Voices from Chernobyl

MONOLOGUE ABOUT FREEDOM AND THE DREAM OF AN ORDINARY DEATH

It was freedom. You felt like you were a free person there. That’s not something you can understand, that’s something only someone who’s been in a war can understand. I’ve seen them, those guys—they get drunk, and they’ll start talking about how they still miss it—the freedom, the flight. Not one step backward! Stalin’s order. The special forces. But you shoot, you survive, you receive the 100 grams you’re entitled to, a pouch of cheap tobacco. There are a thousand ways for you to die, to get blown to bits, but if you try hard enough, you can trick them—the devil, the senior officers, the combat, the one who’s in that coffin with that wound, the very Almighty—you can trick them all and survive!

There’s a loneliness to freedom. I know it, all the ones who were at the reactor know it. Like in a trench at the very front. Fear and freedom! You live for everything. That’s not something you can understand, who live an ordinary life. Remember how they were always preparing us for war? But it turns out our minds weren’t ready. I wasn’t ready. Two military guys came to the factory, called me out. “Can you tell the difference between gasoline and diesel?” I say: “Where are you sending me?” “What do you mean where? As a volunteer for Chernobyl.” My military specialty is rocket fuel. It’s a secret specialty. They took me straight from the factory, just in a T-shirt, they didn’t even let me go home. I said, “I need to tell my wife.” “We’ll tell her ourselves.” There were about fifteen of us on the bus, reserve officers. I liked them. If we had to, we went, if it was needed, we worked, if they told us to go to the reactor, we got up on the roof of that reactor.

Near the evacuated villages they’d set up elevated guard posts, soldiers sat there with their rifles. There were barriers. Signs that said, “The side of the road is contaminated. Stopping or exiting is strictly forbidden.” Gray trees, covered with decontamination-liquid. You start going crazy! Those first few days we were afraid to sit on the ground, on the grass, we didn’t walk anywhere, we ran, if a car passed us, we’d put on a gas mask right away for the dust. After our shifts we’d sit in the tents. Ha! After a few months, it all seemed normal. It was just where you lived. We tore plums off the trees, caught fish, the pike there is incredible. And breams—we dried them to eat with beer. People probably told you about this already? We played soccer. We went swimming! Ha. [Laughs again.] We believed in fate, at bottom we’re all fatalists, not pharmacists. We’re not rational. That’s the Slavic mind-set. I believed in my fate! Ha ha! Now I’m an invalid of the second category. I got sick right away. Radiation poisoning. I didn’t even have a medical card at the polyclinic before I went. Ah, the hell with them. I’m not the only one. It was a mind-set.

I was a soldier, I closed other people’s homes, went into them. It’s a certain feeling . . . Land that you can’t plant on—the cow butts its head against the gate, but it’s closed and the house is locked. Its milk drips to the ground. There’s a feeling you get! In the villages that hadn’t been evacuated yet, the farmers would make vodka, they’d sell it to us. And we had lots of money: three times our salary from work, plus three times the normal daily military allowance. Later on we got an order: whoever drinks can stay a second term. So does vodka help or not? Well, at least psychologically it does. We believed that as much as we believed anything.

And the farmer’s life flowed along very smoothly: they plant something, it grows, they harvest it, and the rest goes on without them. They don’t have anything to do with the tsar, with the government—with space ships and nuclear power plants, with meetings in the capital. And they couldn’t believe that they were now living in a different world, the world of Chernobyl. They hadn’t gone anywhere. People died of shock. They took seeds with them, quietly, they took green tomatoes, wrapped them up. Glass cans would blow up, they’d put another back on the stove. What do you mean destroy, bury, turn everything into trash? But that’s exactly what we did. We annulled their labor, the ancient meaning of their lives. We were their enemies.

I wanted to go to the reactor. “Don’t worry,” the others told me, “in your last month before demobilization they’ll put you all on the roof.” We were there six months. And, right on schedule, after five months of evacuating people, we were sent to the reactor. There were jokes, and also serious conversations, that we’d be sent to the roof. Well, after that maybe we’d live another five years. Seven. Maybe ten. But “five” is what people said most often, for some reason. Where’d they get that? And they said it quietly, without panicking. “Volunteers, forward march!” Our whole squadron—we stepped forward. Our commander had a monitor, he turned it on and it showed the roof of the reactor: pieces of graphite, melted bitumen. “See, boys, see those pieces there? You need to clean those up. And here, in this quadrant, is where you make the hole.” You were supposed to be up there forty, fifty seconds, according to the instructions. But that was impossible. You needed a few minutes at the least. You had to get there and back, you had to run up and throw the stuff down—one guy would load the wheelbarrow, the others would throw the stuff into the hole there. You threw it, and went back, you didn’t look down, that wasn’t allowed. But guys looked down.

The papers wrote: “The air around the reactor is clean.” We’d read it and laugh, then curse a little. The air was clean, but we got some serious dosage up there. They gave us some dosimeters. One was for five roentgen, and it went to the max right away. The other one was bigger, it was for 200 roentgen, and that too went off. Five years, they said, and you can’t have kids. If you don’t die after five years . . . [Laughs.] There were all kinds of jokes. But quietly, without panic. Five years . . . I’ve already lived ten. There! [Laughs.] They gave us decorations. I have two. With all the pictures: Marx, Engels, Lenin. Red flags.

One guy disappeared. We figured he’d run off, but then two days later we find him in the bushes, he’d hung himself. Everyone had this feeling, you understand . . . but then our political officer spoke, he said the guy had received a letter, his wife was cheating on him. Who knows? A week later we were demobilized. But we found him in the bushes.

We had a cook, he was so afraid that he didn’t even live in the tent, he lived at the warehouse, he dug himself a little niche under the crates of butter and canned meat. He brought his mattress there and his pillow and lived underground. Then we got an order: gather a new crew and everyone to the roof. But everyone had already been. And they needed men! So they picked him up. He only went up on the roof once. He’s a second-group invalid now. He calls me a lot. We keep in touch, we hold onto one another, to our memories, they’ll live as long as we do. That’s what you should write.

The papers are all lies. I didn’t read anywhere about how we sewed ourselves protective gear, lead shirts, underwear. We had rubber robes with some lead in them. But we made lead underwear for ourselves. We made sure of that. In one village they showed us the two whorehouses. We were men who’d been torn away from our homes for six months, six months without women, it was an emergency situation. We all went there. The local girls would walk around anyway, even though they were crying, saying they’d all die soon. We had lead underwear, we wore it over our pants. Write that. We had good jokes, too. Here’s one: An American robot is on the roof for five minutes, and then it breaks down. The Japanese robot is on the roof for five minutes, and then—breaks down. The Russian robot is up there two hours! Then a command comes in over the loudspeaker: “Private Ivanov! In two hours you’re welcome to come down and have a cigarette break.” Ha-ha! [Laughs.]

Before we went up on the roof, the commander gave us instructions, we were all standing as a unit, and a few of the guys protested: “We already went, we should have been sent home already.” And as for me, my specialty was fuel, and they were sending me on the roof too. But I didn’t say anything. I wanted to go. I didn’t protest. The commander says: “Only volunteers go up on the roof. The rest can step aside, you’ll have a talk with the military prosecutor.” Well, those guys stood around, talked about it a little, and then agreed. If you took the oath, then you should do what you have to. I don’t think any of us doubted that they’d put us in jail for insubordination. They’d put out a rumor that it would be two to three years. Meanwhile if a soldier got more than 25 roentgen, his superiors could be put in jail for poisoning their men. So no one got more than 25 roentgen. Everyone got less. You understand? But they were good kids. Two of them got sick, and this other one, he said, “I’ll go.” And he’d already been on the roof once that day. People respected him for it. And he got a reward: 500 rubles. Another guy was making a hole up top, and then it was time for him to stop. We’re all waving at him: “Come down.” But he’s on his knees up there and he’s whacking away. He needed to make a hole in that spot, so we could throw the debris down. He didn’t get up until he’d made the hole. He got a reward—1000 rubles. You could buy two motorcycles for that back then. Now he’s a first-group invalid. But for being afraid, you paid right away.

Demobilization. We got in cars. The whole way through the Zone we kept our sirens on. I look back on those days. I was close to something then. Something fantastical. I don’t have the words to describe it. And the words, “gigantic,” “fantastic,” they just don’t do it. I had this feeling . . . What? I haven’t had that feeling again even in love.

Aleksandr Kudryagin, liquidator