In 2002 Sylvia Beamish visited Chernobyl, on the 25th anniversary of the disaster, she recalls that trip and the people she met.

.

Revisiting Natasha and Nikolai in Chernobyl

Long may their spirit live

.

It is 25 years since the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. Can it be nine years since I visited Natasha and Nikolai in their home in the exclusion zone? Since I ate their wonderful dish of home-grown mushrooms in garlic sauce washed down by home-made rakia, listening, if not believing, their protestations: it’s not radioactive.

When I think this week of Chernobyl, I drink a glass to them. I’m guessing that they, and the little community I visited in 2002 will all be gone now. Not necessarily, as they would protest, victims of radiation. Possibly old age got them first.

When you think of a nuclear accident, you expect some Armageddon, devastation, don’t you? Grey emptiness, devastated building: partly right. When I drove into Chernobyl, I was at first taken aback at the beauty of the place. It was a national park without the visitors. Making it all the more wild and beautiful. Initially at least.

There are/were – I have not been back since – two exclusion zones. The first one was inside the 30km radius; the second, tighter zone, within a 10km radius. The inhabited villages are in the outer zone. That’s where Nikolai and Natasha lived. There were still 24 people in the village, more than enough to keep them company, when I visited.  Some of those had refused from the first to move. Others, including Nikolai and Natasa, had moved out for a while, but hated the anonymous high rises they had been moved to.  That was Nikolai’s story at least. Natasha laughed at this and said she hadn’t minded.  The small apartment had been less work. Nor did she by any means look unhappy to be back, however.

At some stage – they told me – the doctors acknowledged that dislocation and loneliness were killing some of the older people faster than the radiation would.  So people of a certain age were allowed to return.

When I met them Natasha, was 87. Nikolai, I assume, a little older. That was March 2002. Back then at least, the road to Chernobyl had little traffic. In minus temperatures, with little more than trees and snow and silence, driving around the exclusion zone was quite an experience. In fact, almost the whole way from Kiev we encountered few cars along the wide, forest-lined, straight road. But even inside the exclusion zone, which I had assumed would have been almost reclaimed by nature, the middle of the road was quite clear of snow.

Authorisation was required to visit Chernobyl. It was quite difficult to get, even for Ukrainians, unless you were related to someone living inside the zone, or you used to live there, in which case you are allowed to go back for burials, for example.  But my visit had somehow been arranged by Philippe, a French journalist who had written a book about the place. Even if you get authorisation, you had to go around with a minder/ interpreter. Only one interpreter was on duty at a time. They took turns to come to live in the zone, for 16 days at a time. My guide/interpreter, Tania, was a nice woman, mid-40s, a single mother of two grown-up children. She too believed it was not that dangerous for these old people to be living in the villages. On a map, she pointed out the area worst affected, and it did not coincide with a neatly-drawn 30km radius. Interestingly, it seemed a village 10 km outside the zone was probably just as badly polluted, but people there did not get any special treatment, while those inside were given food from outside. In the inner zone, inside the 10 km radius, was all the infrastructure that accompanies a nuclear plant.

The one that blew up in 1986 was the last of the four that had been completed, but when the explosion happened, plans were underway for many more, perhaps 12. Construction of the fifth and sixth reactor looked fairly well advanced. A lot of people were still working out there. Even on the Saturday I visited, with minus temperatures, workers were still making temporary sites for the spent fuel, or generally decommissioning.

A goodly number of the thousands working back then in Chernobyl were guarding Pripat, the biggest city just 3km from reactor 4, where 50,000 of some of Soviet Russia’s most indulged workers once lived. All around the town there were barbed wire fences. But this, according to Tania, was because after the explosion, with the type of scarce commodities like TV sets and fridges that had been given to those who worked in Chernobyl, people had been looting the abandoned apartments and spreading the radiation. The facades of the buildings in Pripat still looked well preserved. Not just because of the looters. After the looters came, the authorities stripped the apartments and buried everything.

Really sad was the kindergarten. The mattresses may have been removed, but the bed frames themselves remained. And also, for some reason, some dolls, a few little cars, a football, some building blocks. The children, I asked, did they survive?  The answer wasn’t direct.

It had been a Friday night. The teachers, Tanya said, knowing nothing other than that a fire had happened, had taken the children up to a bridge to watch the heroic work of the fire fighters. They would have been directly exposed. On the way back to Kyiv, the driver pointed out in the distance some of the hastily constructed highrises that had been constructed for people from Chernobyl. Literally in the middle of nowhere it seemed. Not a shop, or café, or park bench, in sight.

.

.

Sylvia Beamish, originally from Cork, is an independent communications consultant who works in the design and implementation of public awareness campaigns and enterprise support throughout Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia. She is fluent in Bulgarian, German and Russian which allows her to get totally involved in a lot of the projects she works on. I first met Sylvia when we were studying at University College Cork (i.e. drinking in The Long Valley) and caught up with her again recently on one of her rare trips back to East Ferry in Cork. After a delicious and entertaining lunch I asked her to submit any story from her travels for the Guest Blog. What’s wonderful about this story is the personal connection that was made and the observations of the smallest, but never insignificant, details.

© Sylvia Beamish 2011

Photos courtsey of Sylvia Beamish. Top: raising a glass with Natasha, Nikolai and Tania her guide. Bottom: The author outside a reactor in Chernobyl.

.

You can contact Sylvia Beamish on www.sylvia-beamish.com

Learn more about / donate and watch a great video of the work being done with a stirring sound track “there is hope: it’s you” by U2 (under News >blog): Adi Roche’s Chernobyl Children’s Fund HERE