Two decades on, the legacy of the world’s worst environmental and nuclear disaster remains unclear, subject to myth, gossip and conflicting science. The people who never left struggle to survive, refugees from a future that never happened.

See accompanying photography by Donald Weber

[Published Outpost Magazine, Sept/Oct 2006 issue]

“BACK THEN, IF YOU WERE IN THE MILITARY, it was prestigious to be stationed here. Because of how beautiful it was.”

Leonid Korolchuk gazes wistfully out the rain-soaked window of our jeep at the dense stand of spruce on both sides of the road in this pocket of Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone. His meaty paws guide the vehicle over a rutted, snow-laden track. “I think it still is.”

Even in the grim hold of winter there is ample evidence of nature’s regenerative powers within the limits of this twenty-first century wasteland. The gabled wooden cottages that have been re-occupied by the “self-settlers” sit cloaked in green patches of pine, ornamented with brambles. Wild horses, once thought extinct in the area, run freely again. As we pull into the nuclear age Pompeii that is Pripyat, wild dogs emerge from behind the Soviet-era apartment blocks and chase down our vehicle. This abandoned company town, only four kilometres from the nuclear station, was once home to 50,000 people and considered a showpiece. Now, forest creeps indiscriminately, enveloping once stately boulevards and fencing in the dwellings where a lifetime’s possessions were left behind. Even the town’s football pitch has been surrendered; from the stadium bleachers one might watch this slow motion reclamation unfold.

It is in this mixed terrain of woodland, marsh and steppe that the civilization of the Eastern Slavs—what would one day grow into the Russian Imperium—first took shape in the seventh to ninth centuries. The woods provided protection against the warring nomadic tribes of Mongols and Tatars who roamed the open plains to the south. A hundred kilometres from here, on the cusp of this forest and on the banks of the Dnieper River, the first great city of the Slavs, Kiev, would rise up, the magnificent golden domes of its churches burnishing the sky.
A schoolteacher at the time of the accident, Korolchuk knows the history of these lands well. Now Chief of Security for the Exclusion Zone, he is charged with supervising security at the infamous power plant, catching scavengers and administering basic law and order for the remaining 400 self-settlers and the 4,000 shift workers who still reside in Chernobyl town during the week. Although the last of the reactors was shut down six years ago, the plant’s decommissioning still requires close monitoring.

Korolchuk is at ease with his job, even enjoys the prestige and camaraderie. I ask if it’s true that wanted criminals hide out in this poisoned refuge. He takes a sidelong look at his deputy Vasily in the passenger seat and smirks. “Not since I’ve been around,” he says. But work here is rarely dull. Although most anything of value has already been looted, they still apprehend about 10 scavengers a week. “They’re not organized gangs anymore, just poor people.” As for serious crimes, there is the odd case to investigate. Not long after my visit a drunken spat between two plant employees will result in a murder charge—the killing committed allegedly with a ball-point pen.

Despite warnings about radioactivity in the soil, self-settlers subsist from their own farming plots and many people from both inside and outside the zone, including Korolchuk, even hunt here. Mostly wild boar.

“It’s good hunting,” Korolchuk says. “We take what we kill to the lab and if it tests fine we eat it. This meat is better for you than the processed stuff you get in stores. Those have been fed steroids. These animals graze naturally. It’s organic.”

Heavy winds buffet the jeep as we pass a row of burial mounds covered with a cake frosting of damp snow. Small radiation warning markers stand upright in the dunes, indentifying this as one of the dismantled and steam-rolled settlements where the highest levels of radioactivity were recorded. Korolchuk has memorized the large colour-coded map on the wall of his office that indicates the most and least poisoned areas, a seemingly random geography explained only by the prevailing winds at the time of the accident.
A little more than a month from today, on April 26, they will be marking the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl’s infamy. Although official ceremonies are planned to commemorate all that was lost, the locals who remain within the zone, and in the lands just beyond it, show little interest in the calendar’s turn. Life is provisional. Everyone remembers and lives with the consequences. They’re even happy to talk about it with outsiders, if a little surprised at your interest. But first things first: work—whatever work you can find, food on the table, a nip of homemade vodka.

The future is a tricky thing—especially when it feels like you’re walking backwards into it.

Twenty years on, you would expect Chernobyl’s legacy to be a matter of historical record, rather than this foggy thing, clouded by myth, rumour, politics and conflicting science. The towns and villages just beyond the plant’s secured 30km perimeter display higher incidences of blood-related cancers, respiratory illnesses, heart disease and psychological distress than elsewhere in Ukraine. Is it the effects of the lingering radiation in the soil, the water and air? Or is it, as some scientists and officials have argued, the wages of poverty, bad lifestyle choices and a culture of fatalism, that have eclipsed the accident’s malign scope?

Scientists and activists quarrel avidly over the number of dead. Meanwhile, chronic political instability at the national level has undermined the country’s efforts to grapple with this dragon, Chernobyl. There is no official plan for the social and economic rehabilitation of a region that remains home to thousands of people. The ironic thing? In medical studies it’s the people who were relocated elsewhere in Ukraine that show higher levels of stress, and more difficulty coping, than the ones who stayed behind.

*

ONCE UPON A TIME it was supposed to be different—with eight working reactors, Chernobyl would be the largest nuclear power plant in the world, a testament to Soviet ingenuity and might.

The product of a strident enthusiasm for Soviet nuclear power in the 1970s, Chernobyl would alleviate the pressures put on Ukraine’s coal stations as output in the country’s southeast reached its bell-curve. Within the space of five years, four nuclear plants came online in Ukraine, beginning with Chernobyl in 1979. Scientists and party officials encouraged the public to embrace the atom as the future of the workers’ state.

“Nuclear power stations are like stars that shine all day long!” wrote one academic in a 1980 magazine article. “We shall sow them all over the land. They are perfectly safe!”

State propaganda assured the public that the new stations were no different than the coal-based utilities of old, but easier to operate and cleaner. According to nuclear engineer and journalist Grigori Medvedev, reactors were equated with “ordinary steam boilers and nuclear station operators with stokers who shovel coal into a furnace.” Thus, by the 1980s, the wages paid to nuclear technicians could be lower than those paid to workers at thermal plants. And yet, the Chernobyl plant and its four light-water-cooled graphite-moderated reactors were considered a model of the Soviet nuclear program, and two more reactors were already under construction at the site.

Then, in the early hours of April 26, 1986, a routine experiment went awry. The plant’s operators were trying to determine whether the reactor’s own turbines could provide sufficient energy to the cooling pumps in the event of a external power failure—the turbines would need to keep the pumps running long enough for the emergency generator to take over. To enable to test to proceed, the reactor’s output was lowered to 25 percent and safety systems were temporarily disabled.

For reasons not apparent to operators at the time, the reactor’s power level fell to less than one percent during the test. As the crew slowly brought it back up there was a sudden power surge. In an instant, output spiked, dramatically raising temperatures and creating an explosion. Fuel rods melted in the intense heat. The reactor’s graphite-casing ignited and a hole was blown in the roof. In the ensuing vacuum, radioactive materials—some of them, such as ceasium 137 and and strontium 90, possessing the half-life of several decades—were sucked up into the atmosphere. One-hundred times more radiation was released than in the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Air particulates were carried by the winds, contaminating northern Ukraine and southern Belarus’ soil, water and air. The fire would rage for ten days.

Galina Korolchuk, Leonid’s wife and the director of an orphanage in the nearby town of Ivankiv, was teaching at an elementary school not far from the burning reactor. “No one told us what had happened,” she says. Although Pripyat was evacuated within two days of the accident—residents were told to leave their possessions behind as they would soon be able to return—the broader public wasn’t notified for at least a week. Soldiers dispatched to the area were initially ordered not to wear protective clothing for fear of creating a panic. “On May Day we went out to the parade,” Galina recalls. “We picked mushrooms and berries in the woods. Those who farmed tilled the ground. And when they did tell us, they said it’s okay, nothing serious. A small accident. Don’t go outside. All we ever got were half-truths.” Eventually more than 200,000 people were evacuated from the areas adjacent to Chernobyl, most of them never to return home.

On occasion, Galina and her husband take foreign visitors on trips inside the zone. That wild animals once again flourish is of little consolation. She’s not very impressed by Leonid’s hunting trips. The experience is always a bitter one, and when the tour ends, as it usually does, next to the hulking mass of reactor four, there is no release.

The reactor, and the concrete and steel “sarcophagus” that encases it, is perhaps the world’s most famous-least visited building. An upstart advertising agency in Kiev has launched its own cheeky public service campaign, “Chernobyl, First Ukrainian Brand” in acknowledgement of how the sarcophagus has become the most recognizable image of the country abroad.

Built to last only 20 years, the sarcophagus is structurally unsound and prone to leakage. Hastily constructed—due to radiation exposure workers toiled in 15 minute shifts, and one wall was never properly welded shut—water damage has at times forced the radioactive stew inside to leech into the soil. A natural disaster such as an earthquake could shatter the sarcophagus, or it could collapse on its own. Work is finally beginning this year on a new, sturdier encasing—a movable hangar-like structure nicknamed “the arch” that will slide on a pair of tracks into place over the present enclosure. But the project, expected to cost $800 million US and financed by nations including Canada, is at least five years from completion. Until then, it remains another background source of anxiety.

And, as everyone will tell you, no one really knows what’s inside.

*

YOU CAN READ THESE LANDS like a palimpsest. Faded, flaking murals of peasant life composed in the Soviet realist style adorn abandoned granaries and schoolhouses. Entire villages, emptied, as though time had locked still circa 1986. A cluster of 19th century gingerbread farmhouses looms secretly in a darkened grove, shuttered in by fences, dogs and chickens pecking in the snow. Small circles of men hunch over their cigarettes by the roadside. Here, ancient myth and everyday gossip conspire easily. Folk tales bleed into idle chatter.

The Chernenko home in Pribirsk is your typical rural Ukrainian domicile. Two square rooms of eroding plaster covered in peeling wallpaper. An unheated kitchen that doubles as a entryway, chicken coop attached. Cats prowl the hardwood floors. Ten-year-old Anya, blind, sits contentedly on a bed, drinking lemonade from a teacup with a spoon. Ever playful, she feels her way along the walls, hoping the visitor will chase her.

“You’re the lion and I’m the rabbit,” she says.

Anya’s father Sergei, 32, was a truck driver at the Chernobyl plant until he was diagnosed with a heart condition four months ago. Like many here, he believed that drinking vodka could protect him from the radiation. Sick, he still drinks, now thinking it will cure him.

Travelling from village to village, following only tracks in the snow, it isn’t difficult finding families coping with a serious illness in their midst. At 70, Valentina Savchenko is the family matriarch and herself the picture of a hardy and healthy septuagenarian. But her grandchildren, now the fifth generation to grow up in the town of Domanivka, have fared less well. Remarkably, four of the teenage boys suffer from epilepsy, a neurological disorder not normally linked to Chernobyl. Nonetheless, doctors have suggested it could be a result of the accident; exposure to even low levels of ionizing radiation have been found to cause some damage to the central nervous system.

The source of Natasha Degtyaryova’s ovarian cancer is less contentious. The angelic-looking14-year-old, bald from the effects of chemotherapy, her liver and kidneys already removed, has been granted the special status of “Grade 2 Disability,” entitling her family to monthly benefits. But between the Chernobyl-related assistance and the unemployment cheque her mother receives, it’s not enough to cover basic needs and the cost of Natasha’s cancer treatment in Kiev.

It’s a chilling, if anecdotal survey. The anxiety of living in a poisoned land may be one thing, but the stresses have been compounded over time on several fronts. The year before the accident, most of the region’s collective farms collapsed; agriculture was by far its largest employer. Then there came the fall of the Soviet Union, the transition to a market economy, recession, the mass closure of factories, and a government that has proved to be as inept and is it is unstable. Even if some of these illnesses are due to factors other than the accident, the ability of the country to confront these challenges has been severely compromised.

The old ones will tell you about the prophecies. After complaining that her pension, even with a recent increase, cannot meet the rising cost of necessities, one babushka reminds me about a passage in Revelations. It describes the burning star Wormwood that crashed to earth, poisoning the river where it landed. The water was made bitter, and many died from drinking it. Chernobyl, translated from Ukrainian, means wormwood.

Then there’s the saga of the two competing princes, in the time of Kievan Rus. At the Pripyat marshes, their armies met in a bloody battle, brother against brother. All perished. When the Soviets began building the reactor in 1971, people claimed it was cursed ground. They swore that the cries of men and the clashing of swords could be heard rising from the woods.

*

IVANKIV IS A TOWN IN FREEFALL, caught between two radically different pasts—a feudal tradition right out of a Gogol novel and the Soviet—with few outward signs of what might come next. It has been 15 years since the empire fell, 20 years since Chernobyl, and a new course still lays waiting.

The occasional horse drawn carriage, enjoying right of way, shares the snow encrusted roads with beat-up Ladas, as drab Soviet-era apartment blocks tower over a grid of feudal homesteads, each cottage enclosed by a wooden fence. Bent-over babushkas, heads cloaked with scarves, clomp through the snow in their bucket-like wool boots, carrying plastic bags. Next to Teterif, the communist-style cafeteria with no menu and no heat, youths cluster in front of the town’s busiest snack bar, queuing for roasted chicken and hot dogs. The architecture is unremarkable, haphazard; even the municipal buildings built in the communist days display little of the pomp one expects. The only pretension to grandeur remains the statue of Lenin still perched overbearingly in front of city hall. There was little groundswell to knock it down.

The open-air daily market, a warren of dilapidated wooden kiosks on the main drag, surges with activity, evidence of a healthy entrepreneurial spirit. The smells of Nescafé instant coffee and fresh poppy seed buns cut through the cold air. Beauty products and bootleg music cassettes are fastidiously displayed next to a selection of raw meats, including slabs of white salo, the raw pork fat that is the national delicacy.

After a slight dip in the road there comes the hospital grounds, more homes, a gas station then a roundabout that provides three routes away from here. In the centre of the circle sits Ivankiv’s oddest landmark—a hollow plaster egg the height of a man. Donated to the town by a wealthy German businessman, it is said to contain a message of peace to future generations.

Back at city hall, to the right of Lenin’s stern gaze, I am ushered into the office of Ivan Kirimov, the administrator for the Ivankiv region, which includes Chernobyl. High heels click down the hallway’s linoleum floors while a steady stream of babushkas pad by with their supplications to officials. In the corner of Kirimov’s spacious office a bound stalk of wheat stands ceremoniously, next to it a gilded portrait of the Virgin Mary.

Kirimov wields some startling statistics. Eighty-eight percent of the children in his district are sick, he says. Since the beginning of the year, he has spearheaded an effort to undertake medical check-ups of the almost 4,000 children who live here. So far, after examining a little more than a quarter of them, only 12 percent have shown no signs of chronic illness. He insists that radiation is the cause.

“The majority of the illnesses in children are related to the Chernobyl catastrophe. As a rule, these are blood, respiratory and skin diseases,” he says. “We had these illnesses before but never in such high numbers.”

Radiation exposure has been linked to a litany of cancers, from thyroid, intestinal and breast cancer to leukemia, as well as asthma and even cataracts.

The authors of a recent United Nations-sanctioned report by the Chernobyl Forum would dispute Kirimov’s findings. It estimated the number of cancer-related deaths resulting from the accident at only 4,000-9,000. It also concluded that current health risks are negligible, arguing that the average yearly dose of radiation received by those living in the contaminated lands is within acceptable limits. A subsequent report issued by Greenpeace on the anniversary contradicts those findings, claiming upwards of 90,000 have died or will die from the radioactivity. Predictably, each side accuses the other of using figures to merely bolster their own interests; one of the parties to the Chernobyl Forum is the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), while Greenpeace is well-known for its anti-nuclear campaigns.

The numbers game, however, is a dodgy affair. First, any attempts to adequately measure Chernobyl’s impact demographically are compromised by the secrecy and misinformation that typified the Soviet response in the first three years after the accident. Second, the economic struggles of the newly independent Ukraine and Belarus undermined what resources could be put towards monitoring and collating information. To date, no thorough epidemiological study has been conducted of the affected populace.

Kirimov shrugs and dismisses the Forum’s report, as though it were issued from another planet. “I think there is some mistake. I don’t know where they get these figures from. You can write anything. We have a real situation in our region.”

*

ON THE AFTERNOON we visit Valentina Sabenok, the 43-year-old mother of two is visibly tired and a little peeved. We catch her in the middle of watching a Bollywood movie on television. “Every time I want to cry I watch an Indian movie,” she says. “Heartbreaking stories.”

Her husband got drunk on the way to work this morning—he guards one of the barges that plies the Pripyat River once it thaws—and was sent home to sleep it off. “His boss is my friend. I helped him get that job. Probably someone treated him to vodka and he couldn’t help having a few shots.”

She is tired because her nine-year-old daughter Tanya, who suffers from severe cerebral palsy, couldn’t sleep last night. They share a room and Valentina must devote all hours caring for the child. Tanya cried until three in the morning, didn’t fall asleep until seven.

Valentina’s family has seen itself forced to move twice in its lifetime. When she was a small child, her home village was flooded to create the nearby reservoir where the Pripyat River meets the Dneiper. Unfortunately, they were relocated to a new homestead within what is now the exclusion zone. After the accident, they were evacuated to Kiev. For a time she stayed in the capital, picking up work in construction. Her parents, however, would join the ranks of the self-settlers, returning to their homes within the zone against government orders. She moved to the town of Stracholissya, just the other side of the checkpoint, to be near her mother who was ill.

The doctors have always told Valentina that Chernobyl is the cause of her daughter’s cerebral palsy. It is a birth defect, a product of the radiation, the legacy passed from mother to daughter. But she doesn’t believe it; she is one of the few who is reluctant to blame the accident. She insists something must have gone wrong after the birth. “First, the doctor says everything is fine, she is healthy. Then three hours later they tell me she is dying.”

A neurologist who later examined Anya asked about the child’s head trauma. “That was the first I ever heard about that,” she says.

“But what could I do? They told me this sickness is related to Chernobyl. At the time I wasn’t well enough to argue with them or investigate. They all blamed Chernobyl.”

Scientists have hotly debated the subject of birth defects in children since the accident. The Chernobyl Forum has argued that because the level of radiation exposure was so low for those living near the reactor, there is little or no likelihood it would adversely affect fertility rates or the future health of offspring. Several studies in Belrus, Russia and Ukraine—deemed inconclusive or flawed by the Forum—have shown otherwise: the incidence of birth defects rose in proportion to levels of radioactive contamination in the area. While the causes of cerebral palsy, a chronic disorder that impairs the brain’s ability to control motor function, are not fully understood, it can be developed when the fetus is exposed to certain chemicals or infections through the expectant mother.

If anything is clear, it is that the genetic effects of exposure to radiation can take several generations to reveal themselves. All the major studies at least concur when it comes to the necessity of vigorously monitoring the accident’s long-term genetic consequences. But it’s that shroud of the unknown which heightens the anxiety of those living in Chernobyl’s shadow.

Valentina doesn’t spend much time thinking about Chernobyl. She struggles to get by on Tanya’s monthly disability allowance of $60. A card-carrying member of the Socialist Party, she follows politics but doesn’t put much faith in it—she knows that her party will likely show no better than fourth in the coming parliamentary elections (it turns out, four months later, they will hold the balance of power in the Rada). Instead, she looks forward to summer. In a month she can begin planting again. Potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. As she toils in the dirt, Tanya will be with her, sitting in her wheelchair, basking in the garden. “That,” Valentina says, “is when I know she is happiest.”

*

WHENEVER WE ARRIVE at the orphanage in Ivankiv, there is a flurry of activity among the children. A row of small, cherubic faces appears in the front windows of the first and second floors. “Who is it, who is it?” The youngest children are perfectly happy to clamber into the arms of a stranger. The teens, the least likely to be adopted, coolly measure up visitors from a distance.

The orphanage, which sits behind the town’s playing field, surrounded by rusting playground equipment, provides the perfect microcosm for understanding the wages of psychological distress in the area. As with elsewhere in Ukraine, the vast majority of these orphans, 75 percent, are labelled “social orphans”—they’re not necessarily here because their parents have died from a Chernobyl-related illness. They’re here because their parents are either unable or unwilling to take care of them.

Over two weeks we will return to the orphanage to say hello, and check in on a few of the children. Volodomyr, a bright but shy 15 year old, gives me my first tour of the building. Like all the children here, he is originally from the area. His father was murdered, and his mother, an alcoholic, had her parental rights stripped from her and is currently in jail. He has a brother at another orphanage—siblings often find themselves split up within the system.

Orphanages typically care for children from 3 until 17 years old, although at 15 children have the option of leaving to attend a trade school where they will board in a dormitory. Until they leave, the director of the orphanage is their legal guardian.

One of the most critical aspects, say the orphanage workers, is to ensure that the children aren’t made to feel different from others in the town. There is a stigma that curses orphan children, and society tends to regard them as more trouble than they are worth. When a Canadian charity, Children of Chernobyl Canada Fund, first established its summer camp in the Carpathian mountains, the locals there were set against the idea, expecting a rash of petty thefts and vandalism. Their fears went unfulfilled.

To combat the stigmatization, the 51 children of the Ivankiv orphanage attend the regular schools in town, and are free to participate in whatever after-school club they fancy.

While the children here were born after the accident, and appear on the surface healthy and well-adjusted, they are doubly afflicted. First—born to mothers exposed at the time of the accident, raised on contaminated lands—their health is a constant issue; while they no signs of serious illness, many of them suffer from a weakened immune system and fall sick easily.

Then there is the lack of family support, and the socialization process that comes with the presence of blood relations in one’s life. The female teachers teach the girls cooking and sewing, while the boys are taught carpentry and how to mend shoes. As for learning how to raise their future families? At best, that’s left to visits with what remains of their own kin—if they’re still in touch.

*

THE SUN HAS COME OUT for Taras Shevchenko’s birthday, Ukraine’s much celebrated 19th century nationalist poet. A three-metre tall black marble statue of his likeness—a not entirely flattering one—is surrounded by a sea of mildly enthusiastic faces and Ukrainian flags. On the statue’s rostrum, before a row of microphones, stands a dour-looking crew of hopefuls from the Our Ukraine political party. A Cossack honour guard, in full furry regalia, sits poised on horseback behind and at the sides of the statue.

Shevchenko’s birthday always attracts a broad spectrum of protesters and celebrants to the downtown square in Kiev that bears his name, but with the first post-Orange Revolution parliamentary elections only a few weeks away, the square is this year being used for all its symbolic heft.

Befitting any nascent, struggling democracy, the election campaign is rife with on-the-street conspiracy theories and innuendo. The Russians are delivering suitcases of cash to the Yanukovych people; the Americans and George Soros are financing the liberal-minded reformers. Those “volunteers” waving party flags from every street overpass and busy intersection? They get $150 US a day.

Although the ongoing costs of Chernobyl account for eight percent of Ukraine’s GDP, the subject of the country’s long-term strategy barely comes up during the campaign. A parliamentarian in the early days of the country’s independence once said “Chernobyl taught us that we are a colony”—the accident is frequently credited with hastening the demise of the USSR—but the accident is now manipulated for politics. Candidates make competing promises to increase benefits for those affected by the disaster.

While Chernobyl may have given cause to the country’s independence movement, it also served as a catalyst for the Ukrainian diaspora, which mobilized to provide relief in its aftermath. Canada, home to the largest expatriate Ukrainian community in the world, saw a variety of grassroots efforts emerge; Children of Chernobyl Canada Fund (CCCF), and its related charity, Help Us Help The Children, have raised $18 million dollars to address the needs of those most vulnerable to the effects of radiation and social collapse.

Over the years CCCF has delivered much-need medical supplies and expensive diagnostic equipment that Ukraine’s troubled health system could not afford, as well as volunteer nurses and doctors. Diagnostic and rehabilitation centres were opened in Zhytomyr and Korosten. A summer camp program, intended to give children a getaway to the clean air of the Carpathian mountains in the country’s west, is still in operation today. The camp also offers children some preparation for working life with lessons on how to complete job applications and perform interviews, and informs them of their legal rights.

Ruslana Wrzesnewskyj, one of the founders of Help Us Help The Children, is in Kiev as part of a team of election monitors, a project financed by the Canada International Development Agency. She began her involvement with relief efforts as an adoptive parent. In 1992 she returned to Canada with a sick teenage girl from the Chernobyl region; the girl spent three months on intravenous at Sick Children’s Hospital in Toronto. When her new daughter was ready to leave the hospital, one of the doctors remarked that this girl “had won the lottery, but what about the others?” The question didn’t sit well.

Those who were children at time of the disaster have grown up. But the subsequent generation of youth has had no easier time of it. It may not be as easy to draw a direct connection, but they remain children of the accident.

“If Chernobyl had been traced statistically from the very outset, and people followed it as they should have, it would’ve been easy to understand,” Wrzesnewskyj says. “There are just too many children in too many orphanages, and too many people dying by the time they’re 40 or 50. It’s not just alcoholism, we’re talking about something bigger.”

“I’ve always called Chernobyl the silent killer. The kids who come to our camps, we do a lot of blood tests on them, and their cell counts and thyroid levels are always out of whack. It will never be known how much damage was done. All I know is we end up working with the end result.”

*

ANNA KRAVCHENKO’S PREGNANT BELLY is illuminated by the glow of the television set as she dances to a music video starring Ruslana, Ukraine’s newest Euro-pop singing sensation. The 21-year-old is doing her best to ignore her younger brothers Evgeni and Vitaly as they fire cap guns at one another, jumping over furniture.

While a combination of low birth rates and the migration of young people to the cities continues to create a net loss of population in the region, the Kravchenko family are part of a small, but noticeable trend of people moving in. Valentina, single and 42, moved the family to Pribirsk because the low cost of housing could afford a larger space in which to raise her children, and a small farmstead with which to feed them. Unemployed, she relies on a monthly government assistance cheque of $85.

To complicate matters, not only is Anna due to give birth in three months, but Evgeni, 14, developed a heart defect within a year of moving here. It’s not likely his ailment is related to Chernobyl—none of the doctors are certain—but she can hardly meet the costs of his medication or the surgery he will eventually require.

It was the fresh air and lack of crime that encouraged Viktor Popovichenko, a 62-year-old retired coal miner, to move to Stracholyssia from his home in the heavily industrialized city of Donetsk. There a lingering, crusty fog of air-borne black particulates is creating its own epidemic of respiratory illnesses. When a transboundary commission was struck by the governments of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine to develop a strategic action plan for rehabilitating the Dnieper River basin all three share, the section of the river that flows past Chernobyl didn’t merit much alarm. In fact, the river and its associated reservoir has filtered many of the radionuclides safely into its base sediment. It was the water treatment facilities downriver in Ukraine’s polluted southeast, where Donetsk lies, that instead have become the focus of urgent action.

Gentrification—it’s not something you might associate with Chernobyl, but there’s a flicker of it, too, as newly affluent Kievans go in search of country homes and summer dachas. A row of ostentatious brick mansions, jokingly dubbed the Chernobyl Riviera, is going up mere kilometres from the zone. Previously abandoned homes are being scooped up cheap by city professionals yearning for the simple life.

While some villages have wrestled with the idea of newcomers—town elders are sometimes consulted before someone moves in—long-time residents like Valentina Sabenok welcomes them. The thought of being surrounded by fewer empty homes comforts her, and as her daughter’s cerebral palsy keeps her close to home, she now has more opportunities to socialize.

Looking out her window at the next house over, its lights on, she says, “it’s almost becoming a village again.”

*

ANATOLY OSIPENKO STILL REMEMBERS his 30th birthday. On May 16, 1986, he was in Moscow’s Clinic No. 6, receiving treatment for the acute radiation sickness he suffered while fighting the fire on the first night of the accident. He shared a birthday cigarette with another sick colleague in a stairwell. Too weak to walk on his own, he supported himself against the wall. Later that afternoon his friend was dead.

While Osipenko has maintained his modest good looks and a stylish chestnut-brown moustache, his slight frame and deliberate motions betray his fragility. He remains one of the few emergency workers still alive who was the reactor the night of fire. His toes break easily, he says, and on many days walking requires too great an effort; the image of radioactive water coalescing around his rubber boots occurs to him frequently. Until only a few years ago, it wasn’t so hard to marshal his energies—he waves his arm about the room as he boasts of building the addition to his home in only four days, largely by himself. It’s by far the biggest house on the block.

Stiffening in his chair, Osipenko blushes, draining the contrast from the small red blotches on his forehead, neck and behind his ears. He is now 49 years old and his eldest daughter 27—add her years to his and you get the age he more closely resembles. He’s a bit puzzled, if hospitable to a fault, by the appearance of a Canadian, asking questions about the past.

“Are you really interested in this? Nobody here is interested anymore.”

Now suffering from heart disease, Osepenko has spent the better part of the past 20 years since the accident, fighting for the government benefits to which he is entitled with the aid of his wife.

There remain approximately 700,000 people still classified as “liquidators”—people involved in putting out the fire and the clean-up over subsequent months and years. There are classes of liquidators, each of which is entitled to certain government benefits, whether they need them or not. Osepenko is a first-class liquidator but has had to fight for what he is entitled to. It didn’t help that Soviet doctors initially misdiagnosed him as part of a policy of underplaying the accident’s impact. Until last year he was only able to receive second category benefits, which meant he still had to cover half of his own medical costs, and was ineligible for electricity and gas subsidies.

His wife pulls out a file of papers four inches thick and slams in on the table. “This is what I had to go through. And that’s only a third of it!”

The subject of benefits and status is a controversy that simmers behind the scenes of the Chernobyl legacy. There are accusations that some liquidators bought their status, or improved their classification through bribes or good contacts. Also, exposure to radiation by liquidators varied by extraordinary degrees, and yet, within each level of classification, there is little discrimination between one liquidator and another. The health of some liquidators has deteriorated dramatically over the years while others have not; and yet they could all receive the same amount of benefits.

Osepenko has had the opportunity to move his family elsewhere. He stayed away for nine months after the accident but returned to work at the fire station as much as he was able. He’s not the only person here to say “Where am I going to go? What am I going to do?” He just can’t imagine living anywhere else.

*

ON THE WAY out of the zone, Leonid Korolchuk has gone quiet in the driver’s seat. I’m thinking about agriculture.

That was Ivan Kirimov’s idea. Farming could save the region. “We need to restore the farms that were closed,” he said. They’ve recently started planting potatoes commercially, and he’s hoping that meat and dairy production will resume. “Then we could even open some of the food processing plants again.”

This may make some sense—just about every family here still farms, even if it’s a small crop for personal use. But the stigma attached to products from the region would make them an impossible sell, even within Ukraine. Kirimov insists that all the products produced in 2005 were tested and declared safe. It would require a heck of a marketing campaign, one shrewdly designed to elicit the sympathies of consumers.

I’m also struggling with one of the more controversial comments in the Chernobyl Forum’s report. That a debilitating culture of fatalism here encourages “poor lifestyle choices”—bad diet, alcoholism, unprotected sex and smoking—and an inclination to blame almost anything on the accident. It’s tempting to believe. But more pointedly there’s a severe lack of economic opportunities. There exists a wellspring of resourcefulness that one rarely sees anymore in richer countries. Everyone here can farm. Hunt and fish. Every other person is a mechanic or carpenter. The ability to manage, survive, is paramount.

I ask Korolchuk, who is considering a bid for Kirimov’s job in the next election, what he thinks should be done. His pitch for the future is one I’ve heard before.

“Make it a nature reserve, a national park or resort. Encourage eco-tourism, or hunting, sport fishing and horseback riding.”

It may sound like an outlandish idea to those far away who speak only of Chernobyl in jokes about glow-in-the-dark cows, but it’s beginning to make some sense. It is a natural museum of the 20th century’s worst global man-made catastrophe. It is the earth’s one true Bastard Eden. An accidental oasis, cursed by the invisible poisons that hide in the soil. But where nature and humanity may have been allowed a surprising second chance.