“We organize trips to Chernobyl, the site of the greatest environmental disaster in human history!! Great rates for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!!” Our hostel’s brochure jubilantly displayed these slogans, alongside similarly enthusiastic advertisements for go-karting trips. In one of those dangerous lapses in judgment, six of my friends and I paid $150 each to spend a few hours at Chernobyl, the site of a devastating nuclear reactor explosion, which occurred almost exactly 22 years before our visit.
As our sullied van puttered along the single road connecting bustling Kiev with its ghostly cousin Chernobyl, the occasional village eventually gave way to rolling hills where towns once stood. One sign indicated the beginning of a “village,” and a second marked where it had ended before the disaster. As we passed the eleventh pair of signs, the stark annihilation wrought by the nuclear monster rendered them utterly superfluous and almost cruel.
Several miles, two passport checks and one release form later, I stood 500 feet from the reactor—known as The Sarcophagus—that released uranium dioxide into the bodies of 50,000 people in fewer than 36 hours. While fervently texting, our guide nonchalantly mentioned that the Ukrainian government will likely build another concrete bunker around The Sarcophagus, since the reactor is still leaking too much uranium. Still sending messages with one hand, he wandered off the road and pulled out a radiation detector. Suddenly, his 50-something face flushed with the excitement of an eight-year-old rounding the corner at an amusement park to see the highest roller coaster of all looming in front of him. Apparently, on the road, the radiation level was fine, but where he was standing, the levels were off the charts.
In a country which lost 40 million people in the 1930s from forced starvation by the Soviets just before sacrificing a generation of men in World War II, perhaps the only recourse after an environmental disaster of Chernobyl’s caliber is to turn danger into a game. What’s a lethally high level of radiation after more than 40 million deaths? But our guide’s attitude at The Sarcophagus became harder to swallow as his casual demeanor continued during our final stop at the ghost city of Pripyiat. Unlike the phantom villages we’d driven past before, whose wooden buildings had been long ago destroyed, Pripyiat’s stone and metal structures must remain perfectly intact because any destruction of materials would only exacerbate the spread of radiation. The results of these precautions chilled me to my marrow. Soviet hammers and sickles perch ominously atop roofs, and signs reading “Hotel” and “Restaurant” adorn buildings seemingly closed yesterday. Unlike the fields once housing villages that now exist only in one’s imagination, Pripyiat is a starkly overt grave.
I tried to imagine that the intact destruction I saw in the school simply meant that the children had left for the afternoon, rather than to face the raw fact that an avoidable disaster had forced five-year-olds to knock their blocks over and leave their shoes behind to avoid developing radiation-induced cancer. Perhaps it was easier for our guide to create a game out of finding the highest levels of radiation rather than face the fact that his country’s soil and soul will be forever tainted with the radiation of The Sarcophagus and the blood of its victims. Regardless, my lack of understanding of his attitude forced me to accept that despite having spent significant time in Russia and Ukraine, the region’s simultaneous obsession with the memorialization of death, and its fatalistic, almost nonchalant attitude towards it remains one cultural barrier that no amount of studying will break down. I can only be thankful that my inability to comprehend stems from never having met death on a massive scale, and that my soul is not numb and remains fully alive.
