You're reading: Chornobyl Exclusion Zone full of life, gossip, work

CHORNOBYL, Ukraine — Despite the scary name, the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is a bustling community full of gossip and colorful stories.

The only difference is that to get on the inside, permission must be obtained from the government body which runs the zone. A visitor must then pass two cordons of guards and barriers that secure this 30-kilometer territory around the Chornobyl nuclear power plant that was badly contaminated after the 1986 radioactive explosion.

There are 4,000 people servicing the zone, and another 3,500 who operate the decommissioned Chornobyl  power plant, the site of the worst civil nuclear accident in human history. There are also 200 settlers who returned to their homes after the mass evacuation in the wake of the accident. They are mostly pensioners scattered around Chornobyl and villages of the exclusion zone.

Occasionally, Hollywood celebrities drop by, such as Olga Kurylenko. The Ukrainian-born model-turned-actress spent several months here filming “Land of Oblivion,” a Chornobyl-themed blockbuster released in 2011.

The local rangers who service the zone remember her visit with humor. Standing on the central square of the town of Chornobyl on a recent spring day, two rangers were laughing at the unrealistic episodes of the movie in which the main hero drinks in a bar with a view of the fourth reactor. The bartender mixes cocktails as several workers in military-style fatigues celebrate a birthday with a cream cake. Ukrainian rock videos play in the background. None of these could have happened in a 1986 Soviet Ukraine.

Yuriy Tatarchuk is one of those rangers. Or, rather, he is a tourist guide, suntanned and in camouflage clothes, and his official job title is worker of the department for public communication. Tatarchuk was Kurylenko’s guide when she came for the first tour before the movie. “She was very modest,” he remembers. “It wasn’t until the second time that she brought a press secretary with her.”

Kurylenko played Anya, a young woman from Prypiat, a city of 48,000 people located just three kilometers from the nuclear plant, where most personnel servicing the nuclear power plant lived. According to the plot, she married on the day of the disaster, and lost her husband soon after. A decade later, she becomes a tourist guide in the zone, showing visitors around the ghost town.

In real-life Prypiat, a man called Valeriy Brus – a former garage worker of the Chornobyl Power Plant – returned to the zone on April 23, 2013. He remembers the town very different.  “At that time, there used to be a shortage of everything in the Soviet Union, but we were provided for very well,” he remembers.

The town of Prypiat looks like a ghost of its former self.

A view of the town of Prypiat, with Chornobyl power plant on the background.

Brus says that the town was “flourishing and very beautiful.” He says that sometimes he goes to revisit his one-room apartment near the central square that he and his family were happy to receive from the government. Now, all houses in the town look like ghosts of their former selves, looted and decomposing, with an occasional piece of furniture, a shoe or newspaper stashed away in a corner.

In contrast, just three kilometers from Prypiat, the Chornobyl power plant and its surrounding territory looks orderly, regimented and even military-like. Its workers are uniformed, and are working to instructions. Visitors are given consignment forms to sign that warn them not to eat outside, not to touch objects including the local flora, and that one’s clothes will be decontaminated should the level of radiation exceed normal. They are also warned to cover as much of the skin as possible. The tourist routes in the Exclusion Zone, however, are designed away from the dirty spots  – for most part.

Because their jobs are considered hazardous, employees of the station and the Exclusion Zone work fewer hours than an average Ukrainian. They also get early retirement and 56 days of vacations per year, compared to the usual  24 days most Ukrainians qualify for. Most of the workers commute to Chornobyl from outside the dead zone.

Natalya Korolevska, the social minister, said that Chornobyl workers qualify for 56 privileges – and to fully comply with them, Ukraine would need to spend Hr 80 billion ($10 billion) annually – unrealistic for a national budget of $45 billion.

This year, the government set out Hr 11 billion to finance these expenses, Korolevska said. Some of the money is wasted on pitiful, meaningless payments, such as Hr 2.1 per month to 2 million liquidators for extra nutrition needs.

A meal from the canteen of Chornobyl power plant.

In the Exclusion Zone, however, vital needs are met. There is a canteen where fresh food is cooked every day. There are shops that sell basic goods at prices roughly equal to those in Kyiv. A 1.5 liter bottle of mineral water with gas goes for Hr 7 in the town of Chornobyl, for example.

A bottle of Shustov brandy goes for Hr 52 – but it wasn’t always available in the zone. Workers here remember the dry law that operated between 1986 and 1997 – and all the smuggling that accompanied it. Vodka was brought in rubber hot water bottles tied around the waist, and consumed carefully away from the police in the quiet of people’s residences.

All workers at Chornobyl get regular medical examinations. Their frequency depends on the type of work a person does, and can be either quarterly, or annual. All personnel also wears personal radiation dosimeters, and their radiation doses are monitored by the doctors.

Residents who returned to the Exclusion Zone despite official prohibition also get medical assistance from the local doctors. “It’s more realistic to get an ambulance here than it is in Kyiv,” claims Tatarchuk. He says it takes 15 minutes for an ambulance to travel 15 kilometers between Chornobyl and Baryshevka, a village of several settlers.

Nevertheless, most of the elderly settlers do not risk living in the Exclusion Zone continuously. They come for the warm season, grow vegetables and enjoy the weather, and move back to civilization outside the zone for the winter.

Kyiv Post editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected]

Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be reached at [email protected]