456 squatters have to live under conditions of “compulsory freedom”
It is perfectly safe to assume that no one living in the city or countryside knows what absolute silence is like, all-penetrating, making your heart contract. Some might say that there is no such silence. They would be wrong. There is. In the town of Prypyat. People from the Emergency Management Ministry say that teams of researchers or just people wishing to see the ghost town with their own eyes find ruined stairs leading to movie theaters, community centers, and hotels falling apart, overgrown park alleys, a time-ravaged speedway, a teddy bear left in a swing 16 years ago. The expressions on their faces look striking on a video tape or photos. The Belarusians call their part of the Chornobyl area a preserve; Ukrainians know it as the Zone. Whatever the name, the meaning remains the same. The place will forever be a blemish, more psychological than radiation.
Although the Chornobyl Zone is considered an area of compulsory evacuation, with access restricted, using procedures as severe as customs treatment, people continue to work there, and 456 live there. Tourists also visit, but describing such sojourns as tourist ones does not seem very proper, because tourism implies rest and entertainment. The latter does not apply at all and resting in a high radiation area would seem more than extravagant. In fact, the tourism idea belongs to the United Nations. Its experts considered that, since for most foreigners Ukraine is above all associated with Chornobyl, it could be listed as a tourist attraction. You want to visit, stay, take a good look around? You may. Just pay and have a nice trip. The proceeds will be used for decontamination and rehabilitation programs. True, on rare occasions some people know nothing about Chornobyl. Is it a panorama, diorama, a church? After listening to the guide, putting on shoe covers, jerseys, jackets, and being taken to the Sarcophagus and Prypyat, no questions are asked.
But there is no tourist influx. Hard as the Intourist, Sputnik, Sam, and Hamaliya firms try to lure curious and generous tourists laden with video and photo cameras, the result is far from gratifying: several individuals a month at best. Yet the European-style hotel does not stay empty. Most of the tenants are experts – biologists studying the effect of radiation on plant and animal life, geologists, geographers, etc.
As a date associated with Chornobyl approaches, the place is visited by noted public figures, representatives of international organizations, and even politicians. Of course, rare visits are easily explained. No one visiting the place is completely immune to the fear of radiation, although MES workers insist that the radiation level has been stable for the past four years (in fact, you can check it by dialing 5-28-05). The most important thing is to observe all the safety regulations, like following only strictly outlined itineraries, thoroughly checked and decontaminated. And it is best not to think about “trifles” like background radiation or food and water that are not completely free from contamination. Of course, the food served the visitors is perfectly safe and very carefully examined (this food happens to be much cleaner than what Kyiv residents buy at makeshift street markets).
The so-called squatters, now calculated as numbering 456, are not so lucky. Most of them are people that could not stand the separation after being evacuated in 1986 and returned on their own. The Day was told that such people also return for different reasons; some do not want to live with their relatives, others do not want to change residence in their twilight years (the squatters’ average age is 62-63), still others hate the idea of leaving their cows untended, and there are those relishing the exotic status. Kateryna, an old woman living in the village of Opachychi, says no one offered her housing anywhere else; if they did she would be happy to leave. She is 79 and has to chop wood and tend her garden all by herself. She has adult grandsons, but they visit very seldom for reasons everybody understands only too well, mostly on anniversaries of deaths when they are cleared at checkpoints after producing documents attesting to relatives living or buried in the Chornobyl Zone. Of course, Kateryna has grown accustomed to living alone (her husband left her and their children years ago). She is assisted by Vira Rudnyk living next door. She is the only one of Opachychy’s 26 residents to have a car. She and her husband ride to Ivankiv every ten days. Kateryna sometimes visits Vira to watch television (her own was destroyed in a thunderstorm). She looks forward to a visit by someone from the government, to show him just how happily Ukrainian elders can live these days.
Her friend Vira is more optimistic. She was offered a home elsewhere, but the roof was leaking and there was no running water. “What difference does it make if I live in Ivankiv or Opachychy? The radiation level is practically the same. Here I have my chicken, geese, vegetable garden, and I’m even paid my pension. So you should envy us, not we you,” she says. She likes holidays best of all, when the villagers gather, turn on the tape recorder, sing, and dance. The greatest advantage (her relatives Hanna and Vasyl Yeremenko were forced to agree) is that no one bosses them around and everybody can live as he or she chooses. Moreover, one need not worry about bricks to build, say, a barn, or about young people spending the whole night carousing.
True, several remarks made during this optimistic discussion rose doubts about the illegal squatters’ privileged status. For example, a heart attack or stroke, a rather common occurrence with the elderly, makes one wonder what to do. Theoretically, there are a couple of physicians and several paramedics catering to fifteen villages. They are supposed to visit their patients every week. In actuality, everybody will tell you that there is no way to call a doctor when you need one. The Opachychy residents are lucky, because Vira Rudnyk used to be a trained nurse, so she can come, make an injection, even fix an intravenous apparatus. Incidentally, the medical aspect sheds light on yet another nuance; of all the illegal squatters only 118 are registered with health care institutions, meaning that not all want to appear in official records. The Chornobyl Zone is a haven for those on the wrong side of the law. The locals are aware of living in such region. They also complain that the checkpoints, numerous as they are, are no obstacle for malefactors that steal everything they can lay their hands on. And the legal businesses operating in the Zone are no godsend, either. They have caused several fires, and no one bothers to listen to what the populace has to say on the subject. Previously, the squatters could use a bus once a week to go to Ivankiv, visit the post office or polyclinic. The bus route was canceled, and the authorities have been promising to renew it for several years.
Thus Zone really is the best word to describe the place, not preserve. Local freedoms are in many respects illusory; they are best described as voluntary-compulsory. The people here actually have no alternative. They were forced to create their own small isolated world; they live in it, trying not think of the potatoes they harvest from their gardens, mushrooms picked in the nearby forest, and milk from their cows grazing on the local grass.
