Ask a Ukrainian when he stopped believing in communism, and the answers vary. A few quote the invasion of Czechoslovakia, some the Afghan war, others the discovery of Stalin's mass graves at Bykivnya. Many, like Lyashenko, look blank, because they have not really stopped believing in communism at all. But by far the likeliest reply is 'Chernobyl'. ...Imperilling everyone impartially and in the most basic and dramatic fashion, no other single piece of communist bungling did more to turn public opinion against the regime.
- Anna Reid, Borderland
So many have photographed and written about Chernobyl I almost hesitate to even take a stab at it - what more can be said about this tragic, lonely post-Soviet space? Over Photoshopped pictures of abandoned buildings with orange skies, the ferris wheel, the empty classrooms. But a few weeks after my visit I'm still thinking of this place.
A trip to Chernobyl comprises not only the nuclear plant and exploded reactor, but the city of Pripyat and surrounding villages, locked in an open-air 1986 time capsule. The Fulbright office organized the trip for us with a local tour agency. We got on the bus at 7 in the morning and set off for the exclusion zone. Technically, tourism is still not allowed in the "zone." Visitors are allowed under the guise of "educational excursions." For this reason, independent visits to Chernobyl are difficult, and most visitors chose to go with a tour agency.
When I first told Anna, my Russian teacher, about my upcoming trip to Chernobyl she seemed a bit disappointed. She knew that some of the Fulbright students were just arriving, and she didn't think it right that the first thing they see be Chernobyl, when Ukraine has so many other beautiful destinations. "Why is everyone so interested in Chernobyl?" She asked me. Melissa, another Fulbrighter, told a woman on her Odesa-Kyiv train that she was going on an excursion to Chernobyl. The woman gave her a similar look. "Why Chernobyl?"
As you walk around the city of Pripyat and the other abandoned villages in the area, you see a lot of what a Frenchman on our trip constantly referred to as "hyper-reality." Almost 25 years after the disaster, thousands have visited the site, and some have rearranged the left items. In one small house in a surrounding village, a day calendar was still hanging on the wall, with the date "April 26, 1986" never removed. Family photos were carefully placed around the room. Many toys have been rearranged so the visitor encounters them in doorways, on tabletops, on sidewalks. Yet regardless of what was arranged here and there since the disaster, all of these things were once part of the lives of the citizens of Pripyat.
Throughout the city of Pripyat, it is obvious that scavengers have removed materials of value, such as metal hand railings and fences. Our guide pointed this out to us, and one of the others on the tour asked him what the metal had been used for. He shrugged and said there was no way to know. A joke from the crowd about silverware and utensils got a few chuckles as we walked on.
In the prison, some found discipline slips scattered on the floor, issued to individual prisoners and listing their infractions and punishments. The doors to the individual cells were all open and the rooms were dark. In the maternity ward of the hospital and the back of the kindergarten, white metal cribs and beds were scattered and rusting. The floorboards of the sport center's court were warped and peeling.
In one of the schools, there is a room where several boxes of child-size gas masks have been dumped out onto the floor. They were delivered to the school in the confusion following the disaster but never used. This is a famous stop on the tour.
The day after our trip to Chernobyl, I happened to meet one of the first photographers to photograph the city. It was quite an opportunity to talk to her about her first trips there, and the ways in which the zone has changed over the years. She talked a bit about tourism to the area, and visitors changing the space when they visit it. She commented that it was much more striking years ago, when the disaster was fresh and tourism had not yet begun.
I asked her opinion on the graffiti that can be found throughout Pripat. She just shook her head and said that it was something new. That it wasn't there before. Although I found much of it quite striking - and even beautiful - I can understand her negative feelings about it. To visit the zone again and again after so many years, and see it change from a deserted Soviet city with everything locked in time to an international space evolving in its own way.
Since visiting Chernobyl, I've looked at a number of blog posts and photo collections of Chernobyl visits and impressions. Many of them include at least one photograph of these Banksy-like haunting images. One thing that struck me when viewing other's photographs from a few years before my visit is that even this art is fading away as the forest takes back the city. The color in the dress of the little girl by the elevator is fading and the wall is showing through. The dancer in the city square are turning from black to gray.
I'd like to think I'm not prone to excessively dramatic thoughts, but in the few weeks since the excursion, I've found myself thinking quite a few times about some of the specific apartments and buildings that we visited - sitting the same way, slowly wearing away as my own inhabited spaces are dirtied and tidied, swept up and reorganized.
Towards the end of the tour we climbed to the top of one of the tallest apartment buildings in Pripyat. By this time it almost seemed normal to be walking around an abandoned zone, looking in other people's bedrooms and classrooms and offices. On the top of the apartment we looked across the forest and town, squeezed past the giant neon sign on the top of the building to get to the other side of roof. Then we suddenly heard a noise from across the city and we all turned to look - it was a tour bus starting its engine in the silence.
Despite its current state, it is not difficult to imagine Prypyat as the beautiful city it no doubt was. And although it is difficult to detach our emotions from our post-Chernobyl, post-Five Mile Island skepticism of nuclear power, imagine how great it must have been to stand in this city built on nuclear power. How proud this city must have been, before that sign of radiation took on the terrifying connotation it has today.
On our way home, we all turned in our radiation measurement devices and received a "certificate" indicating how much radiation received during the day and a 5% off coupon for any further excursions organized through Chernobyl Tours.
