"Avoid the moss. Whatever you do, don't touch the moss." Such were the cautionary words imparted by my tour guide Nick regarding these verdant radioactive sponges as we progressed past the checkpoint marking the entrance to the 30-kilometre exclusion zone of Chernobyl, the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster.
For the second day of my short trip to the Ukraine, I had decided to sign onto an organised tour, reasoning, perhaps perversely, that in light of the civil war scorching its very visible destruction upon the country, it might in fact be one of the safest places for a hapless foreigner to find himself.
It was on the night of April 26th 1986, during a scheduled safety test, that Reacter No.4 erupted like a radioactive volcano, expelling the equivalent of 100 times the combined radiation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The westerly winds propelled the fallout into Sweden, Italy, Germany, the South of France and even Great Britain.
Nearly three decades on and the area immediately surrounding the reactor is still radioactive, although for a drop-in visit of 4 to 5 hours the potential implications of the fallout is equivalent to the exposure during a flight from London to New York. In fact, Nick says, as we drive on closer to the epicentre, his Geiger counter remaining subdued on the dashboard, there is less radiation in this outer ring of Zone than in Kiev where nearly all the buildings are made from granite.
Indeed, despite the region having been rendered inhospitable for approximately 200,000 years, human activity in the 'Zone of Alienation' has steadily increased. There is a hub of scientists based near the reacter, a construction team working on the long-awaited protective dome, not to mention small cliques of local residents evacuated in the mass exodus of the 186 satellite villages, seeking reassimilation to their homes and former way of life.
There's something affecting, almost noble, about seeing small clutches of these people, living something of a nomadic existance, foraging for wild mushrooms and berries amongst the forest; victims of circumstances far beyond their control, stoically defying both the health risks and the necessary detachment from modern civilisation to reclaim their homeland.
Driving past these diminutive cottages surrendered to the woods that have grown to swallow them, I began to feel like I had embarked upon a kind of morbid safari, observing this evidence of the profound human impact the catastrophe had wrought on local inhabitants of the region.
Progressing on to the 'Chernobyl City' we pause by an iron monument to the 28 firemen who died as a result of their immediate response. The strataspherically high dose of radiation their bodies absorbed as they entered the burning reactor caused them to die gradually and painfully in a Kiev hospital over the following fortnight, the injuries they sustained far exceeding the realms of medical cure. These, plus two engineers who died in the explosion, comprise the 30 victims officially recognised by the Soviet government as being casualties of the disaster.
There has been no authorised investigation into the number of secondary casualties who suffered from virulent cancers, radiation poisoning, and blood diseases as a result of their exposure; nor the abortions, miscarriages and seriously deformed children born shortly after, or those yet to suffer from latent disorders; all of whom are estimated to comprise hundreds of thousands across Europe.
Approaching the nuclear plant complex itself the geiger counter starts to accelerate like a terrifying taxi meter forcing you to momentarily query your own sanity for being there. We pass by a tree stump of a cooling tower paused for all time mid-construction, a project doomed never to reach operability.
And then we are there, only a couple of hundred metres away from Reacter No.4 itself, encased in steel and concrete in what appears to be an improvised and haphazard arrangement with scant recourse to coherent design, which of course is probably not far from being the case.
In the weeks and months following the explosion, around half a million miners and construction workers were conscripted from across Russia to combat the burgeoning emergency situation which threatened to toxify the entire continent of Europe. Their mission was to contain the continual leakage of radioactive waste into the atmosphere; in effect to create a sarcophagus around the superstructure. The design life was limited to around thirty years, at which point the tourniquet would begin to unravel and require substantial reenforcement.
Several years later than planned, construction began on the steel dome that now sits neighbouring the reactor, nearing completion and waiting to be edged across to form another stabilising layer; like a kind of structural Russian doll that will over many years be encased in ever more insulating layers.
From there it is on to the abandoned town of Pripyat, where more than anywhere else the true symbolic and imaginative potency of the disaster is laid bare.
On the approach road a proud sign establishes the city's formation as being 1970, lending a degree of retrospective poignancy to the fact that the city (with a population of over 49,000 at the time of the disaster), was to fall at the premature age of only 26. Poignant too in that Pripyat, being a kind of Ebenezer Howard 'garden city' for the nuclear age, had provoked a great deal of opportunity and optimism for this confident investment in nuclear as a source of energy. Workers were offered handsome salaries and young families were encouraged to move there; the immigrants to a new unpopulated town, with naturally expanded hopes for what the future held for them.
Stepping out across the main town square, there is a silence that lies thick like dust over everything, that repudiates the intrinsic nature of urbanity. The square is flanked by large concrete high rises - a hotel, a leisure complex, an apartment block - that conform to the architectural blueprints of the Soviet ideal; the rigid constructivism in tandem with Stalinist neoclassicism.
In fact, given the town's untimely descent into ruins, it can be seen as ironic that the traditional ethos of the Soviet architecture that 'form follow function' (unlike so much of contemporary neoliberal capitalist architecture), has been inverted. Since there was no function for these buildings to fulfil post-1986, all that remains is the aesthetic.
It was at this point, as Nick pointed out a path across the square, that I felt the overwhelming congruence with Andrei Tarkovsky's classic 'Stalker', a film that many deemed to be a prophesy of Chernobyl, with the mysterious 'Forbidden Zone' that is traversed in search of some elusive philosophical truth. There is a metaphysical force that threatens those who travel to the Zone, similarly, it could be said that radiation is a natural metaphysical element, usurping visibility, manifesting itself into all and any tangible physical property including of course the sanctity of our own bodies.
We ambled around the iconic fairground; the ferris wheel and dodgem cars standing in slow decay, gradually being overcome by rust, almost like the sombre, neglected toys of children who suddenly morphed into adults and moved on to alternative means of distraction.
In the high school, we roam between classrooms that have all the appearance of being vacated in a chaotic frenzy; textbooks lie strewn in snowdrift piles, glass from every window is splintered across the floor like a bomb blast pattern. Particularly unnerving is the huge collection of plastic gas masks gathered on one of the upper floors as though they were a corpus of dead birds.
Surveying these relics of urbanity, I ruminate on how Pripyat exists as a city totally cleansed of its 'Debord-ian' spectacle in a way that is completely antithetical to the way in which people live and relate to cities; constantly immersed in and compelled by a myriad of commercial imperatives, stimulation and simulation, pushed and pulled in all manner of physical and emotional directions.
I'm aware of the frequent references made to J.G. Ballard in my writing. However, in this instance the connection is simply unavoidable, given that Chernobyl is the landscape that most closely mirrors the fictive 'Ballardian' plains - the abandoned hotel, the drained swimming pool, the resurging synergy between the natural and the built environments as wildlife continues to reclaim the terrain for itself. Not only this, but the fact that this was a highly modern community built from nothing, with its primary purpose being to support the technological 'machine' that in the end destroyed itself and cast the town into desuetude.
It was the equivalent of a city settlement expanding around the holy ground of a cathedral, with religious faith being the elixir that both sustained and legitimised the community. Nuclear power was the deity to which the inhabitants, and the USSR as a whole, bent their knee; a belief in the primacy of harnessing this force to sustain their existance and elevate their society on the continual march of progress. It was a belief that, at the hands of human folly (the power plant concealed numerous critical design flaws that rendered its demise an inevitability), would provoke an apocalyptic wrath upon the denizens.
There was one point on the tour that I found striking in the multi-faceted narratives it seemed to encapsulate. In a storage room of one of the high rises, a tableau of Soviet banners and flags, iconography of Lenin and other local political figures, were arranged against the walls; preparations for the May Day celebrations of just a handful of days hence. The fact that they remained here forgotten, in all their proud nationalist pomp and finery, relics of a celebration that never happened, I found immensely symbolic of just how integral the disaster was in contributing to the dismantling of the Soviet state that had come to dominate Mother Russia since the revolution.
With the USSR experiencing economic decline, and after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, there was a dawning radicalisation brewing amidst the populace which Gorbachev tried to harness with his programme of restructuring. This period of 'Glasnost' (openness) was a stark contrast to the cloak of secrecy with which the Soviet Union had attempted to envelope the events of Chernobyl.
In the days after the event, the government refused to acknowledge or report it, only doing so when scientists in Sweden were alerted to adnormally high radiation levels emanating from foreign regions. Not only this, but they sought to manipulate the numbers of those affected by radiation by raising the threshold level at which one could be deemed contaminated. With such engrained deception levering a disjunct between state-held ideology and civilian well being, it was surely inevitable that the tide would soon have to turn against the Communist Party.
In the end, my overriding impression of Chernobyl is that the desolate towns, the ruined structures, the dessicated ambition, are all fundamentally emblematic of a possible future for humankind.
Pripyat in particular, stands as an Athens or Rome for the 20th century; its lifespan from creation to destruction proceeding at a very modern hyperspeed. The landscape is evidence of a broken marriage between faith in science and technology, and fallible human endeavour. It represents, in the short term, a marked cultural shift for a nation that would be profoundly altered in 1991; and, in the long term, a vision of human civilisation after some cataclysmic 'doomsday' event, after which nature has the freedom to reassert its control.
It is not pessimism to state that all cities will eventually be ruins, or that all that is must some day cease to be, and with that in mind Chernobyl exists as a stark yet highly modern vision of the future urban landscape.
No comments:
Post a Comment