Touristic Chernobyl: the places of heroism and looting

More and more people come to visit the restricted area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant year after year. Travel agencies offer one-day, two-days or even a week trips to theexclusion zone. However, there are illegal tourists who jump over the fences and follow the non-touristic routes. Why the recent disaster is so attractive for both groups of tourists?

Sunday.7.30 am. Half-sleeping people are standing near minibuses with radiation hazard signs on the windshield and drink coffee. These are tourists. They will spend the whole day in the Chernobyl zone.

“In 20 minutes we’ll make a stop at a gas station. There you can use the civilized toilet, the last one in our route,” - the guide announced.

The first companies selling Chernobyl tours appeared at the turn of the 90s, in the early 2000s. They not only organize trips, but also solve bureaucratic issues; to visit the zone you need have a permission of the state. You also need to pay for it: it’s less than 5 euros for a Ukrainian and 17 euros for a foreigner. One-day tour including company services costs $30 for Ukrainians, and about $100 for foreigners.

Sergey Mirny operates the excursion. He was the radiation intelligence squad commander at the disaster site in summer of 1986.

Today he takes tourists to the places where he measured radiation background 30 years ago. He says that the tourist routes are safe. During a day the visitor receives a radiation dose approximately equal to an hour of flight in the plane. But you need to strictly follow the rules. It is prohibited to walk on the grass, roadsides and the ground (since the radioactive elements settle in the ground) in the 10-kilometer zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It is also forbidden to smoke.

For the last year the company toured 3,500 people to the exclusion zone. There were about 17 thousand legal visitors. Sergei Mirny believes that a trip to Chernobyl changes people.

 “They see tens of thousands of abandoned dwellings, a 50-thousand town (Pripyat, a satellite town of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant) that became desolate in three hours, and now it stands as it is. Most of our customers are city dwellers. And like it or not, you think how you would feel. Many people put work, career, and home on the first place. And now they see that work, career, and the houses that were built by hard-earned money are now abandoned once and forever. And they start to understand that their home and people they live with is the best that they have” says Sergey.

It takes almost an hour and a half to get from Kiev to the exclusion zone. We have to spend an hour waiting in the queue at the checkpoint.

The Chernobyl zone is a state within the state. I heard this phrase said by our guide and from people who are somehow related to Chernobyl. The zone territory is surrounded by barbed wire with the checkpoint post at the entrance. The monument of Lenin still stands there and a hammer and sickle hanging on the entrance board to Chernobyl. Now the territory is inhabited by shift workers and self-settlers.

Even the tourist route agreed by the authorities can help you to discover a double life of the “micro-state”. On the one hand, these are “ceremonial” objects: a nuclear power plant, memorials; a new one is being built near the old sarcophagus over the destroyed power unit, which is the largest arched structure in the world. Official delegations come here every year on April 26.

Looting is a dark side of the zone that has been existing here since the disaster. The guide shows the house in the village of Zalissya that was inhabited five months ago by a retired old woman. The flowers planted by the mistress are still growing in the garden. But the house turned into a mess after her death. Marauders did it.

Sergei Mirny describes the pursuit of a criminal 30 years ago in his book “Liquidators. Chernobyl Comedy”.

“...The Zhiguli car escapes away at the end of the alley leaving a dust tail behind; it is filled with the rolled-up carpets sticking out of the back door window. The fence doors in the alley are wide open; it was a cozy village just a moment ago, and now it’s weathered and abandoned…”

The Duga-1 satellite complex in the military town of Chernobyl-2 was once a top-secret facility. The USSR planned to track the launches of ballistic missiles from the United States via this construction. Now tourists wander around the 146-meter structure. A pile of children's beds from the former kindergarten are dumped near the radar; despite the fact that this complex and the surrounded area is secured.

Two kilometers away from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is Pripyat, a town founded when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was under construction. The guide says: after the evacuation of the inhabitants, the marauders threw iron baths out of the windows of the houses. You can still see the piles of scrap metal on the streets.

“They crush the pillars, fold metal wire and hide it somewhere. Then they come here with wagons or bicycles, and take all this out of the zone. We cannot report it as a massive export, because first you need to collect all this, and then carry it away through the forest roads. You need to collect it, but there is almost nothing left there” said Nikolai Zhukovich, spokesman for the National Police State Administration in the Kiev region, in an interview with Hromadske Radio.

There is a legal mechanism to carry cargo from the exclusion zone, explains Zhukovich.

“An enterprise that legally works in the territory of the exclusion zone, conducts decontamination, processes items (for example, radiators) and issues a processing report. The car is then loaded with the radiators, the company issues the invoice, and the cargo is taken out to the checkpoint. There is also a radiation control group that runs inspection; after that, the car drives to the barrier bar where the cargo is checked by the law enforcement officers. They inspect the cargo and radiation control documents. Only then the car is good to go” says Zhukovich.

We are not so surprised by the extent of the robberies, but mostly by the fact that there is still something left in the zone. For example, there was a rusty car that belonged to liquidators near a multi-floor building in Pripyat. Or the ferris wheel and half-destroyed merry-go-rounds in the former amusement park, that was planned to be open on May 1, 1986.

- The kindergarten in the village of Kopachi. I saw dolls there. It’s rather a showcase designed for photo shootings. But it is still thrilling.

Having been earning in the Chernobyl zone for almost 15 years, the Ukrainian government agencies have not created any conditions there. The toilet is made of a wooden box at the entrance to the zone. The food served at the dining room of the plant has not changed for years. Visitors also complain about the bad  hotel service.

At the same time, some tourists are attracted by the exclusion zone that has no conditions. A 28-year-old Kyrill Stepanets from Kiev calls himself a stalker. He has been in the zone of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant for at least sixty times and wrote a book about his campaigns. Kirill is keen on abandoned houses and abandoned territories.

“There is a beautiful nature in Polissya. Immense swamps and pine forests. I grew up in a pine forest in the countryside of Kiev, and it is symbolic for me. There are also many living creatures” says Kirill.

We personally saw “animals”. Not far from the checkpoint, we saw Przewalski’s horses grazing there. As guides say you can come across foxes, wolves, bears, and lynxes in the forests of the exclusion zone.

Today, most of the abandoned villages and the town of Pripyat is an area that nature tries to conquer. There are trees growing on the streets and on the roofs of buildings; The Pripyat stadium is overgrown with grass. People themselves destroy the memory of the former life on this territory.

There is still something to see in the area of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, except for official objects and facilities. And feel the extent of not only radiation disaster, but also a social and criminal catastrophe.