Chernobyl

DAVID REMNICK / The New Yorker 4aug03

On April 26,1986, at 1:23 A.M., Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl trembled and exploded, causing a conflagration that spewed a radioactive cloud ten times as deadly as the radiation at Hiroshima. Many residents of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian towns downwind from the reactor absorbed radiation equivalent to a thousand chest X-rays. And yet the next day, ignorant of the dangers, children played in the fields and on the playgrounds; sixteen couples were married in Pripyat, just two miles from the burning reactor. One of the officials in charge proclaimed, "Panic is worse than radiation."

Photo by Robert Polidori

And then began the headaches, the nosebleeds, the nausea. Thousands of people died of cancers and other diseases in the years after the Chernobyl disaster. Had it not been for hundreds of thousands of soldiers and rescue workers who devoted themselves to the cleanup at Chernobyl and Pripyat, there is no telling how many more people might have died. What certainly died at Chernobyl was the Soviet pretense. With Chernobyl, perestroika began in earnest.

On a trip to Chernobyl a couple of years after the accident, I saw abandoned playgrounds, schools, houses, half-buried cars and rail carriages. Reactor No. 4 was a "sarcophagus," encased in concrete, though much of the rest of the complex was running. The only people who lived in the area were the technicians, who came and went in shifts, and the very old, who no longer cared about the calculus of radiation. Recently, the photographer Robert Polidori visited Pripyat and Chernobyl and won unprecedented access there, meeting the engineering team at Reactor No. 3, and visiting a classroom where someone had written on the blackboard, "No return. Farewell. Pripyat, 28 April, 1986."

We have seen all the toppled statues of Lenin, Marx, and Dzerzhinsky, but, as Polidori's photographs make painfully clear, nothing quite compares to Chernobyl as a gallery of ruin. Yuri Shcherbak, a former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, who is a physician and anti-nuclear crusader, once said, "If it weren't for the danger, they should leave the Chernobyl plant standing. It could be the great monument to the Soviet empire."