As we near the town centre, I feel a strong sense of dislocation, as if perhaps we shouldn’t be here. I assume this is because of the potential dangers of the place, the speculative health implications of our visit, or maybe it could be to do with the gravitas of its history; that coming to this town is an act of desecration or disrespect, as though we’re putting our dollar down for the freak show, about to enter the tent to gaze and point at the bearded lady or the three-legged man. But that’s not it, I realise. We don’t belong here because nobody belongs here. Drive through a city, any city, even in the middle of the night, and there’s a bulb glowing over a lonely porch, a dog eyeing you suspiciously, or a closed-up petrol station, its owner sleeping upstairs. Here there is nobody. No admissions booth. No map demarcating the areas of interest. Not even a passing farmer taking a shortcut.
The city is utterly, utterly dead.
So you first encounter it not as a stranger, a foreigner who doesn’t understand its ways, but instead as a pathologist, slicing through a cadaver stiffened by rigor mortis.
We stop at the main square and get out to walk. We find ourselves speaking in low murmurs, conscious of the silenced past. Pripyat is, above all else, a place of eloquent absence.
We walk with deliberation, intently aware of our movements. Perhaps this is because we’re so alert to the air we’re breathing, as though we’re instructing our limbs to take note that we’re in an alien atmosphere.
Kolya, our guide, warns us not to touch anything and to be careful not to step on any moss, which zigzags through the cracked concrete. “It’s a sponge for radioactivity,” he tells us. And so our motions become even more pronounced. We watch where we tread, then we stop and look around, then watch where we tread once more, like a small child negotiating a flight of stairs.
The square fronts onto the city’s Palace of Culture, an imposing building, its ranks of steps facing us. To the right sits the Communist Party Headquarters. To our left is the first in a regimented row of apartment blocks. On its roof stands a set of giant Cyrillic letters in opaque grey, outlined in communist scarlet. Russian is a language that resists a Latinate eye; swirled letters are sharpened with geometric edges, as though they can only be transcribed by chisel. I ask Kolya for a translation. “Let the atom be a worker not a solider,” he says, then hesitates with his explanation. “Basically they’re saying they want to use it for electricity, not for… you know… bombs.”
Kolya is twenty-two or twenty-three; wears green camouflage fatigues even though he’s not in the military, and speaks in flowing bullet points, which gives him an air of deliberate insouciance. On our drive in, we passed the nuclear complex.
• That is reactor 1.
• That is reactor 2.
• Pripyat had a population of maybe forty thousand people.
• Chernobyl village had a population of twelve thousand people.
• Now there are maybe one thousand.
• A few scientists, guides, officials, safety workers.
• It’s boring but we play cards and keep ourselves busy.
• Of course, we get to go home regularly.
• We have two weeks on, then a month off.
“Let the atom be a worker not a soldier.” The phrase carries a particularly Soviet sense of absolutism and obligation. Even the simple atom is forced to take on a role, to sublimate itself to the orders of others.
Shapes are very consciously defined here. No building seems out of place in relation to another. This is a city that prizes regularity, precise planning, built in the 1970s on the Ukrainian side of the Polesia woodlands, an area popular with hunters. Next to it runs the Pripyat River, two hundred metres wide, which flows into the Dnieper and onwards towards Kiev. Pripyat was the city where the workers for the Chernobyl nuclear plant lived, grateful for their posting in a town that was once the jewel of Soviet modernity. This was a city of boundless promise. A population of high-level professionals who all served the same employer, so their professional unity no doubt extended to their private lives as well. You sense it was once a children’s sanctuary, free of malign influences. Behind the Palace of Culture sits a playground with bumper cars and a Ferris wheel. We walk through crèches that once were state of the art. Rooms with metal enamel cots and cushioned play areas, an abundance of dolls, even still; they lie scattered near windows, sprawled underneath miniature tables and chairs.
Many elderly parents accompanied their children and grandchildren here, eager to escape the grind of larger cities. Families squeezed together in their apartments to make room. Communal living was a situation they were used to. No doubt it was much easier to do so here, with a river nearby to fish in, forests that invited walkers.
We make our way through a loading door to the backstage area inside the Palace of Culture. Stage backdrops lean against the wall in preparation for the Mayday celebrations that were due to be held that year, in 1986, six days after the disaster, five days after the evacuation.
The backdrops are print portraits of prominent Communist Party leaders, their faces twenty feet high. I recognise Lenin and Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Communist Party for almost two decades from the mid-sixties. The others I can’t place. I ask Kolya if he can name them, but he shakes his head. “It was all over by the time I was born.”
The faces look out with neutral disinterest, resigned to their oblivion.
The auditorium still impresses. Everything intact. Damp has yet to find its way in. The carpet looks spotless and full, as if recently vacuumed. The rows of seats await their patrons. A mezzanine level overlooks us.
The silence here is of a different quality to that outside. It feels familiar to me. I spent most of my twenties as a theatre director and even though my productions mostly took place in small black studios or cold improvised venues, I’ve stood many times on a silent stage. As with other spaces built for public events, a courtroom or a stadium, it’s a place that naturally hums with expectation.
I think of Nikolai Ryzhkov, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR at the time of the disaster. His face is perhaps included in the solemn portraits behind me. His visit to the site came on May 2. He arrived accompanied by Yegor Ligachev, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
They sat for a few days with the scientific delegations, impressed them with their willingness to listen to the assembled expertise, to engage with the intricate complexities of the issue. A governmental commission was formed in situ, headed by Ryzhkov himself. On the fourteenth of July he surprised and invigorated the leaders of the cleanup with a speech in Moscow, declaring that the Chernobyl accident “did not occur by chance,” stating instead, “It was inevitable.”[1] An extraordinary admission by an official of his status.
The resonances of the empty stage seem to counter its surroundings. Unlike its sister buildings, this auditorium doesn’t hark back to former glories; instead, it sits in stoic anticipation of its future, prepared for what is to come.
I land at Minsk airport the previous evening. I’ve arrived to join a delegation from the Irish charity Chernobyl Children International, which has been working in Belarus for the past twenty years. Its founder, Adi Roche, has invited me along to see some of their projects firsthand.