BAZAR, Ukraine – Park ranger Lyuba Konyukh picks her way carefully through a thick forest of pine trees, stopping to pour salt in troughs for deer. She looks around with a smile, checks on some fenced-off anthills, and points to a tree where she once spotted a lynx.
Diving her rickety old car further through the preserve, she passes through abandoned villages, fields overgrown with trees, and fishing ponds devoid of anglers. The asphalted road is the only sign that this part of northern Zhytomyr Oblast was once densely populated.
That was before an explosion on April 26, 1986 at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, some 70 kilometers to the east, spread a poison of radioactive fallout over this ancient forestland, forcing many of its people to flee.
But some stayed, or soon returned. For them, the radiation was a lesser evil than another invisible blight – the stress of resettlement.
“We’ve already adapted to this zone,” says the 37-year-old Konyukh, who wears a military-style khaki jacket, her uniform topped incongruously with a pink woolen beret. “And it’s adapted to us.”
Park ranger Lyuba Konyukh drives her old car through a nature reserve set up on the location of villages abandoned in the wake of the Chornobyl disaster. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Konyukh was one of those who had to leave the area after the disaster. But she came back as soon as she could, finding a job at a newly created nature reserve named after an ancient tribe, the Drevlyany (literally “forest people”), who once inhabited this territory.
Konyukh now lives in the village of Bazar, which is nestled among the silent, contaminated woods. Bazar, or “market” in Ukrainian, is so named because it is believed the Drevlyany once had a slave market there. In recent years, this ancient village has experienced a boom in newcomers, lured by the virtually free housing it offers.
But its population is still only a fraction of what it once was.
Repopulation
The village’s 57-year-old mayor, Oleksandr Budko, a tall man with the bearing of a former military officer, is the one who saved Bazar from permanent depopulation.
A native of the village, he was heartbroken to see its population collapse – it had dropped from 2,500 people in 1986 to just 240 people in 2004 — the year he took over the management of the village. The houses of those who fled remained the property of the local council. It couldn’t sell them, but was allowed to put them up for rent. As the abandoned houses had started falling into decay very quickly, Budko decided to set the rent for them at the minimum price of 25 kopecks per square meter. The typical monthly rent for an entire house was about Hr 12, or around $1.50 at that time. Twelve years later, with the devaluation of hryvnia, it’s about 50 cents.
An old lady walks by her house in the village of Bazar. (Anastasia Vlasova)
In a cash-strapped Ukraine hit by war and economic stagnation, the promise of practically free housing brought many people back to Bazar, despite the dangers of radiation. “Many people had left the area, but couldn’t get used to the new places,” Budko said. “The forest people love the forest.”
The population of Bazar has now more than doubled since 2004, to 570 residents, including a dozen children attending the local kindergarten and several hundred from Bazar and the surrounding area who study at the village school. In the afternoon, noisy crowds of schoolchildren walk slowly home, crowding into a local cafe to pick up snacks on their way.
But Bazar, the main street of which is still named after Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, looks far from normal. Half of its houses remain abandoned, some with collapsed roofs and sagging, deformed walls. Transport is by horse and cart as often as it is by car.
Children come to buy tea and snacks after school in a cafe in Bazar. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Budko has hopes that on the 30th anniversary of Chornobyl catastrophe the government will change the status of Bazar from a zone of mandatory evacuation to a zone of a voluntary resettlement. That would make it possible to sell the property there, and bring investment to the village.
Fled from the east
Doctor Oleksandr Sklyarov, 38, came to live in Bazar in November 2014, fleeing from the war in Luhansk, his home city. He left it for a couple of months with hopes that the Russian-fomented military conflict would be over soon. He said he couldn’t live under the armed gangs that have seized control in the city since he and his family members openly supported Ukraine.
Sklyarov’s family lost several apartments in Luhansk, where he was a successful surgeon. They couldn’t find a cheap place in Kyiv. Instead, they saw an announcement on the Internet with an invitation to settle in Bazar almost for free.
Now Sklyarov lives with wife Hanna, 35, and daughter Katya, 8, in a big house next to the village hospital, where he works as a family doctor twice per week. He does his main job in Narodychi, a local community center in some 30 kilometers to the northwest.
Doctor Oleksandr Sklyarov talks to one of his patients at the hospital in Bazar. (Anastasia Vlasova)
He said the poverty and alcoholism he found in Bazar was a bigger problem than the radiation. But the beautiful natural setting and the warm-heartedness of the people are big advantages of living there, he said.
“At least nobody is shooting here, and I can freely speak the Ukrainian language,” Sklyarov said.
The villages are grateful to their doctor, who saved the hand of a sawmill worker last year when it was badly injured in an accident.
News blackout
Pensioner Olena Maistrenko, 57, her head covered by a babushka-style shawl, bursts into tears when she opens a book about Chornobyl.
Back in April 1986, she worked at a school kitchen and heard the first rumors about the nuclear catastrophe from another cook who had seen police cordons being set up on a road near the village. “The policemen were stopping the cars and measuring radiation,” Maistrenko remembered. “Later there was an announcement at the school that the children should spend the minimum of time outdoors.”
Two weeks after the explosion, amid a Soviet news blackout, Bazar’s families would share snippets of information as they tended the graves of their loved ones at the local cemetery, during the Orthodox Christian springtime ritual of remembrance of the dead. They began to realize something very serious had happened at the Chornobyl plant.
Olena Maistrenko points to family portraits in her house in the village of Bazar. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Few suspected that they had already been affected. In fact, the radioactive cloud released by the explosion at the ill-fated reactor No. 4 had reached Bazar within days. The police ordered people to leave surrounding villages, but in Bazar the authorities just offered free vacations to the seaside for families with small children.
When Maistrenko’s son Vova started at school on Sept. 1, 1986, school medics found that only three children of 26 in his class had normal levels of white blood cells. Almost the entire class, including Maistrenko’s son, was sent to hospital in Zhytomyr, the provincial capital, for several weeks. Maistrenko’s daughter Yulia, who was then five, started to have problems with her thyroid gland and remains under surveillance by doctors to this day.
Olena Maistrenko pets a horse in her barn. (Anastasia Vlasova)
For three years after the catastrophe, the residents of Bazar continued life as normal, growing their own food and fishing in the local river. They even named a new street after Chornobyl. But then in 1989 a new law included the village in the zone that had to be evacuated.
Health effects
Halyna Ivanenko, 56, said it was a painful experience for her and her husband Ivan, 61, to leave their village and start a new life some 150 kilometers to the south. The family left Bazar in 2000 but returned 10 years later, once their children had grown up and started their own families.
Sitting on her cozy sofa beside a dozen family portraits, Ivanenko said she developed asthma at the place where she had been resettled. It disappeared once they returned to Bazar. A retired nurse, she said the radioactive contamination had had an effect on her family’s health: her daughter-in-law, who was living in Bazar when the Chornobyl accident happened, later had to have half of her thyroid gland removed.
Halyna Ivanenko sits under the family portraits in her house in Bazar. (Anastasia Vlasova)
But Ivanenko believes Bazar is now safe from radiation. Living in a small, tidy house just across the road from the forest, she said she would go into the forest in summer to gather blackberries. “We keep a cow, pigs, geese and hens,” Ivanenko said.
She also said she would not be afraid to take her four-year-old grandson Artem into the forest. Artem, who was playing next to his grandma, has stayed in Bazar for months. Artem’s parents, who live in the town of Boyarka on the outskirts of Kyiv, are now thinking of returning to Bazar, Ivanenko said.
Ivanenko’s grandson Artem plays with a toy gun in the living room. He often spends months with his grandparents in Bazar. (Anastasia Vlasova)
“My son tells me sometimes: mom, when I retire, I’ll also come to live here,” she said.
Cleaner with time
Nevertheless, experts are divided on whether it’s yet safe to live in radiation-hit areas like Bazar.
Oleksiy Pasiuk, a nuclear energy expert at the National Ecological Centre of Ukraine, said the radioactive contamination was actually spreading in some spots – heavy radioactive elements seep into groundwater and accumulate in some areas. In a very small area there can be clean zones right next to extremely contaminated ones.
It’s also naive to believe that the radiation completely disappeared in 30 years after the catastrophe, Pasiuk said. While the radioactive iodine released in the explosion has a half-life of eight days (half of the atoms decay into a stable isotope of Xenon every eight days), the half-lives of Strontium-90 and Caesium-137, two other major radioactive contaminants, are around 30 years.
A mailbox made out of a plastic water bottle. (Anastasia Vlasova)
“The territory is getting cleaner with time, but these changes are happening very slowly,” Pasiuk said. “Some radionuclides are not there anymore, but the long-lasting radionuclides will remain for thousands of years.”
Thom Davis, a research fellow at the University of Warwick, who researches the social impact of the Chornobyl disaster, said the stress of forceful resettlement brought even more health consequences than the radiation.
A picknic area next to a well located in the woods of the Drevlyansky Natural Preserve near Bazar. (Anastasia Vlasova)
“For the people of Bazar, they are probably right that the area is ‘clean,’” Davis said. “Even if it not clean in terms of radiation, it is ‘clean’ for them in terms of their being at home there, and able to live in a happy way.”
In Bazar, many locals said that those who had resettled died earlier than those who stayed.
Hunting parties
Most of the men in Bazar work in the local forest reserves and sawmills. Despite the lingering radiation in the woods, wood from them is logged and transported all over Ukraine. Bazar has also become a popular spot with rich hunters who travel there from Kyiv and Zhytomyr, often trespassing to the territory of reserves.
Park rangers from the Drevlyanskiy nature reserve talk as they go about their work in the reserve. (Anastasia Vlasova)
“When 30 men with rifles and night-vision devices come to chase one elk, the animal has no chance,” said Konyukh, the ranger. “I don’t see it as a hunt, it’s just killing.” Konyukh said that the food and alcohol the hunters bring with them on their outings are often worth more than the carcasses of the animals they slaughter.
Experts warn against eating meat and taking the trophies of the wild animals in this area, as they can move freely around the Chornobyl zone, and could have been in its most contaminated parts.
The stuffed head of a wild boar serves as a decoration in a hunting lodge in Bazar. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Shadow of war
In the evening, Bazar’s local cafe turns into a bar, where villagers entertain themselves with alcohol and music. The walls of the venue have hearts with arrows projected on them with lasers, rotating in time with the loud music. Young people dance to the thump of pop songs.
Kurdysh, who has changed from her ranger’s uniform into a fancy dress and put make up on her face, points to a small, frenetically dancing young man. In the summer of 2014, he had been sent by the army to eastern Ukraine to fight against Russian-backed armed groups and regular Russian troops. He was captured and spent four months in captivity in Donetsk until his relatives tracked him down on the Internet. Budko, the mayor, who also owns a sawmill business, paid the armed groups a ransom out of his own pocket to free the soldier.
A Saturday night disco party in the bar in Bazar. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Another sign of the ongoing war is a large glass jar on the corner of the bar counter. It has a picture of a paratrooper glued to its side, and banknotes inside it. Bazar’s residents are collecting money for a fellow villager who was severely wounded in the war and is now in a coma.
Next day, Konuykh and her friends are back at the same cafe to meet another villager, on a short period of leave from the war zone. The tired-looking man in military uniform is surrounded by happily smiling villagers, who toast his health and invite him to visit their homes. Despite its location in the infamous Chornobyl zone, Bazar at this moment looks little different to hundreds of other Ukrainian villages.
“I don’t think Chornobyl hurts people as much anymore,” says Budko, the mayor. “Now the war is the No. 1 problem.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at grytsenko@kyivpostcom
