Voices from Chernobyl

SOLDIERS’ CHORUS

Artyom Bakhtiyarov, private; Oleg Leontyevich Vorobey, liquidator; Vasily Iosifovich Gusinovich, driver and scout; Gennady Viktorovich Demenev, police officer; Vitaly Borisovich Karbalevich, liquidator; Valentin Kmkov, driver and private; Eduard Borisovich Korotkov, helicopter pilot; Igor Litvin, liquidator; Ivan Aleksandrovich Lukashuk, private; Aleksandr Ivanovich Mikhalevich, Geiger operator; Major Oleg Leonodovich Pavlov, helicopter pilot; Anatoly Borisovich Rybak, commander of a guard regiment; Viktor Sanko, private; Grigory Nikolaevich Khvorost, liquidator; Aleksandr Vasilievich Shinkevich, police officer; Vladimir Petrovich Shved, captain; Aleksandr Mikhailovich Yasinskiy, police officer.

Our regiment was given the alarm. It was only when we got to the Belorusskaya train station in Moscow that they told us where we were going. One guy, I think he was from Leningrad, began to protest. They told him they’d drag him before a military tribunal. The commander said exactly that before the troops: “You’ll go to jail or be shot.” I had other feelings, the complete opposite of that guy. I wanted to do something heroic. Maybe it was kid’s stuff. But there were others like me. We had guys from all over the Soviet Union. Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Armenians . . . It was scary but also fun, for some reason.

So they brought us in, and they took us right to the power station. They gave us white robes and white caps. And gauze surgical masks. We cleaned the territory. We spent a day cleaning down below, and then a day above, on the roof of the reactor. Everywhere we used shovels. The guys who went up, we called them the storks. The robots couldn’t do it, their systems got all crazy. But we worked. And we were proud of it.

We rode in—there was a sign that said, Zone Off Limits. I’d never been to war, but I got a familiar feeling. I remembered it from somewhere. From where? I connected it to death, for some reason . . .

We met these crazed dogs and cats on the road. They acted strange: they didn’t recognize us as people, they ran away. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with them until they told us to start shooting at them . . . The houses were all sealed up, the farm machinery was abandoned. It was interesting to see. There was no one, just us and the police on their patrols. You’d walk into a house—there were photographs on the wall, but no people. There’d be documents lying around: people’s komsomol IDs, other forms of identification, awards. At one place we took a television for a while—we borrowed it, say—but as far as anyone actually taking something home with them, I didn’t see that. First of all, because you sensed that these people would be back any minute. And second, this was connected somehow with death.

People drove to the block, the actual reactor. They wanted to photograph themselves there, to show the people at home. They were scared, but also really curious: what was this thing? I didn’t go, myself, I have a young wife, I didn’t want to risk it, but the boys downed a few shots and went over. So . . . [Silent.]

The village street, the field, the highway—all of it without any people. A highway to nowhere. Electrical wires on the posts to nowhere. At first there were still lights on in the houses, but then they turned those off. We’d be driving around, and a wild boar would jump out of a school building at us. Or else a rabbit. Everywhere, animals instead of people: in the houses, the schools, the clubs. There are still posters: “Our goal is the happiness of all mankind.” “The world proletariat will triumph.” “The ideas of Lenin are immortal.” You go back to the past. The kolkhoz offices have red flags, brand-new wimples, neat piles of printed banners with profiles of the great leaders. On the walls—pictures of the leaders; on the desks—busts of the leaders. A war memorial. A village churchyard. Houses that were shut up in a hurry, gray cement cowpens, tractor mechanic’s shops. Cemeteries and victims. As if a warring tribe had left some base in a hurry and then gone into hiding.

We’d ask each other: is this what our life is like? It was the first time we saw it from the outside. The very first time. It made a real impression. Like a smack to the head. . . . There’s a good joke: the nuclear half-life of a Kiev cake is thirty-six hours. So . . . And for me? It took me three years. Three years later I turned in my Party card. My little Red book. I became free in the Zone. Chernobyl blew my mind. It set me free.

There’s this abandoned house. It’s closed. There’s a cat on the windowsill. I think—must be a clay cat. I come over, and it’s a real cat. He ate all the flowers in the house. Geraniums. How’d he get in? Or did they leave him there?

There’s a note on the door: “Dear kind person, Please don’t look for valuables here. We never had any. Use whatever you want, but don’t trash the place. We’ll be back.” I saw signs on other houses in different colors—“Dear house, forgive us!” People said goodbye to their homes like they were people. Or they’d written: “we’re leaving in the morning,” or, “we’re leaving at night,” and they’d put the date and even the time. There were notes written on school notebook paper: “Don’t beat the cat. Otherwise the rats will eat everything.” And then in a child’s handwriting: “Don’t kill our Zhulka. She’s a good cat.” [Closes his eyes.] I’ve forgotten everything. I only remember that I went there, and after that I don’t remember anything. I forgot all of it. I can’t count money. My memory’s not right. The doctors can’t understand it. I go from hospital to hospital. But this sticks in my head: you’re walking up to the house, thinking the house is empty, and you open the door and there’s this cat. That, and those kids’ notes.

I was called on. My assignment was not to let any of the old inhabitants back into the evacuated villages. We set up roadblocks, built observation posts. They called us “partisans,” for some reason. It’s peacetime, and we’re standing there, in military fatigues. The farmers didn’t understand why, for example, they couldn’t take a bucket from their yard, or a pitcher, saw, axe. Why they couldn’t harvest the crops. How do you tell them? And in fact it was like this: on one side of the road there were soldiers, keeping people out, and on the other side cows were grazing, the harvesters were buzzing, the grain was being shipped. The old women would come and cry: “Boys, let us in. It’s our land. Our houses.” They’d bring eggs, bacon, homemade vodka. They cried over their poisoned land. Their furniture. Their things.

Your mind would turn over. The order of things was shaken. A woman would milk her cow, and next to her there’d be a soldier who had to make sure that when she was done milking, she’d pour the milk out on the ground. An old woman carries a basket of eggs, and next to her there’s a soldier walking to make sure she buries them. The farmers were raising their precious potatoes, harvesting them really quietly, but in fact they had to be buried. The worst part was, the least comprehensible part, was that everything was so—beautiful! That was the worst. All around, it was just beautiful. I would never see such people again. Everyone’s faces just looked crazy. Their faces did, and so did ours.

I’m a soldier. If I’m ordered to do something, I need to do it. But I felt this desire to be a hero, too. You were supposed to. The political workers gave speeches. There were items on the radio and television. Different people reacted differently: some wanted to be interviewed, show up on television, and some just saw it as their job, and then a third type—I met people like this, they felt they were doing heroic work. We were well paid, but it was as if that didn’t matter. My salary was 400 rubles, whereas there I got 1000 (that’s in those Soviet rubles). Later people said, “They got piles of money and now they come back and get the first cars, the first furniture sets.” Of course it hurts. Because there was that heroic aspect, also.

I was scared before I went there. For a little while. But then when I got there the fear went away. It was all orders, work, tasks. I wanted to see the reactor from above, from a helicopter—I wanted to see what had really happened in there. But that was forbidden. On my medical card they wrote that I got 21 roentgen, but I’m not sure that’s right. The procedure was very simple: you flew to the provincial capital, Chernobyl (which is a small provincial town, by the way, not something enormous, as I’d imagined), there’s a man there with a dosimeter, 10-15 kilometers away from the power station, he measures the background radiation. These measurements would then be multiplied by the number of hours that we flew each day. But I would go from there to the reactor, and some days there’d be 80 roentgen, some days 120. Sometimes at night I’d circle over the reactor for two hours. We photographed it with infrared lighting, but the pieces of scattered graphite on the film were, like, radiated—you couldn’t see them during the day.

I talked to some scientists. One told me, “I could lick your helicopter with my tongue and nothing would happen to me.” Another said, “You’re flying without protection? You don’t want to live too long? Big mistake! Cover yourselves!” We lined the helicopter seats with lead, made ourselves some lead vests, but it turns out those protect you from one sets of rays, but not from another set. We flew from morning to night. There was nothing spectacular in it. Just work, hard work. At night we watched television—the World Cup was on, so we talked a lot about soccer.

We started thinking about it—I guess it must have been—three years later. One of the guys got sick, then another. Someone died. Another went insane and killed himself. That’s when we started thinking. But we’ll only really understand in about 20-30 years. For me, Afghanistan (I was there two years) and then Chernobyl (I was there three months), are the most memorable moments of my life.

I didn’t tell my parents I’d been sent to Chernobyl. My brother happened to be reading Izvestia one day and saw my picture. He brought it to our mom. “Look,” he says, “he’s a hero!” My mother started crying.

We were driving, and you know what I saw? By the side of the road? Under a ray of light—this thin little sliver of light—something crystal. These . . . We were going in the direction of Kalinkovich, through Mozyr. Something glistened. We talked about it—in the village where we worked, we all noticed there were tiny little holes in the leaves, especially on the cherry trees. We’d pick cucumbers and tomatoes—and the leaves would have these black holes. We’d curse and eat them.

I went. I didn’t have to go. I volunteered. At first you didn’t see any indifferent people there, it was only later that you saw the emptiness in their eyes, when they got used to it. I was after a medal? I wanted benefits? Bullshit! I didn’t need anything for myself. An apartment, a car—what else? Right, a dacha. I had all those things. But it exerted a sort of masculine charm. Manly men were going off to do this important thing. And everyone else? They can hide under women’s skirts, if they want. There were guys with pregnant wives, others had little babies, a third had burns. They all cursed to themselves and came anyway.

We came home. I took off all the clothes that I’d worn there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain . . . You can write the rest of this yourself. I don’t want to talk anymore.

I had just come home from Afghanistan. I wanted to live a little, to get married. I wanted to get married right away. And suddenly here’s this announcement with a red banner, “Special Call-Up,” come to this address within the hour. Right away my mother started crying. She thought I was being called up again for the war.

Where are we going? Why? There was no information at all. At the Slutsk station, we changed, they gave us equipment, and then we were told that we were going to the Khoyniki regional center. We got to Khoyniki, and people there didn’t know anything. They took us further, to a village, and there’s a wedding going on: young people dancing, music, drinking vodka. Just a normal marriage. And we have an order: get rid of the topsoil to the depth of one spade.

On May 9, V-Day, a general came. They lined us up, congratulated us on the holiday. One of the guys got up the courage and asked, “Why aren’t they telling us the radiation levels? What kind of doses are we getting?” Just one guy. Well, after the general left, the brigadier called him in and gave him hell. “That’s a provocation! You’re an alarmist!” A few days later they gave us some gas masks, but no one used them. They showed us dosimeters a couple of times, but they never actually handed them to us. Once every three months they let us go home for a few days. We had one goal then: to buy vodka. I lugged back two backpacks filled with bottles. The guys raised me up on their arms.

Before we went home we were called in to talk to a KGB man. He was very convincing in telling us we shouldn’t talk to anyone, anywhere, about what we’d seen. When I made it back from Afghanistan, I knew that I’d live. Here it was the opposite: it’d kill you only after you got home.

What do I remember? What stuck in my memory?

I’ve spent all day riding through all the villages, measuring the radiation. And not one of the women offers me an apple. The men are less afraid: they’ll come up to me and offer some vodka, some lard. Let’s eat. It’s awkward to turn them down, but then eating pure cesium doesn’t sound so great, either. So I drink, but I don’t eat.

But in one village they do sit me down at the table—grilled lamb and everything. The host gets a little drunk and admits it was a young lamb. “I had to slaughter him. I couldn’t stand to look at him anymore. He was the ugliest damn thing! Almost makes me not want to eat him.” Me: I just drink a whole glass of vodka real quick. After hearing that . . .

It was ten years ago. It’s as if it never happened, and if I hadn’t gotten sick, I’d have forgotten by now.

You have to serve the motherland! Serving—that’s a big deal. I received: underwear, boots, cap, pants, belt, clothing sack. And off you go! They gave me a dump truck. I moved concrete. There it was—and there it wasn’t. We were young, unmarried. We didn’t take any gas masks. There was one guy—he was older. He always wore his mask. But we didn’t. The traffic guys didn’t wear theirs. We were in the driver’s cabin, but they were out in radioactive dust eight hours a day. Everyone got paid well: three times your salary plus vacation pay. We used it. We knew that vodka helped. It removed the stress. It’s no wonder they gave people those 100 grams of vodka during the war. And then it was just like home: a drunk traffic cop fines a drunk driver.

Don’t write about the wonders of Soviet heroism. They existed—and they really were wonders. But first there had to be incompetence, negligence, and only after those did you get wonders: covering the embrasure, throwing yourself in front of a machine gun. But that those orders should never have been given, that there shouldn’t have been any need, no one writes about that. They flung us there, like sand onto the reactor. Every day they’d put out a new “Action Update”: “men are working courageously and selflessly,” “we will survive and triumph.”

They gave me a medal and one thousand rubles.

At first there was disbelief, this sense that it was a game. But it was a real war, an atomic war. We had no idea—what’s dangerous and what’s not, what should we watch out for, and what ignore? No one knew.

It was a real evacuation, right to the train stations. What happened at the stations? We helped push kids through the windows of the train cars. We made the lines orderly—for tickets at the ticket window, for iodine at the pharmacy. In the lines people were swearing at one another and fighting. They broke the doors down on stores and stands. They broke the metal grates in the windows.

Then there were the people who came from somewhere else. They lived in clubs, schools, kindergartens. They walked around half-starving. Everyone’s money ran out pretty fast. They bought up everything from the stores. I’ll never forget the women who did the laundry. There were no washing machines, no one thought to bring those, so they washed by hand. All the women were elderly. Their hands were covered with boils and scabs. The laundry wasn’t just dirty, it also had a few dozen roentgen. “Boys, have something to eat.” “Boys, take a nap.” “Boys, you’re young, be careful.” They felt sorry for us, they cried for us.

Are they still alive?

Every April 26, we get together, the guys who were there. We remember how it was. You were a soldier, at war, you were necessary. We forget the bad parts and remember that. We remember that they couldn’t have made it without us. Our system, it’s a military system, essentially, and it works great in emergencies. You’re finally free there, and necessary. Freedom! And in those times the Russian shows how great he is. How unique. We’ll never be Dutch or German. And we’ll never have proper asphalt and manicured lawns. But there’ll always be plenty of heroes.

They made the call, and I went. I had to! I was a member of the Party. Communists, march! That’s how it was. I was a police officer—senior lieutenant. They promised me another “star.” This was June of 1987. You were supposed to get a physical, but they just sent me without it. Someone, you know, got off, brought a note from his doctor that he had an ulcer, and I went in his place. It was urgent! [Laughs.] There were already jokes. Guy comes home from work, says to his wife, “They told me that tomorrow I either go to Chernobyl or hand in my Party card.” “But you’re not in the Party.” “Right, so I’m wondering: how do I get a Party card by tomorrow morning?”

We went as soldiers, but at first they organized us into a masonry brigade. We built a pharmacy. Right away I felt weak and sleepy all the time. I told the doctor I was fine, it was just the heat. The cafeteria had meat, milk, sour cream from the kolkhoz, and we ate it all. The doctor didn’t say anything. They’d make the food, he’d check with his book that everything was fine, but he never took any samples. We noticed that. That’s how it was. We were desperate. Then the strawberries started coming, and there was honey everywhere.

The looters had already been there. We boarded up windows and doors. The stores were all looted, the grates on the windows broken in, flour and sugar on the floor, candy. Cans everywhere. One village got evacuated, and then five to ten kilometers over, the next village didn’t. They brought all the stuff over from the evacuated village. That’s how it was. We’re guarding the place, and the former head of the kolkhoz arrives with some of the local people, they’ve already been resettled, they have new homes, but they’ve come back to collect the crops and sow new ones. They drove the straw out in bales. We found sewing machines and motorcycles in the bales. There was a barter system—they give you a bottle of homemade vodka, you give them permission to transport the television. We were selling and trading tractors and sowing machines. One bottle, or ten bottles. No one was interested in money. [Laughs.] It was like Communism. There was a tax for everything: a canister of gas—that’s half a liter of vodka; an astrakhan fur coat—two liters; and motorcycles—variable. I spent six months there, that was the assignment. And then replacements came. We actually stayed a little longer, because the troops from the Baltic states refused to come. That’s how it was. But I know people robbed the place, took out everything they could lift and carry. They transported the Zone back here. You can find it at the markets, the pawn shops, at people’s dachas. The only thing that remained behind the wire was the land. And the graves. And our health. And our faith. Or my faith.

We got to the place. Got our equipment. “Just an accident,” the captain tells us. “Happened a long time ago. Three months. It’s not dangerous anymore.” “It’s fine,” says the sergeant. “Just wash your hands before you eat.”

I measured the radiation. Once it got dark, these guys would pull up at our little station in cars and start giving us things: money, cigarettes, vodka. Just let us root around in the confiscated stuff. They’d pack their bags. Where’d they take it? Probably to Kiev and Minsk, to the second-hand markets. The stuff they left, we took care of it. Dresses, boots, chairs, harmonicas, sewing machines. We buried it in ditches—we called them “communal graves.”

I got home, I’d go dancing. I’d meet a girl I liked and say, “Let’s get to know one another.”

“What for? You’re a Chernobylite now. I’d be scared to have your kids.”

I have my own memories. My official post there was commander of the guard units. Something like the director of the apocalypse. [Laughs.] Yes. Write it down just like that.

I remember pulling over a car from Pripyat. The town is already evacuated, there aren’t any people. “Documents, please.” They don’t have documents. The back has a canvas cover. We lift it up, and I remember this clearly: twenty tea sets, a wall unit, an armchair, a television, rugs, bicycles.

So I write up a protocol.

I remember the empty villages where the pigs had gone crazy and were running around. The kolkhoz offices and clubs, these faded posters: “We’ll give the motherland bread!” “Glory to the Soviet worker-peoples!” “The accomplishments of the people are immortal.”

I remember the untended communal graves—a cracked headstone with men’s names: Captain Borokin, Senior Lieutenant . . . And then these long columns, like poems—the names of privates. Around it, burdock, stinging-nettle, and goose-foot.

I remember this very nicely tended garden. The owner comes out of the house, sees us.

“Boys, don’t yell. We already put in the forms—we’ll be gone come spring.”

“Then why are you turning over the soil in the garden?”

“But that’s the autumn work.”

I understand, but I have to write up a protocol . . .

My wife took the kid and left. That bitch! But I’m not going to hang myself, like Vanya Kotov. And I’m not going to throw myself out a seventh-floor window. That bitch! When I came back from there with a suitcase full of money, that was fine. We bought a car. That bitch lived with me fine. She wasn’t afraid. [Starts singing.]

Even one thousand gamma rays

Can’t keep the Russian cock from having its days.

Nice song. From there. Want to hear a joke? [Launches right in.] Guy comes home from the reactor. His wife asks the doctor, “What should I do with him?” “You should wash him, hug him, and put him out of commission.” That bitch! She’s afraid of me. She took the kid. [Suddenly serious.] The soldiers worked next to the reactor. I’d drive them there for their shifts and then back. I had a total-radiation-meter around my neck, just like everyone else. After their shifts, I’d pick them up and we’d go to the First Department—that was a classified department. They’d take our readings there, write something down on our cards, but the number of roentgen we got, that was a military secret. Those fuckers! Some time goes by and suddenly they say, “Stop. You can’t take any more.” That’s all the medical information they give you. Even when I was leaving they didn’t tell me how much I got. Fuckers! Now they’re fighting for power. For cabinet portfolios. They have elections. You want another joke? After Chernobyl you can eat anything you want, but you have to bury your own shit in lead.

How are doctors going to work with us? We didn’t bring any documents with us. They’re still hiding them, or they’ve destroyed them because they were so classified. How do we help the doctors? If I had a certificate that said how much I got there? I’d show it to my bitch. I’ll show her that we can survive anything and get married and have kids. The prayer of the Chernobyl liquidator: “Oh, Lord, since you’ve made it so that I can’t, will you please also make it so I don’t want to?” Oh, go fuck yourselves, all of you.

They made us sign a non-disclosure form. So I didn’t say anything. Right after the army I became a second-group invalid. I was twenty-two. I got a good dose. We lugged buckets of graphite from the reactor. That’s ten thousand roentgen. We shoveled it with ordinary shovels, changing our masks up to thirty times a shift—people called them “muzzles.” We poured the sarcophagus. It was a giant grave for one person, the senior operator, Valery Khodemchuk, who got caught under the ruins in the first minutes after the explosion. It’s a twentieth-century pyramid. We still had three months left. Our unit got back, they didn’t even give us a change of clothes. We walked around in the same pants, same boots, as we had at the reactor. Right up until they demobilized us.

And if they’d let me talk, who would I have talked to? I worked at a factory. My boss says: “Stop being sick or we’ll have to cut you back.” They did. I went to the director: “You have no right to do this, I’m a Chernobylite. I saved you. I protected you!” He says: “We didn’t send you there.”

At night I wake up from my mother saying, “Sonny, why aren’t you saying anything? You’re not asleep, you’re lying there with your eyes open. And your light’s on.” I don’t say anything. No one can speak to me in a way I can answer. In my own language. No one can understand where I’ve come back from. And I can’t tell anyone.

I’m not afraid of death anymore. Of death itself. But I don’t know how I’m going to die. My friend died. He got huge, fat, like a barrel. And my neighbor—he was also there, he worked a crane. He got black, like coal, and shrunk, so that he was wearing kids’ clothes. I don’t know how I’m going to die. I do know this: you don’t last long with my diagnosis. But I’d like to feel it when it happens. Like if I got a bullet in the head. I was in Afghanistan, too. It was easier there. They just shot you.

I clipped an article from the newspaper. It’s about the operator Leonid Toptunov, he was the one on duty that night at the station and he pressed the red accident button a few minutes before the explosion. It didn’t work. They took him to the hospital in Moscow. The doctors said, “In order to fix him, we’d need a whole other body.” There was one tiny little non-radioactive spot on him, on his back. They buried him at the Mytinskaya Cemetery, like they did the others. They insulated the coffin with foil. And then they poured half a meter of concrete on it, with a lead cover. His father came. He’s standing there, crying. People walk by: “That was your bastard son who blew it up!”

We’re lonely. We’re strangers here. They even bury us separately, not like they do other people. It’s like we’re aliens from outer space. I’d have been better off dying in Afghanistan. Honest, I get thoughts like that. In Afghanistan death was a normal thing. You could understand it there.

From above, from the helicopter, when I was flying near the reactor, I could see roes and wild boars. They were thin and sleepy, like they were moving in slow motion. They were eating the grass that grew there, and they didn’t understand, they didn’t understand that they should leave. That they should leave with the people.

Should I go or not go? Should I fly or not fly? I was a Communist—how could I not go?

Two paratroopers refused—their wives were young, they hadn’t had any kids yet. But they were shamed and punished. Their careers were finished. And there was also a court of manhood, a court of honor! That was part of the attraction—he didn’t go, so I will. Now I look at it differently. After nine operations and two heart attacks, I don’t judge them, I understand them. They were young guys. But I would have gone anyway. That’s definite. He couldn’t, I will. That was manhood.

From above the amazing thing was the hardware: heavy helicopters, medium helicopters, the Mi-24, that’s a fighting helicopter. What are you going to do with a Mi-24 at Chernobyl? Or with a fighter-plane, the Mi-2? The pilots, young guys, all of them fresh out of Afghanistan. Their feeling was they’d pretty much had enough, with Afghanistan, they’d fought enough. They’re sitting in the forest near the reactor, catching roentgen. That was the order! They didn’t need to send all those people there to get radiation. What for? They needed specialists, not a lot of human material. From above I saw a ruined building, a field of debris—and then an enormous number of little human shapes. There was a crane there, from East Germany, but it wasn’t working—it made it to the reactor and then died. The robots died. Our robots, designed by Academic Lukachev for the exploration of Mars. And the Japanese robots—all their wiring was destroyed by the radiation, apparently. But there were soldiers in their rubber suits, their rubber gloves, running around . . .

Before we went back we were warned that in the interests of the State, it would be better not to go around telling people what we’d seen. But aside from us, no one knows what happened there. We didn’t understand everything, but we saw it all.