Hello? Is There Anybody In There?

     As a warning, this will be a very long post. It's been a post three days in-the-making. Grab a cup of coffee or tea and relax. You'll be here for a while.

     So, I've had some time to digest the events of Saturday (April 30th) and I want to share my thoughts on the visit to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. I'll say now that it will not be what you expect. The trip wasn't what I expected. This was a trip of excitement, disappointment, disillusionment, and frustration. Expectations were tempered and broken. The upside is that I now have a more accurate idea of what has been happening in the Zone up to the current day. People change everything they touch. Chernobyl and Pripyat are no exception.

     First, a little background. If you read the post from April 26th, you'll have seen my reason for going. This place has fascinated me for years. The mystery and allure of a place, though, often overshadow reality. I wanted to see the Exclusion Zone for myself. To be able to stand on the same ground that saw so much drama and action. To see the hastily constructed sarcophagus with my own eyes. In some ways, it felt like standing on a battlefield years after the event. Much of the area is now a historical site. "Preserved" for future generations.

     Since about ten years ago, regular people have been able to visit the Zone on short trips for tourism or curiosity. It's actually been possible to visit for scientific reasons since it was established in 1986. Thanks to the popularity of video games and films depicting the "wasteland" that is the Zone, civilians have flocked to the area to see the sights with their own eyes.

     I don't count myself among the fans of films or games. I was more interested in the history of the area. I wanted to see exactly where certain events played out thirty years ago. So I signed up for a tour. My group consisted of several Americans, Germans, a Brit, a Dane, a Chinese man and a couple from France. It cost me $122 for a 1-day tour in English, a meal in the Zone and a rented dosimeter. To allay any fears, the meal was safe. It was made with food shipped in from outside the Zone.

     The tour guide had a very specific route that they needed to follow. The schedule of stops was flexible. But we were only allowed to visit certain things. Before even stepping into the Zone, they have to file paperwork with the officials in charge of the Zone. They need to specify the who, what, when and where of the trip to get permission. That is why going with a guide is important.

     Now, the most important question. Was it safe? For the relatively short time that I was there, yes it was safe. Radiation levels all over the Zone vary depending on where the worst fallout was from the accident. The tour guides know these areas well. They know where to walk, what not to touch, and when to be cautious. With the exception of the memorial near Reactor Number Four, they also didn't lead us into areas with high radiation levels. The background radiation levels over much of the Zone are barely higher than in Kiev. 

     When we left Vokzal in Kiev, the meter was reading 0.13 uSv/h. At the meal, it read 0.16. The highest reading I saw all day was 16.16 uSv/h. That was when I held the meter directly above one of the few hotspots we were shown. Speaking of which, the tour guides know where all of these are. They encourage you to hold your meter near the spot to read what levels of radiation are coming off of it. But they also say, "don't place any of your things on the spot or touch it." By the end of the day, my dosimeter said that I had received a total radiation dose of 0.003 mSv. By comparison, an international flight crew will receive up to 3 mSv for a whole year of pan-Atlantic travel. In the picture to the right, you can see the highest reading I got standing outside of Reactor Number Four. This was at a distance of three hundred meters. I believe the dosimeter started beeping at any reading above 2.00 uSv/h.

     Over the course of the day, we made our way from the entrance of the Exclusion Zone up through Chernobyl, past the power plant, and on to Pripyat. The map on the right shows the layout of the major points of interest in the Zone. The yellow line shows where we traveled during the day. The first checkpoint is just off the bottom of the map. We arrived there a little after 10AM. It's an interesting place. On a long road, a group of buildings huddle around a random point in the middle of nowhere. A guard shack, several covered garages, and several outbuildings. It's the first indication that something is different about what lies beyond. That and the barbed wire fences. From there, we traveled farther north up the road to our first stop at the village of Zalissya. We walked around there for a bit before moving on to the town of Chernobyl. It has become a strictly-policed, working town. The few bars are only allowed to sell alcohol during certain hours of the day. It also is home to one of the fire stations that sent firefighters to the power plant on the night of the disaster. They lost thirty of their own that night.

     After the town of Chernobyl, we continued the journey to the actual power plant. Along the way, we stopped in Leliv for another checkpoint and at Kopachi to see a kindergarten. On the road after Kopachi, we caught our first glimpse of the New Safe Confinement arch. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is situated on a massive facility. While operational, it was home to four operational reactors. Two more were under construction with as many as six planned after those. The disaster at Reactor Number Four put a halt to construction on Reactors Five and Six as well as any future plans. On the ground, nearly between the NSC and Reactor Number Four, we visited a memorial and were able to get our first and best look at the current situation at the power plant.
     It's a strange feeling standing on a historical site. Knowing the ground under my feet could kill me if I stayed too long or dug too deep was a sobering thought. At the same time, I wanted to be able to walk under the NSC arch, to see the displaced lid of the reactor, stand at the base of the walls of the sarcophagus. Basically, I wanted a closer look. But short of getting a job there, that'll never happen.

     From there, we got back on the road and continued on to the crossroads at the Pripyat sign. Here, we took more photos, measured some more radiation and learned the location of the "red forest." This was an area of forest that received such a huge amount of radioactive fallout that the leaves died and turned red. It was actually not far from where we were standing. But as part of the liquidation, it was cut down and buried.

     The next stop on the tour was the actual town of Pripyat. At the time of the disaster, this was home to many of the workers at the Chernobyl power plant. By Soviet standards, this was a wonderful place to live. It had many amenities that major cities like Kiev didn't have. We walked around the town for about two hours. Without a map, it would be easy to get lost. Road signs, and in fact roads, are hard to find. You need a guide if you are to safely navigate the city.

     This is where the tour started to go downhill emotionally for me. I'll explain later on. But in short, this city has had thirty years to be picked over by scavengers, looters and reporters. About the only things in their natural place are buildings. The remaining possessions of the former residents have either been returned or turned into props for tourist's enjoyment.

     We walked through the palace of culture (a stand-in for church in the USSR), the amusement park, the football field, a school, and a residential high-rise.

      After Pripyat, we all boarded the bus again and drove to the mess hall for lunch. Like I said up above, the meal was safe from harmful radiation. The borsch was very good. In fact, the whole meal was good. I'm becoming a fan of traditional Ukrainian meals. It was much better than I was expecting to get outside of a Puzata Hata-made or home-made meal. Before getting lunch, we passed through our first radiation check of the day. The machines examine specific parts of your body for radioactive particles that are caught on your clothing or skin. I had seen one of these machines before at the Chernobyl museum here in Kiev. This time, I got to see what it was like in operation.

     After lunch, we only had one more stop on the itinerary. The secret military town of Chernobyl 2 and the Duga over-the-horizon radar array. The secret town is located at the end of a long, bumpy concrete road. During the time of the USSR, on maps it was marked as a non-operational children's camp. There is even a bus stop at the entrance to the road where the kids could wait for their bus. Since this was a military-only area, it was free of the staging we saw throughout Pripyat. Instead, we could see how it looked after being picked over by scrap-metal hunters and looters. This was much closer to the image in my head of the Zone. Abandoned buildings, broken equipment, faded paint, and the broken vestiges of Communist agitprop.

Panorama of the base of the Duga Array. The smaller array is far off to the right. It's only 90 meters high.

     By far, the Duga array was my favorite stop of the day. If I'd been able to walk through the New Safe Confinement and at the base of the old sarcophagus, then it would have lost that position. But for me, the steel structure of the Duga captured my attention like few other things in the Zone did. Probably, it was the sheer size of the thing. I wish we had more time to see it up close. I was only able to walk around and under it. We couldn't climb it's 150 meters to survey the Zone due to time and safety constraints. But I'd have gladly done it.
     Nothing can prepare you for the sense of scale you receive standing at the base of the Duga array. When the average height of a human is about 1.7 meters, few things can dwarf you like a wall of steel 150 meters high. The Soviets really knew how to build big things. This impressive piece of Cold War technology will continue to impress people for decades to come. Even though I've never seen them in person, I would put this on par with the pyramids of Giza.
     Standing at the base of the Duga-1 array, I made a startling discovery. When the wind is just right, the Duga sings. It's not a sweet, melodic tune. It's more like a wail, a moan, a howl, or a banshee call. A single somber note that changes slightly in pitch with the speed of the wind whistling through the wires. To me, it was a sad song telling of the death of this area. Of everything I saw on the trip, that single experience made the biggest impact on me. In the shadow of this massive construction, I tried to imagine what it must have looked like in the uncertain years of the Cold War. The singing of the Duga couldn't have sounded any different in those days. In the quiet hours of the night, would soldiers listen to it's wail and imagine the wail of warning sirens joining it's song?
     As I wandered the grounds of this once-secret military base, the image that came to mind was Ezekiel and the valley of dry bones. Computer parts, shells of radios, husks of military trucks, buildings, and propaganda all lay scattered across the area. I wondered what life might have been like living behind the Iron Curtain and under fear of capitalism. The array was built as an early-warning radar system to detect the launch of American nuclear missiles aimed at the heart of the Soviet Union. Would they wait with fear, trepidation or boredom as the Duga sang its song?

     By the time we left the grounds of the Duga, I was worn out. Physically and emotionally. In part, I was glad to leave. I just wanted to go to bed and sleep. Before that, we stopped at a memorial for the fallen fire fighters. We also had to pass through two more radiation checks before exiting; one at the Leliv checkpoint and the final at the entrance to the Zone. No one had to leave any clothing in the Zone. The Chinese man in the group went through one of the radiation detectors and had a "false positive" prevent him from passing. He tried another machine and it let him pass. The tour guide claimed it was a faulty machine. From there, it took over two hours but I finally made it home before 9:30PM.

Looking down the road away from the Zone.

      On my way to the Zone, I had several expectations. Desolation, destruction, depression. I did see those to one extent or another. But one word I didn't expect to come to mind was "life." Life abounds in the Zone. I caught glimpses of wild horses and a fox. Insects bothered us all day long. Birds called their songs from tree limbs. The trees and flowers were in full bloom, showing colors as vibrant as any other in the world. But human life is conspicuously absent. If you start walking down a side path, the sounds of tourists and trucks are quickly swallowed by the foliage. Thirty years on from the accident and nature is quickly working to reclaim what once belonged to flora and fauna.

The Palace of Culture

      Often people miss the forest for the trees. In Pripyat, it's easy to miss the trees for the city. Looking at the crumbling decay, it's easy to fail to see the situation for what it is. Get too involved in looking at what was and you can fail to see what might be. We humans are merely temporal. We live a finely balanced, fragile existence. Stray too far to one side or the other, towards hubris or apathy, and our cities will look like Pripyat.
     There are few places in the world that make me feel like an outsider. I feel at home in a forest. Comfortable. Relaxed. But in the forest that is now Pripyat, I felt out of place. Not like I was being watched by a malevolent force. But rather, it felt like I was in a place I didn't belong. As if the city were saying, "Let me sleep." As if Tolkien's army of the Dead would at any minute step out from the buildings and deliver their famous line.

“The way is shut. It was made by those who are Dead, and the Dead keep it, until the time comes. The way is shut.”

     One thing I didn't like, that becomes a bigger and bigger issue the more I think of it, is the staged nature of it all. I heard several times before visiting is that there isn't an original shot to be made in Pripyat. And it's true. Our tour guide told us as we left one small village that when the area was opened to reporters in the past decade, many set up dolls and gas-masks for added emotion in their photos. A place like this doesn't need added emotion. Isn't the real human story emotional enough? Unfortunately, some people don't think so. Many of those props still stand today.
     The most uncomfortable part about visiting Pripyat wasn't knowing what happened. It wasn't knowing that nearly 50,000 people once called this place home. It wasn't even knowing that so many thousands have died as a result of the accident. I felt every time I looked into a room, through a window, or at the decaying buildings that I knew most of what I saw was staged for my enjoyment. Because of that knowledge, as the day went on, I felt more and more like a peeping Tom, a voyeur, and an interloper. Fortunately, by the time we moved on to the DUGA array, that feeling mostly went away. There, the props of decay weren't so obviously staged. The discomfort, however, started the moment we entered the first building in downtown Pripyat. I had an inkling of that feeling at our first stop in Zalissya.

     Zalissya was a small town on the road to Chernobyl. It was big enough to have it's own small produkti (grocery story). Up until about a year ago, it even had one self-settled resident. She was an old woman who simply needed to live her last years in her own home. However, she died not long ago and her possessions were scattered around her old home as if they'd been rummaged through by dozens of tourists. We saw a similar situation in our next stop.
     Kopachi was another village much closer to the power plant. In the months after the disaster as part of the liquidation, all but three buildings were bulldozed and buried. One of the surviving buildings is a former kindergarten. When I stepped through the double front doors, I began to realize the depths of staging the Zone has undergone. Books were laid out to specific pages. Dolls sat in chairs waiting for gullible tourists to snap photos. Beds lined the walls like perfect soldiers on a battlefield's disarray. The whole scene had a rummaged-through quality to it. It felt unnatural.
     Thus, by the time we stepped off the bus and into Pripyat proper, I was beginning to dread what I might see. I even felt the first rotting threads of self-loathing worming their way through me. Every step only reinforced that feeling. About half-way through our walk among down-town Pripyat, my last vestiges of hope in the situation snapped. We walked into yet another building, nearly indistinguishable from the rest, and our tour guide says "we're next going to the gas mask room." Anyone remotely familiar with pictures of Pripyat will know what I'm talking about. After a short walk down a wide hallway, I stepped into the room and there it is.

     Outside of haunted house attractions and Hollywood, there is no more pre-staged place in the world. This room is disaster porn, theater and lies all rolled into one disgusting mass of vile, abhorrent....I'm getting angry just typing this. About a quarter of the floor is covered in the rotting rubber of hundreds of Soviet gas masks. Glass lenses stare out from the pile like empty eye sockets of skulls. The hoses weave in and out among the pile. Filter canisters too are scattered throughout the mass. From the middle of the mass rises a child's chair, on which is perched the most pitiful looking doll. Pitiful because she is fitted with a dirty smock and gas-mask twice the size of her head. Among the mess of the room stand tables with various props of the former lives which inhabited this place. Note books, text books, toys, and the husk of a television through which you can photograph the doll. I'll excuse a lot of photos I took in that ghost town. But the few I took of her through that television I'll hate for the rest of my life.
      The rest of the day, I couldn't shake the feeling that in this place of desolation I was nothing more than a voyeur. I felt I was taking photos for some sick, demented pleasure. But at the same time, I knew I couldn't stop. I tried to tell myself it was for posterity, so I could look back in ten-years-time and see something I had done. Instead, until we moved on to the non-civilian portion of the tour, I felt uncomfortable every time I took a photo within the bounds of Pripyat.
     Let me pause here and say that I know those past few paragraphs may seem harsh. But I want to explain in the clearest possible language what I felt over the course of the day. I believe I fell victim to the hype of Chernobyl. Intellectually, I knew there was a human story to the events. I think in my head, I conflated the accident at the power plant with the on-going situation in the nearby villages and towns. What I failed to accurately judge was how commercialized and over-hyped that situation had really become. However, those feelings were merely one side of a coin.
     The flip-side of that coin is that multiple times I had to tell myself that I was really there. That I was standing on the ground which I had read so much about. Seeing the NSC for the first time with my own eyes, seeing the rusting shell of the sarcophagus, walking under the Pripyat Ferris wheel, reading the giant letters on the roof of the palace of culture.
     Another thing that bothered me about the trip was the "illegal" nature of what we were doing. Officially (and allegedly), there is a law about not entering any abandoned buildings in Pripyat. It's for our safety, considering these buildings haven't had any regular maintenance in over thirty years. At the same time, we all knew that everyone did it and it was OK (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). There are also little phrases like "we've got to be quick so the guards don't see us" when talking about going up on the roof. The other phrase that I didn't like went roughly like, "they say not to go into buildings but that wouldn't make for a good tour." I got the feeling that either the rule isn't iron-clad or it doesn't have any power. If the people who make the laws don't care, then what good are the laws?
     A few times I ran ahead of the group or lagged behind to get some pictures without people. Like I said in the post last Tuesday, I wanted to avoid showing people in my pictures. Part of the allure of the Zone is the absence of people. Objectively, there is a certain beauty in destruction, in decay. Seeing nature come up through the cracks of civilization is an amazing sight.
     Knowing that there was little chance of me returning to the Exclusion Zone emboldened me to take a lot of photos and go places I never imagined I'd visit. Inside questionable rooms and spaces, up onto high perches, into the pool. I think that boldness offset some of the discomfort I felt while in the city.

The crossroads at the Pripyat sign.

I hesitated for few minutes before deciding to jump into the pool. It was obvious there had been people in there before. And I'm not talking about 1996 when the liquidators still swam there. There was debris and graffiti in the deep end. The ladders also looked sound enough. The thought of never returning brought on the boldness for this photo. Surprisingly, when the tour guide returned, she didn't even bat an eye at where I was. I assume she has seen this many times before.

The Azure Swimming Pool of Pripyat.

I raced to the rooftop of a 16-storey apartment building to get pictures before anyone else. I failed that but was second there. This was taken after most of the group had come up.

In the distance you can see the NSC and part of Reactor Number Four.

     Like the car show last weekend, I've collected the photos from the trip together into one gallery. You can view it here. If you look at everything, it will likely take a long time. Longer than it took to read this post. I took a lot of short clips during the visit with the intent of putting together a video of the trip. Look for that in the coming weeks.
     Ultimately, I'm glad that I went. I think I'm too young to have a bucket list. But Chernobyl is definitely something worth crossing off of a list like that. Am I glad I went? Yes. Would I recommend a visit to someone else? That answer is a little more difficult.
     As someone who has seen the documentaries, read the articles, and examined the pictures, I had an image in my head with it's own intricacies and details. When those details failed to match up to reality, my expectations were left open to disappointment. Call it reality or call it buyer's remorse. A bit of both in my case I think. Before going, I tried to temper my expectations. I knew going in that there would be some staged scenes. Scenes not natural to the location. What I wasn't prepared for was thirty years of staging before the day I set foot within the Zone.
     If you are one of those adventurous types who want to see the Exclusion Zone for what it truly is, don't go on a tour. If possible, find a legal route of visiting where you can see the areas not staged for your enjoyment. See the hidden alcoves, the unmolested apartments, the unwalked paths. You won't see these things on a guided tour. Without that, I don't believe you would receive an accurate impression of what the Zone really is today. Too much of the current of the situation is "panem et circenses." Simply put, coming off of a disappointing trip, I have a hard time recommending it. Ask me again in a year or ten. My opinion might change. But as the saying goes, "Don't meet your heroes." I wholeheartedly agree.

- Brian Tuscher