim the abandoned areas of town.

Just before we got to the “City of Chornobyl” sign, where we were to meet our guide, I saw one of the many sloganeering placards so prevalent in Communist days, standing by a thick grove of trees. “Forests are the lungs of the world,” it said.

Our Guide, Vladimir

our guide Vladimir

Our guide’s name was Vladimir, and he was a former resident of Prypat, the atomic ghost town. He was thus able to share not just the history of the town, but his own as well.

Vladimir had been living in the area with his wife and son when the explosion occurred. Just before the evacuation, Vladimir brought his son to the doctors for testing, and the boy had registered 16 roentgens, an amount so large that the nurse conducting the test broke down crying. The amount is equal to the average 60-year lifetime dosage of an adult. Vladimir’s son was five.

Worse even than the harm that the accident might have done to his son was the reaction of the authorities. We’ve all probably heard about the Soviet government’s crude attempt at a cover-up followed by its casual disregard for its own citizens during the clean up. An additional brutality was that doctors were ordered to abort the unborn children being carried by mothers in the area, presumably because the Soviet government feared the pictures of mutated kids that might reach the public. One of Vladimir’s friends has a son, Ilya, who is only alive today because his friend was able to smuggle Ilya’s mother out of the hospital before the doctors got to her.

After the initial shock, former residents of the ten-kilometer (6.2 mile)-diameter Chornobyl restricted were left to humiliating neglect. Work was never easy for outsiders to find in the Soviet Union, and the fall of Communism didn’t help matters. Those who had worked in the reactor found themselves with impressive resumes that the handful of remaining nuclear facilities wouldn’t even consider. The rest were just more unemployed refugees, often promised government compensation for their loss, but seldom paid.

For reasons such as these, it is little wonder that Vladimir and his friends have been plagued by depression since the disaster. Vladimir chose to be a guide because, even though he and his family deplore the health risks and have few good memories of the area that lasted the blast, he could not find other options as an unemployed refugee in Kyiv. Vladimir is not alone. He estimated the current population of Chornobyl at 4,000, down from 17,000 before the blast, with another 300 stubborn hold-outs scattered outside the city. Occasionally he goes out to meet the trolleybus carrying other Chornobyl workers even less fortunate than he, just to give his fellows a warm greeting.

Despite his troubles, Vladimir’s stony expression and blunt dissatisfaction were overmatched by a genuine interest in us as guests, and a willingness to help answer all of our (many) questions.

An Invisible Swamp

Ecologically clean, really

Before leaving Chornobyl to head for the reactor, we stopped by a café for a bad cup of tea and baloney sandwiches. I was hungry enough to swallow it all down, along with the line that the food was safe because it had been brought in from areas beyond the edge of the restricted zone just recently.

According to Vladimir, because some plants concentrate radiation and some do not, while all Chornobyl mushrooms are poisonous, I could drink Chornobyl apple juice, or pick Chornobyl strawberries, and they would be perfectly fine.

I had also thought of radiation as a set of invisible force field. If I plotted out the bad areas from space, there would be a set of concentric circles around the plant, with each small circle indicating a certain rise in the amount of radiation. The actual picture is more like an enormous swamp with scattered pockets of quicksand. Some areas of the town of Chornobyl are cleaner than Kyiv. In fact, there is one area of Kyiv, the benighted soon-to-be-slum of Troyeshchina, which was unfortunate enough to have a particularly large cloud of radiation descend upon it. It now has significantly higher levels of radiation than much of the restricted zone, with the exception of Prypat and the immediate vicinity of the reactor. This is still less than one ten-thousandth of a roentgen per hour, (compared to natural background levels ranging from one ten-millionth to one hundred-thousandth).

Scientists know that 500 roentgen per hour will kill a human in five hours. The firefighters who were given nothing but useless thermal suits and sent out to die were hit with about 1000 roentgens each for over an hour, multiple times. Helicopter pilots who also eventually died from radiation burn
Chernobyl pedestrians and motoristss received while dumping sand on the smoldering plant performed an average of 1800 flights each, at 80 roentgens per flight. At the tiny ten-thousandth to one-hundred-thousandth of a roentgen per hour levels in the Chornobyl area today, there is little evidence of clear physical harm from radiation, even for people like Vladimir who work in the area for month-long shifts.

From the café window, we could see a handful of Vladimir’s fellow residents walking or driving around outside. When we had first arrived, I’d smelled cutlets frying, not the nuclear waste I was still a little afraid would be sitting around in big barrels. Between the food, the run-down buildings, and the handful of pedestrians, Chornobyl seemed hardly less vital than many other heavily-depopulated small towns in Ukraine. Yet we left the town to see the deadliest nuclear reactor in the world, entombed in a heavy concrete and steel sarcophagus.

The Engine of Destruction

the Chornobyl Atomic Energy StationThe reactor itself bore a strange resemblance to an old, gray car engine. It was squat, heavy, and metallic, rather loaf-shaped, with huge numbers of buttresses rising up on all sides and looking like valves and pistons.

There wasn’t much to do except stare at the monster and imagine what it must have been like when it blew up. Vladimir said that particles from the cloud it launched into the air traveled around the Earth twice. The total amount of radioactive contamination from the blast was 400 times that of the Hiroshima bomb.

Radiation Hotspots Because of the wind pattern in the few days after the blast, the cloud blew out over a larger area of Belarus than Ukraine. (image: Wikipedia) Despite the major contamination suffered in a number of towns in Belarus, the situation could have been much worse. The way the wind blew, Kyiv, only 50 kilometers (30 miles) away, received a relatively mild dose of radiation. If the cloud had blown directly toward the city, millions of people would either have been heavily contaminated or evacuated.

Probably contaminated. In their continuing gross disregard for the lives of citizens, the Soviet government held the usual Labor Day celebration in the capital five days after the exjust so you know we (and the alien spores) were thereplosion, just as if nothing had happened. The combination of devastation from the blast and gross disregard for human life afterwards is often cited as a significant factor contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The great metal and concrete mound that I was staring at had probably contributed to the destruction of the Soviet Union.

 But that was almost twenty years earlier. Standing in front of the shaky sarcophagus in 2004, none of that was visible. All I saw was a hulking shell and an odd little bronze monument out front that seemed to depict alien spores or Brussels sprouts. I was told the monument predated the accident. Maybe the radiation got to it.

My ability to try to picture the disaster scene was shattered when not one, but three of our mobile phones went off. We moved on to the ghost town of Prypat.

Bitter and Wistful at Once

“The Party of Lenin is the Power of the People that Will Lead Us to The Triumph of Communism!” cried a crumbling slogan on the side of an apartment building. I smiled a mean-spirited little smile.

“We’re for peace; war we don’t need! – That’s Friendly Group’s basic creed” said a little framed picture in a nearby elementary school. I suddenly felt embarrassed about my gloating—far better if Communism had fallen without leaving behind this legacy.

stalactites on the Palace of CultureThe rest of the town was like that. I saw ‘Energetic – The Palace of Culture’. Thin yellow stalactites were hanging beneath its entryway. Later I saw the music room at the elementary school, which saddened me in a way that some of the other rooms hadn't. It might have been the carefully chalked scales on the back chalkboard, or the messages, with phone numbers, chalked on the front board by former residents trying to find each other again after the evacuation scattered them across the country.

a photo from a school album “While Imperialism Survives…” a black and yellow poster depicting nuclear proliferation warned the five- to twelve-year-olds. “Peace is the happiness of children,” said a nearby framed picture.

“Our Power is Incalculable!” cried a red and black poster of an idealized Soviet worker lying amid the trash underneath a school desk. “At the Lesson Today” said a corner of the foreign language classroom, in English.

“Prypat used to be a prestigious place to live,” said Vladimir. The city was only an hour from Kyiv, and along the railroad tracks a day’s ride from Moscow. It was far enough away for it to be a good place for Kyiv elites to come for a rest. And it had its own Atomic Energy Station, which meant good high-tech jobs.”

Our Power is Incalculable! “The better off kids could even watch movies at night, and there was an all-night store,” Vladimir said, “your wife can tell you that meant it was a pretty important town in 1986. Lesya heartily agreed; in the strict Soviet system, tiny-seeming perks such as these were clear indications of elite status to Soviet citizens.

From the roof of an apartment building, we could see the theater where the lucky children could watch movies, as well as a rusting Ferris wheel that had gotten put in just before the accident. The sidewalks below were nearly invisible beneath the soaring trees. On the way back down, we ducked into many of the apartments. All the valuable items had already been taken by the owners, or taken after the owners left. Here and there were remnants of life: an old newspaper, a bottle of vodka, four pairs of children’s shoes, and a bent bicycle frame. A thin, four foot tall sapling was growing right up through the middle of a corner room.

Driving on, Vladimir pointed out the town’s old sports stadium, which had once been a source of pride. The place he was pointing looked to me like a small Christmas-tree farm, and I couldn’t see any bleachers. Before we left, Vladimir mentioned one slogan that was taken down after the disaster: a big sign that said “Let the atom be a worker not a warrior!”

Heading Home

We’d gotten a rather late start on our tour, so there wasn’t time to see the vehicle graveyard, where the firefighters ditched their radioactive trucks, or a local church Vladimir recommended visiting, or some of the other famous sites of the area. After Prypat, we dropped Vladimir off at his office, promising to go on a tour with him again some time. Then we drove out.

Przhevalski HorsesUnwilling to let us go in such a somber mood, Chornobyl gave us one last surprise. In a field not more than fifty yards from the main road we saw real Przhevalski horses. They were stumpy little creatures, but heavily muscled. The group consisted of one male horse guarding two females. My friends acted as my better judgment and held me back from going to get a close-up shot. Even at fifty yards the stallion was eyeing me suspiciously.

the Chornobyl monument

The last thing we saw was the Chornobyl monument, a collection of rather ghoulish-looking statues depicting the engineers and firefighters who tried to bring the blast back under control. But the monument was built with foreign donations—even the post-Communist Eastern European governments, it seems, hadn’t wanted to acknowledge this failure of the Soviet Union too clearly.

Appedix: Pictures, Other Articles, and Options for Visiting Chornobyl Yourself

Additional Pictures from our Trip: this is our gallery of all the best pictures from our trip. 

Chornobyl - a disaster that has become a moral category: Please read this fabulous article by a woman who was living in Kyiv in April 1986, and who has subsequently tracked down government documents, personal letters, and other documents on the event.

Questions from the Chornobyl zone: Another good article I mentioned above, by Mary Mycio, author of “Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl.”

Most of the pictures not taken by me come from the Wikipedia entries on Chornobyl and the Chornobyl accident.

As I found out during our visit, Chornobyl tours have become official enough that getting in is no longer a matter of furtive bribe-giving and rushing about with eyes averted from passers-by. One blogger I found recently said he was able find four-person tours for $100 per person from the UK. We got in for the silly price of $150 total, but Lesya was working in a tour agency, so we know where to look.

We, of course, got help from Lesya's company when we visited (IBIS Tours: www.uatour.com) Please comment this article if you have recommendations of your own (for or against)! I'd love to have more than just one option to recommend to people.