Indeed, for many of the women, Chernobyl was only the last in an unholy trifecta of hardship. After the famine came the Nazis, who, when the babushkas were teenagers, slashed their way across the Ukraine in the 1940s, raping women and killing another 2.7 million people, including virtually the entire Jewish population. Having survived all of that, the babushkas were not inclined to cut and run after the Chernobyl explosion created invisible threats in the air, soil and water. Hanna, who nearly became one of the infants eaten by their families during Holodomor, puts it succinctly: “Starvation is what scares me. Not radiation.”
Most of the babushkas share the belief that “if you leave, you die.” They would rather risk exposure to radiation than the soul-crushing prospect of being separated from their homes. “You can’t take me from my mother; you can’t take me from my motherland. Motherland is Motherland,” says Hanna. Aphorisms slip matter-of-factly from the lips of the babushkas. “Replant an old tree and it will die,” says one woman. “A pigeon flies close to his nest. I would never leave my home.” One refrain I heard often was, “Those who left are worse off now. They are all dying of sadness.”
What sounds like faith may actually be fact. According to United Nations reports, those who were relocated after the accident now suffer from anxiety, depression, and disrupted social networks—the traumas of displaced people everywhere. And these conditions seem to have health effects as real as those caused by radiation. “Paradoxically, the women who returned to their ancestral homes in the Zone outlive those who left by a decade,” says Alexander Anisimov, a journalist I met who’s spent his career studying the self-settler community. No health studies have been done, but anecdotal evidence suggests that most of these women die of strokes rather than any obvious radiation-related illnesses. Toxic levels of strontium and cesium in the soil are real, but so are the tug of the ancestral home and the health benefits of determining one’s own destiny. And East or West, pig fat or organic almond butter, few would deny that being happy helps you live longer.
A lone fisherman hunches over a hole in the vast forbidden Pripyat River; abandoned gray metal ships on their sides and half sunk, languish in the landscape behind. For these women, environmental contamination is not the worst form of devastation, I think, as I stand near the river on an empty road snapping a photo of one of the massive storks’ nests of sticks, hay and feathers that is perched atop telephone poles around Chernobyl. And that holds true for Chernobyl’s wildlife, too. Storks may have dropped dead from the skies over Sweden days after the accident, but twenty-five years later they are ubiquitous in the Exclusion Zone. Their return illustrates the controversy among scientists and laypeople about exactly how living creatures cope with radiation. Do they adapt (as some scientists—and babushkas—claim people do)? Is survival of the genetically fittest at work? It’s likely to be decades before we know. Scientists have discovered DNA mutations in the animals who have returned, but few visible physiological anomalies (one example: the local moose are having one calf, not two). Clearly, the mass exodus of human beings has been a boon to some animal species. In the Zone of Alienation, and in designated nearby areas, it is officially forbidden to hunt or eat wild animals, which can be highly contaminated. But that is the sort of edict people tend to shrug off in a country experiencing acute economic crisis and corruption, where there is a deep connection to the soil and, especially in the rural areas, a live-off-the-land culture.
“I often collect berries and mushrooms to eat,” says one babushka. “It’s forbidden, but I go anyway. When I see the police I hide in the bushes,” she adds. Hunters also sneak into the Zone, and the contaminated meat from animals they poach ends up in the restaurants of Kyiv. Police charged with enforcing the rules in Chernobyl are rumored to shoot wild horses and other game from helicopters. And contaminated meat isn’t the only dangerous item to slip out of the Zone. Pilfered irradiated metal from machines and vehicles used during the clean-up makes its way to China. “Hot” toilet seats, illegally looted from the evacuated ghost town of Pripyat, three kilometers from the reactor (where background radiation levels are a whopping 100; my visit there was brief) are now scattered throughout Eastern Europe. Twenty-five years after the accident, Chernobyl’s legacy lives on.
At first, of course, the main victims were those who were initially exposed to extreme doses of radiation. After the first responders were felled, the Soviets deployed robots to put out the fire, but radiation levels were so high the machines went berserk. The government then sent in a phalanx of human beings, dubbed liquidators, the translation of a Russian word that can also mean “cleaner.” Thousands of young soldiers were strong-armed into volunteering by being presented with the following choice: Spend two years on the bloody Afghanistan front or two minutes shoveling radioactive matter off the reactor complex. Most of them took a shot of vodka and the latter. Most of them are now dead, dying or disabled. (Call them what you will—heroes, pawns, soldiers who did their duty—the truth is they stopped a fire that, had it spread, could have caused the other reactors to explode, leaving much of Europe uninhabitable.) But these soldiers weren’t the only liquidators that beautiful, tragic spring. The term also refers to the hundreds of thousands of women and men throughout the region who took part in the clean-up and support effort.
Galina Konyushonok, now seventy-one, was called to duty as a liquidator almost immediately. She worked in a nearby bread factory at the time of the accident and was charged with driving to the town of Chernobyl every day to pick up wheat so the government could feed the people working the disaster. Of course, the wheat itself was highly contaminated. Sitting today with three babushka neighbors in a kitchen bright with the reflection of the snow outside, Galina, who has thyroid cancer, looks strong and healthy; she’s talkative and her thick eyebrows dance with almost every word. Her friend Nadezhda Tislenko, seventy-one, has been bent over at a right angle by osteoporosis, yet she is outstandingly gracious.
“Please, please have some cake,” she offers.
“No spasiba,” I say, deploying my standard response so as to avoid potentially contaminated food. No local food, along with “don’t breathe deeply” were just a few of the warnings on a release I had to sign at the Zone’s police checkpoint. It’s hard to refuse food from any grandmother but here, where traditions run deep and visitors are few, it feels extra rude. On the windowsill, a white tin can labeled “Food Relief: in the name of Christ” holds a well-tended houseplant. Galina’s house is located in the town of Zirka, a few hundred yards outside the Exclusion Zone, a boundary demarcated by a chain link and barbed wire fence. Her little village “used to have seventy-six cows but now only has two,” she says. The arbitrary process by which Zirka came to be considered a “normal” village despite high contamination levels is a common tale of misguided bureaucracy.
“All the villages around us were evacuated when the reactor blew. But a special strain of potato had just been planted in the fields [of Zirka’s collective farm], so they said our village shouldn’t be evacuated,” recalls Galina, adjusting her purple headscarf around her ruddy face. “They haven’t checked for radiation here in fifteen years,” she adds.
Although it would be a stretch to call the babushkas a sisterhood, a deep camaraderie connects these women who have spent their entire lives in the area. They help each other at slaughtering time. They visit one another’s homes (on foot; they do not have cars) to play cards, and gamble. “But not for money,” Galina specifies. “I keep telling them, the more you play the more your brain works,” she says, laughing. The women joke about moving in together if heating gas prices get too high (they are on fixed, modest government pensions), but emotional attachment to their homes runs too deep for that; home is the entire cosmos of the rural babushka. The babushkas have electricity but most villages in the Zone have a single phone; nobody has running water. Those with a TV might sit down with handwork to watch a soap opera after the chickens are fed and the wood chopped. When I asked about the dearth of m
en, Galina responds: “The men died and the women stayed. I wish I had a husband to quarrel with!” The old ladies crack up when Galina tells a gallows-humor joke about a woman being gang-raped by Nazis. The babushkas are unfazed by how I squirm at the joke; they also ignore the click click click of my dosimeter, which is measuring ever-fluctuating background radiation levels.
In a corner of Galina’s house, beneath a bright window, stands the bed where her husband died seventeen years ago after making her promise never to leave their home. Galina’s exquisite needlework and embroidery, stacked in neat piles and framed on the walls, gives warmth and color to the three-room cottage where she’s lived for fifty-two years and raised four children who visit her often—a pleasure denied her neighbors inside the Exclusion Zone. There, adult family members may visit after jumping through several administrative hoops, but children under eighteen are allowed in only once a year to see their babushkas and visit the graves of their ancestors, on a spring holiday called Remembrance Day.
On a small table in the same room, a dozen or so medicines, an identification card and a blood pressure machine tell a more somber story. An ID reading “Disabled, First Group,” indicates her liquidator status and her thyroid cancer diagnosis. She waves away the table of meds, as if to shoo off its significance, and crosses the room to show me a piece of fabric embroidered with the message, “Bring happiness and health to my motherland.”
“I’m not afraid of anything anymore. It’s difficult to be old, but I still want to live,” she says, folding up the embroidery. “A gift,” she says then walks into the other room to find a bag. I look out the window at her five-foot tall pile of chopped wood that rests in the snow next to a shed. Inside, the warm pungent air that is endemic to the cottages of Chernobyl wafts comfort—and fear. Burning Chernobyl wood releases radiation. It is illegal to burn wood from this region. When I put the dosimeter into the ashes of Galina’s firebox it goes nuts; radiation levels shoot from fifteen to seventy-three in a matter of seconds.
Galina gives me a tour of her cellar, where the dim light of a single bulb reveals the antler racks of five roe deer. “My son shot them for me,” she says. Local intelligence claims deer are the most contaminated species in the region, but Galina eats the meat from this land, as all babushkas do. The cellar is also heaped with brown eggs, beetroot, jars full of pickled foods, and of course, potatoes: the year-round, hardscrabble labor of the babushkas represented in a single room where Galina is laying in supplies for the harsh winter. “They used to not take potatoes from me, but now they do,” she says of her son’s family, whose vigilance about not eating contaminated food has apparently waned. Thinking of her son, perhaps, Galina looks upward, and with a mischievous, proud smile says: “In the attic I have forty liters of moonshine that I made. When I die my family will drink it! They won’t have to buy any.” We climb up to the attic so I can see the stash. A shaft of afternoon light blazes through the attic window, refracting through a dozen hefty glass jugs of hooch; stars of light bounce off the blades of old-school brown leather ice skates, circa 1940, hanging over a rafter.
There is a breed of heroic resilience, of plain-spoken pragmatism, specific to those who rise at 5 A.M. and work, with few modern conveniences, until midnight in subzero weather; to those who bury their two-year-old next to their own parents, as Hanna did; to those who’ve earned the hard way the right to joke about Nazi atrocities. It’s not as if they wouldn’t want things to be easier. Some acknowledge the radiation and its impact on their health. But as one eighty-two-year-old put it, with a patina of typical, simple defiance: “They said our legs would hurt. And they do. So what?”
Findings about the long-term health effects of Chernobyl are controversial and contradictory. The World Health Organization predicts 4,000 deaths will eventually be linked to Chernobyl, and reports that thyroid cancer rates have shot up in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, largely among those contaminated in the weeks immediately following the accident. However, the WHO now considers the psychological impact to be just as or more detrimental than the physical. Being depressed and unmotivated, pursuing an unhealthy lifestyle and clinging to a victim mind-set, they say, has proved to be the worst fallout for the “Chernobylites” twenty-five years after the accident. Other organizations, such as Greenpeace, contend that Chernobyl is responsible for tens of thousands of illnesses and deaths even though these cannot yet be scientifically linked to the accident. All agree it will be generations before the full consequences of Chernobyl can be fully understood.
Meanwhile, life goes on. Until it doesn’t.
Five babushkas bob in single file along a snow-swept, single-lane road, a squat platoon of hunched women swaddled in dark clothing and headscarves, marching home from the funeral. The second one that week. Their figures are all that moves in the frigid, bleak landscape. Lyubov Koval, 84, the mother of the deceased, describes her fifty-five-year-old son’s final days. “He screamed, and screamed,” she says, her narrowed blue eyes indulging pain for only the tiniest moment. “There was some problem with his kidneys,” she reveals, regarding cause of death. “They won’t say it was the radiation,” adds his sister Olga Kudla. Six gravediggers sit at a long wooden table, eating wild goat liver, blintzes and dumplings and drinking. “He was a liquidator in the zone,” one of them says. “They wouldn’t give him the medicine he needed. He wouldn’t have died if they had.” The babushkas keep bringing piles of steaming food, brown bread and sweet homemade wine—pushing, pushing, pushing food as if it is love and life itself. Refusing is death. A full shot glass of moonshine sits in the middle of the table for the deceased.
The shelter covering Reactor Number 4, which so many lives were sacrificed to construct, sits cracked and rusty in winter’s 3:30 P.M. dusk. I think about the lake of nuclear lava—20 to 30 tons according to experts on site—simmering below, then walk a few hundred yards onto a bridge and look down to see giant catfish, some more than ten feet long, trolling the waters of the now defunct reactor’s cooling pond. After the explosion in 1986, the shelter was built to cover the reactor and prevent leakage of radioactive materials. The shelter was intended to last fifteen years, not twenty-five, but a mire of bureaucratic shenanigans, politics and economic woes have added up to little action in the construction of a new one. Part of the problem is that the shelter is leaking so much radiation that nobody wants to work near it. Collective fingers are crossed that the aging sarcophagus does not collapse and explode, the consequences of which could dwarf those of 1986.
While it has been possible since 1999 for visitors to pass the heavily guarded police checkpoints and enter the Zone with an escort, the Ukrainian government recently announced an idea, not yet executed, to open the Exclusion Zone for the first time to conventional tourism. For those who want to experience the Zone first hand, these babushkas could become a stop on an ethnographic tour. (Perhaps babushka moonshine will become the latest artisanal trend.)
For now, their spirit shines amid the bleak, silent dead Zone. A fearless babushka stands watch over a garden at night, poised to bang a gas bottle with a metal bar to ward off attacks from wild boar. Galina recently harvested twenty big bags of potatoes. “All clean. No worms this year!” she says gratefully. Flashing a glint of gold from her lone tooth, Hanna reveals that she has saved a pig to slaughter for Remembrance Day. “I only think of the good things in life,” she says, rolling onto the balls of her feet. “Come back tomorrow,” she tells me, holding up a chunk of thick, white pig fat. “We are going to party.”
Holly Morris is the creator/director of the PBS travel series “Adventure Divas,” and author of Adventure Divas: Searching the World for a New Kind of Heroine, which was named a New York Times “Editor’s Choice.” A former National Geographic Adventure columnist, she is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and other publications, and her work is widely anthologized. She hosts the television series Globe Trekker, Treks in a Wild World, and Outdoor Investigations, and is at work on a documentary
about the babushkas of Chernobyl. Visit her at www.thebabushkasofchernobyl.com.
COLETTE O’CONNOR
How I Got My Oh-La-La
You don’t have to be born French.
By most accounts, I look O.K. My style, such as it is, mainly impresses the world with a mild, she’s nice. Yet I had been in Paris mere weeks when Madame de Glasse, the French neighbor with whom I am friendly, announced some startling news. As we chatted in the launderette we both use on the rue de Passy, Madame eyed a washer’s soggy wad of pajamas, long johns, turtlenecks and sweats I had plopped into a rolling basket. Then she said with some alarm, “Mademoiselle,” she said. “Like many Americans, you are a prude, non?”
Moi? I stared at her, shocked.
True, Madame’s wash was a jambalaya of plunging necklines, peek-a-boo intimates and colors the heart-racing hues of passion. There were lace bits and sheer slips and things that looked short and clingy. But who would have thought that what passes for hot where I come from—a whole sack of comfy stuff snapped up for a song at an outlet—would be seen by Madame de Glasse (if not all of France) as symptomatic of a horrible American malady: dowdiness. And I had it!
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