The Visiting Chernobyl Experience of HSE Student.
The experience of my friend entering the Exclusion Zone made my perception of history different. The first mention of the word Chernobyl was in documentaries, history books and grainy black-and-white photographs in high school shows. It existed in the past, somewhere distant in Ukraine, enclosed in the radioactive myth and remote tragedy. I have never considered it as a place where one can just visit, walk and even breathe the cold air in its vacant streets.
Then my friend Anastasia Sulakauri, who is also a student of HSE like I, went there.
She did not only go as an ordinary sightseer; but she came with curiosity, boldness, and an odd feeling of respect and fascination. As she returned and related her experience to me, Chernobyl suddenly changed into a dim historical event into a physical location. One that, unexpectedly enough, now is nearer to me than even a few parts of Moscow. Her narrative did not only fulfill my curiosity, but gently it put a seed in me. I had never imagined this before: Could one day, I will visit it as well.
An accident that made the generation.
Prior to the visit by Anastasia, my knowledge about Chernobyl was very minimal: an explosion, a nuclear power plant, radiation, something awful that occurred many years ago. As she spoke and as I read further the details came into focus.
The accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant occurred on 26 April 1986 when the 4th reactor in that plant blew up, as a result of a late-night safety experiment. Radioactive material was emitted in massive amounts and it dispersed across vast regions of what is modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, etc. The adjacent town of Pripyat, a previously young and prosperous town, which was constructed to house the plant workers, and their families, had to be evacuated within several hours. People abandoned their homes, toys, photographs, and their daily things with confidence that they will revisit them. Most never did.
Chernobyl became symbolic of a technological break, a governmental blackout and human victimhood, yet, ironically, of a call to strength, science and the necessity to think better than the power we have in our hands.
Being students of HSE, we are conditioned to ask questions, to do research, to see behind the lines. To Anastasia visiting Chernobyl was precisely that; a means of perceiving history not only in its written form, but as a physical location.
Why go there at all?
My first response when I was initially informed by Anastasia that she was going to Chernobyl was alarm and excitement.
"Is it even safe?" I asked her.
She laughed. It is far better than crossing parts of Moscow on rush hour.
Naturally, in order to enter the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, one can do it only with licensed guides who have to observe strict rules. They escort visitors along certain paths, inspect the level of radiations, and ensure that no one touches anything and does not go where there is danger. It has restrictions to how long you can be there, what you may carry and what you may not carry away (spoiler: you carry nothing).
Is it even safe?
In the case of Anastasia, the reasons to go were the following:
Personal interest: She had been raised with a legend of Chernobyl as a metaphor, of danger, of Soviet history, of what had gone wrong. She needed to know what was behind the metaphors.
Academic interest: Being an HSE student, she is surrounded by the discourse on history, recollection, politics, and media. All of these are united in Chernobyl.
Human interconnection: She wanted to show respect- to know, even in a little sense, how thousands of human beings can be deprived of their homes in a matter of a few hours.
I heard her and understood that Chernobyl is not only a tourism adventure; it is also a sort of pilgrimage, a visit to a place where the past is still very alive.
The entry into the Exclusion Zone.
Anastasia mentioned that she was not afraid the first time she met the patient, but silent.
Her group had to travel to the Exclusion Zone, and to get to it a guard checked passports and permits at the checkpoints on the way to Kyiv. By walking into the Zone, she said, she crossed an invisible line between two worlds: the world of real life, with its shops, car honks, Telegram messages--the world of the world, where time had ceased to exist in 1986.
The Geiger counter, the small instrument which counts the radiation, was attached to the guide. Anastasia made a joke that initially all people were more concerned with the beeping device than the scenery. But before long the environment was in need of their utmost attention.
They were riding down deserted highways with stunted trees, old ruins with cracked windows and corroded Soviet slogans on them. Nature appeared to be gradually to repossess all. Formerly well thought over streets and play-grounds were now a forest with bits of human bodies still protruding.
The silence was dumbest of all, she said to me. There is no traffic, no people, wind and birds. And there you might think how many stories had had their end.
Pripyat: a city with a word half distorted
And in case the world has put Chernobyl in the spotlight, Pripyat is the apparition behind it. Pripyat was an experimental Soviet city, founded in 1970: the young, modern, and optimistic. It possessed schools, kindergartens, cultural center, sporting facilities, hospital and even a new amusement park which never officially opened. It was mainly populated by the nuclear plant workers and family members. It was like going into a photo album forgotten in the rain, and still, as you walked through Pripyat, fading, ruined, but still, it was familiar.
They went to a school where gas masks were on the floor, text books were lying unclosed on the table and slogans of a bright future were peeling off the wall. Toys of children were lying on dusty shelves in an apartment block. There were theatre chairs in the cultural center that would never be filled. And there was the Ferris wheel, the well-known one, which stood mute in the amusement park. It has turned into one of the most recognizable photos of Chernobyl: yellow cabins, now rusty, the symbol of happiness, which never came to pass.
"When I saw the Ferris wheel," Anastasia has told me, "I at once thought of how ordinary that day had begun with everybody. Dad and mom preparing breakfast, children going to school. And in a few hours their entire world was changed."
A weight of history and the reactor
The group was then taken to the viewing point, which was close to the plant itself, and at a safe distance. The New Safe Confinement that is currently enclosing Reactor 4 is a massive steel edifice that is meant to isolate radiation and enable future operations to decontaminate the old sarcophagus.
In some movies, the reactor looked dramatic, but this was not the case with Anastasia. There was neither fire nor a fiery cloud of green, but a grey industrial building, weirdly commonplace. And, there, she perceived the pressure of all that had occurred.
It seems strange, she thought, to stand in front of a building, and to be able to understand that a single night here altered the lives of millions of people.
Their tour guide told them about the firefighters who ran in without appropriate protection, the plant workers who attempted to put the disaster under control, and the residents who had little time to be alerted of their evacuation. A large number of such early responders died of radiations. The streets and villages were deserted. Wholesale communities were displaced.
Nothing was more difficult to hear than what Anastasia saw, she said, as she listened to these stories.
"The buildings are tragic, yes. However, the unseen aspect - the life, the choices and the silence- is the one that lingers."
How her journey changed me
I have never (yet) been in Chernobyl. What I heard about walking over the deserted streets of Pripyat is all as a result of what Anastasia said and what photographs she carrying her camera captured. However, her experience already altered my thinking style.
I was thinking at first that history is not as remote as it so often seems. Individuals who survived Chernobyl are not dead yet. Controlled but still present is the radiation. The Exclusion Zone is also not only a frozen museum, but it is a living ecosystem where nature has flourished in the absence of humans. Weeds and birds and even shaggy horses roam through deserted houses.
Second, it showed me that traveling does not have to be about taking a break or leisure. There are lots of different reasons why, as students, we travel: to escape, to experience the new culture, to gather Instagram stories. However, there is also a traveling that is confrontational: it is traveling into challenging pasts, unpleasant realities, and what we suppose.
At last, her experience made me understand the value of memory. Not passively, such as, memorizing the dates to take a test, but actively and in a responsible manner. They are always reminded of Chernobyl by asking questions on how societies manage risk, information and responsibility. It involves changing the way of thinking regarding the relationship between science and politics, and human cost when things go badly wrong.
In the future: my personal Chernobyl account.
Will I go to Chernobyl one day? I think I will
Not morbid curiosity, and not merely because it would be fine to check one item in some travel bucket list. I would walk with the same carefulness and thoughtfulness with which Anastasia had walked--to pass slowly through those deserted areas, to hear that silence, and to be able to observe with my own eyes how a place can be so full of memory.
Being an HSE student, I believe that we are lucky: we can have the knowledge, we may argue in the academic world, we may see the international view. However, there are times where learning requires us to leave the classroom and venture into areas that do not only arouse our intellectual stimulation.
Chernobyl has turned into such a place to me, as Anastasia sees it.
Her images of the Ferris wheel, school corridors, view in Reactor 4, and even the endless trees that grow in the ruins are not merely pictures. They are calls-to-mind, to think and to understand the duty that we have as the next generation to manage our technologies, our environment and our societies better than the world did that night in April 1986.
This is my Chernobyl story, not of visiting it myself, but of being greatly impressed by one who did. And, in case her adventure gave me encouragement, maybe it will do the same to you--to read more closely history, to travel more intelligently and to hear more attentively to those places whence the past still speaks.
Shared by
Qanita Masood
