Voices from Chernobyl

MONOLOGUE ABOUT THE SHOVEL AND THE ATOM

I tried to commit those days to memory. There were many new emotions—fear, a sense of tearing into the unknown, like I’d landed on Mars. I’m from Kursk. In 1969, they built a nuclear reactor nearby in the town of Kurchatov. We used to go there to buy food—the nuclear workers always received the best provisions. We used to go fishing in the pond there, right near the reactor. I thought of that often after Chernobyl.

So here’s how it was: I received a notice, and, as I’m a disciplined person, I went to the military recruiter’s office the next day. They went through my file. “You,” they tell me, “have never gone on an exercise with us. And they need chemists out there. You want to go for twenty-five days to a camp near Minsk?” And I thought: Why not take a break from my family and my job for a while? I’ll march around a bit in the fresh air.

At 11 A.M. on June 22, 1986, I came with a bundle and a toothbrush to the gathering spot. I was surprised by how many of us there were for a peacetime exercise. I started remembering scenes from war films—and what a day for it, June 22, the day the Germans invaded. All day they tell us to get in formation, then to break up, finally as it’s getting dark we get on our buses. Someone gets on and says: “If you’ve brought liquor with you, drink it now. Tonight we’ll get on the train, and in the morning we’ll join our units. Everyone is to be fresh as a cucumber in the morning, and without excess baggage.” All right, no problem, we partied all night.

In the morning we found our unit in the forest. They put us in formation again and called us up in alphabetical order. We received protective gear. They gave us one set, then another, then a third, and I thought, This is serious. They also gave us an overcoat, hat, mattress, pillow—all winter gear. But it was summer out, and they told us we’d be going home in twenty-five days. “Are you kidding?” says the captain who came with us, laughing. “Twenty-five days? You’ll be in Chernobyl six months.” Disbelief. Then anger. So they start convincing us: anyone working twenty kilometers away gets double pay, ten kilometers means triple pay, and if you’re right at the reactor you get six times the pay. One guy starts figuring that in six months he’ll be able to roll home in a new car, another wants to run off but he’s in the army now. What’s radiation? No one’s heard of it. Whereas I’ve just gone through a civil defense course where they gave us information from thirty years before, like that 50 roentgen is a fatal dose. They taught us how to fall down so that the wave of the explosion would miss us. They taught us about irradiation, thermal heat. But about the radioactive contamination of an area—the most dangerous factor of all—not a word.

And the staff officers who took us to Chernobyl weren’t terribly bright. They knew one thing: you should drink more vodka, it helps with the radiation. We stayed near Minsk for six days, and for all six days we drank. I studied the labels on the bottles. At first we drank vodka, and then I see we’re drinking some strange stuff: Nithinol and other glass cleansers. For me, as a chemist, this was interesting. After the nithinol, your legs feel cottony but your head is clear, you give yourself a command, “Stand up!,” but you fall down.

So here’s how it was: I’m a chemical engineer, I have a master’s degree, I was working as the head of a laboratory at a large production facility. And what did they have me do? They handed me a shovel—this was practically my only instrument. We immediately came up with a slogan: Fight the atom with a shovel! Our protective gear consisted of respirators and gas marks, but no one used them because it was 30 degrees Celsius outside, if you put those on it would kill you. We signed for them, as you would for supplementary ammunition, and then forgot all about it. It was just one more detail.

They transferred us from the buses to the train. There were forty-five seats in the train-car and seventy of us. We took turns sleeping.

So what is Chernobyl? A lot of military hardware and soldiers. Wash posts. A real military situation. They placed us in tents, ten men to a tent. Some of us had kids at home, some had pregnant wives, others were in between apartments. But nobody complained. If we had to do it, we had to do it. The motherland called and we went. That’s just how we are.

There were enormous piles of empty tin cans around the tents. The military depots have a special supply in case of war. The cans were from canned meat, pearl buckwheat, sprats. There were groups of cats all around, they were like flies. The villages had been emptied—you’d hear a gate open and turn around expecting a person, and instead there’d be a cat walking out.

We dug up the diseased top layer of soil, loaded it into automobiles and took it to waste burial sites. I thought that a waste burial site was a complex, engineered construction, but it turned out to be an ordinary pit. We picked up the earth and rolled it, like big rugs. We’d pick up the whole green mass of it, with grass, flowers, roots. And bugs, and spiders, worms. It was work for madmen. You can’t just pick up the whole earth, take off everything living. If we weren’t drinking like crazy every night, I doubt we’d have been able to take it. Our psyches would have broken down. We created hundreds of kilometers of torn-up, fallow earth. The houses, barns, trees, highways, kindergartens, wells—they all remained there, naked. In the morning you’d wake up, you need to shave, but you’re afraid to look in the mirror and see your own face. Because you’re getting all sorts of thoughts. It’s hard to imagine people moving back to live there again. But we changed the slate, we changed the roofs on houses. Everyone understood that this was useless work, and there were thousands of us. Every morning we’d get up and do it again. We’d meet an illiterate old man: “Ah, quit this silly work, boys. Have a seat at the table, eat with us.” The wind would be blowing, the clouds floating. The reactor wasn’t even shut down. We’d take off a layer of earth and come back in a week and start over again. But there was nothing left to take off—just some sand that had drifted in. The one thing we did that made sense to me was when some helicopters sprayed a special mixture that created a polymer film that kept the light-moving bottom-soil from moving. That I understood. But we kept digging, and digging . . .

The villages were evacuated, but some still had old men in them. To walk into an old peasant hut and sit down to dinner—just the ritual of it—a half hour of normal life. Although you couldn’t eat anything, it wasn’t allowed. But I so wanted to sit at the table, in an old peasant hut.

After we were done the only thing left were the pits. They were going to fill them with concrete plates and surround them with barbed wire, supposedly. They left the dump trucks, cargo trucks, and cranes they’d been using there, since metal absorbs radiation in its own way. I’ve been told that all that stuff has since disappeared, that is, been stolen. I believe it. Anything is possible here now.

One time we had an alarm: the dosimetrists discovered that our cafeteria had been put in a spot where the radiation was higher than where we went to work. We’d already been there two months by then. That’s just how we are. The cafeteria was just a bunch of posts and these had boards nailed to them at chest height. We ate standing up. We washed ourselves from barrels filled with water. Our toilet was a long pit in a clear field. We had shovels in our hands, and not far off was the reactor.

After two months we began to understand things a little. People started saying: “This isn’t a suicide mission. We’ve been here two months—that’s enough. They should bring in others now.” Major-General Antoshkin had a talk with us. He was very honest. “It’s not advantageous for us to bring in a new shift. We’ve already given you three sets of clothing. And you’re used to the place. To bring in new men would be expensive and complicated.” With an emphasis on our being heroes. Once a week someone who was digging really well would receive a certificate of merit before all the other men. The Soviet Union’s best grave digger. It was crazy.

These empty villages—just cats and chickens. You walk into a barn, it’s filled with eggs. We’d fry them. Soldiers are ready for anything. We’d catch a chicken, put it on the fire, wash it down with a bottle of homemade vodka. We’d put away a three-liter bottle of that stuff every night in the tent. Someone’d be playing chess, another guy was on his guitar. A person can get used to anything. One guy would get drunk and fall down on his bed to sleep, other guys wanted to yell and fight. Two of them got drunk and went for a drive and crashed. They got them out from under the crushed metal with the jaws of life. I saved myself by writing long letters home and keeping a diary. The head of the political department noticed, he kept asking me what I was writing, where was I keeping it? He got my neighbor to spy on me, but the guy warned me. “What are you writing?” “My dissertation.” He laughs. “All right, that’s what I’ll tell the colonel. But you should hide that stuff.” They were good guys. I already said, there wasn’t a single whiner in the bunch. Not a single coward. Believe me: no one will ever defeat us. Ever! The officers never left their tents. They’d walk around in slippers all day, drinking. Who cares? We did our digging. Let the officers get another star on their shoulder. Who cares? That’s the sort of people we have in this country.

The dosimetrists—they were gods. All the village people would push to get near them. “Tell me, son, what’s my radiation?” One enterprising soldier figured it out: he took an ordinary stick, wrapped some wiring to it, knocks on some old lady’s door and starts waving his stick at the wall. “Well, son, tell me, how it is.” “That’s a military secret, grandma.” “But you can tell me, son. I’ll give you a glass of vodka.” “All right.” He drinks it down. “Ah, everything’s all right here, grandma. Don’t worry.” And leaves.

In the middle of our time there they finally gave us dosimeters. These little boxes, with a crystal inside. Some of the guys started figuring, they should take them over to the burial site in the morning and let them catch radiation all day, that way they’ll get released sooner. Or maybe they’ll pay them more. So you had guys attaching them to their boots, there was a loop there, so that they’d be closer to the ground. It was theater of the absurd. These counters weren’t even going, they needed to be set in motion by an initial dose of radiation. In other words, these were little toys they’d picked out of the warehouse from fifty years ago. It was just psychotherapy for us. At the end of our time there we all got the same thing written on our medical cards: they multiplied the average radiation by the number of days we were there. And they got that initial average from our tents, not from where we worked.

We got two hours to rest. I’d lie down under some bush, and see that the cherries are in bloom, big, juicy cherries, you wipe them down and eat them. Mulberry—it was the first time I’d seen it. When we didn’t have work, they’d march us around. We watched Indian films about love, until three, four in the morning. Sometimes after that the cook would oversleep and we’d have undercooked buckwheat. They brought us newspapers—they wrote that we were heroes. Volunteers! There were photographs. If only we’d met that photographer . . .

The international units were nearby. There were Tatars from Kazan. I saw their internal court-martial. They chased a guy in front of the unit, if he stopped or went off to the side they’d start kicking him. He’d been cleaning houses and they’d found a bag full of stuff on him, he’d been stealing. The Lithuanians were nearby, too. After two months they rebelled and demanded to be sent back home.

One time we got a special order: immediately wash this one house in an empty village. Incredible! “What for?” “Tomorrow they’re going to film a wedding there.” So we got some hoses and doused the roof, trees, scraped off the ground. We mowed down the potato patch, the whole garden, all the grass in the yard. All around, emptiness. The next day they bring the bride and groom, and a busload of guests. They had music. And they were a real bride and groom, they weren’t actors—they’d already been evacuated, they were living in another place, but someone convinced them to come back and film the wedding here, for history. Our propaganda in motion. A whole factory of daydreams. Even here our myths were at work, defending us: see, we can survive anything, even on dead earth.

Right before I went home the commander called me in. “What were you writing?” “Letters to my young wife.” “All right. Be careful.”

What do I remember from those days? A shadow of madness. How we dug. And dug. Somewhere in my diary I wrote down that I understood, in the first few days I understood—how easy it is to become earth.

Ivan Nikolaevich Zhykhov, chemical engineer