In Wartime

by Tim Judah

  Galya Malchik. Karapyshi, March 2015.

  As in all Ukrainian villages the population is predominantly elderly. Galya said “there are almost no children in the village.” When she was young “there were four or five children in every house and now there are only pensioners sitting in their homes.” Just as Nadya is intending to retire here, others have already done so after a lifetime working in Kiev. Between the village and the city there are strong links because many of those who work in the cities, and those who migrated there as Ukraine industrialized after the war, maintained their links with their home villages. Typically their children would spend their summers in the village. They would have fun if they were lucky, but dig, weed and water if they were not.

  Today the pensions of many who live here are supplemented by income from land. Like everywhere else those who worked in the kolkhoz got parcels of land when it was broken up after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Either, like Galya, they are too old to farm the land, or they don’t have the money to do so. So it is rented to a company which then groups as much of it together as possible, in effect farming much of the same land as the kolkhoz had. The person who owns the land usually gets a portion of the income of the crop sold but can take some of the crop too. Even if a villager wanted to farm their land it might be virtually impossible. For example Galya’s 2.75 hectares is surrounded by plots belonging to others, so she could not even get to it, let alone drive a tractor to it, without crossing their land. “It is just part of one big field.”

  The law does not allow people to sell this land but you can pass it on when you die. Galya herself inherited her plot from her sister. In some parts of the country big companies run the farms but in others the companies tend to be smaller. Here, said the sisters, most of what makes money is controlled by one local politician and his wife, who have built themselves a fancy home and drive a fancy car. Galya described the wife as a “famously cruel bitch.” They were the real power here, rather than Sergiy the mayor. There are a few shops in town, and when someone not connected to the Karapyshi power couple tried to open one he was told in no uncertain terms that the next day it had better “no longer be here.” I asked the sisters why they and others put up with this, and Galya shrugged and said: “Ukrainian villagers are very obedient.” It was rare for them to rise up against authority. Nadya pointed to an ambiguity. Both of them had been members of the Communist Party, and had mixed feelings about this past. For sure communism brought suffering but now people suffered in a different way and, since they were used to a life of not complaining, “they” (meaning those with power) could get away with giving them just “a piece of freedom.”

  During the Second World War the Germans passed through the village but there was no fighting here. Before the Soviets evacuated they took most of the cattle and other animals. The rest were taken by the Germans, who nonetheless did not give the kolkhoz land back to the locals. A few joined the German-recruited Ukrainian police and then fled at the end of the war. I asked them how they felt about this period and Nadya said: “We were patriotic Soviets,” although she added that there was not much alternative on offer here at the time. But this memory does not mean they confuse a former patriotism with an admiration for Vladimir Putin and his Russia, which wants to claim the sole mantle of the glory of the Soviet Union’s role in the crushing of the Nazis, while forgetting the Holodomor, the Nazi-Soviet pact, Stalin’s purges and so on. Nadya said of Russians, “We were brother nations” and Galya added, “Until last year when things changed with the annexation of Crimea.” But whatever has happened they think that Putin is the problem, not Russians with whom good relations can be restored. Putin does not come in for as much bile as I had expected. More is reserved for people closer to home. Nadya told me that army officers she knows complain of unclear chains of command and illogical decision-making which her friends say is impossible to explain. But their deepest scorn is reserved for Britain and the U.S. They expected them to give weapons to the Ukrainian army so it can better fight the Russians, because until now all they had given the country, said Nadya, was the equivalent of feeding “a fly to a dog”—in other words, nothing.

  “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl,” wrote Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, in 2006, “even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.”

  Gorbachev, who had been in power just over a year when the catastrophe happened, may overstate the case but there is little doubt that it was one of those pivotal moments in history when it was nudged in a particular direction that it might not have taken otherwise. The explosion happened at 1:23 in the morning of April 26, 1986. At first there was confusion as to what had occurred and how serious the situation was. It was only at 14:00 on April 27 that people in the town of Pripyat, three kilometers away, where most of the plant workers and their families lived, were evacuated. They were told it would be for three days, but it was forever.

  The news first emerged abroad on April 28 when routine testing on the shoes of a worker returning from the toilet at a nuclear plant in Sweden, 1,100 kilometers away, detected abnormal levels of radiation. During the day it was determined that this had come from the Soviet Union, and that night the Soviet authorities admitted that something had happened at Chernobyl. Gorbachev argues that there was no deliberate attempt to cover up what had happened, which was then and is still widely believed. He claims that the authorities themselves did not understand the gravity of the situation. Then, he argues, the disaster, “more than anything else, opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it, could no longer continue.” Ordinary people lost what faith they had in the system and a direct line can be drawn from here to the demise of the Soviet Union. Ukrainians, for example, now understood that the plant was not under their control but run from Moscow. Hence it made sense for many people, as the USSR began to unravel, to think that the authorities in Kiev should be in control of what was going on in Ukraine.

  To this day no one knows how many people were afflicted by cancers and other illnesses that they would not have gotten otherwise. More than 500,000 participated in the cleanup operation and it continues to this day. An exclusion zone was imposed covering some 2,600 square kilometers. There is an inner core around the plant and the second, wider, surrounding belt. This includes the town of Chernobyl itself, home to a few thousand who now maintain the defunct plant or work on building the new “sarcophagus” to encase the reactor that exploded.

  Chernobyl is 120 kilometers north of Kiev. It is in wooded, marshy land close to the border with Belarus, where even more ground was contaminated than in Ukraine itself, because of the way the radiation fell. For Ukrainians, although Chernobyl is, for sure, part of their history, there is no real feeling of the momentousness of what happened. Throughout the country there are monuments commemorating those who died, just as there are to those who fell during the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, but “Chernobyl” as an event does not loom over the country as do, for example, the events of the Second World War. The reason for this is that what happened here is not an issue which can be fought over zealously and ideologically. It feels almost as though Ukrainians have given the Chernobyl part of their history a collective shrug.

  That is a pity. The exclusion zone is one of the most extraordinary places in Europe. You need permission to enter it or you have to be on a tour which has gotten it for you. Entering the zone is like entering another country: you have to show your passport. You also have to be checked off against the list of names of those who have permission to enter for the day.

  To the side of the road are abandoned villages, gradually being engulfed by nature. A very few elderly locals have returned. At first the authorities used to turf them out but eventually gave up and allowed them to
stay. Research shows that, on average, they live longer than those who were evacuated and never came back, perhaps because they are happy to be pottering about in their own homes, weeding their own vegetable gardens, even though the fruit and vegetables they grow can be contaminated. Indeed, while some of the area is still contaminated, it is only in patches, and much of the zone is now no more radioactive than anywhere else. Chernobyl town feels empty as it has so few inhabitants, and it is an unexceptional place. Most of those who live here are authorized to do so because their work is somehow connected to the continuing cleanup. The town is actually 15 kilometers from the plant, but when the nuclear station was begun in 1972, it was felt demeaning to call it by the name of Kopachi, a nearby village, and since Chernobyl was the name of the wider district, this is how it got its name.

  The area is part of the Polesia region which stretches from Poland across southern Belarus and northern Ukraine into Russia. Chernobyl’s recorded history goes back to the Middle Ages when it was a little town, trading on the banks of the Pripyat River. In 1897 almost 60 percent of its population was Jewish and it was the home of a Hassidic dynasty. Today the followers of this branch of Hassidism come on pilgrimages to the restored tombs of their tzadiks, or righteous ones. On May 9, everyone who once lived here can return to meet old friends and visit their family graves. The explosion altered not just the history of the world in general but, in the most profound way, that of the 200,000 or so people in Ukraine who lived here and who lost their homes. Others lost their homes in Belarus and some even in Russia too.

  Arriving at the plant you see the cranes surrounding two unfinished reactors, just as they were on the day they stopped work. They stand next to the lake-like cooling pond. Throw bread into the water and soon it is gone, gulped by giant catfish, the size of a man. They are not mutants but simply grow this big because fishing is prohibited as the water is contaminated. Sometimes people still fish though. The plant itself is unremarkable. It looks like what it was—a nuclear power plant. The block that blew up is encased in concrete but it is deteriorating and the concrete is beginning to crack. So, a huge hangar-like structure is being constructed next to it, a vast, arched affair on rails. When it is completed it will be rolled over the old reactor and then work will begin underneath this new sarcophagus to dismantle the old one and dispose of the radioactive material still entombed inside it. It is due to be finished in 2017 and will have cost some €2 billion. According to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is coordinating the funds for the shelter from the EU and forty-two other countries, it would be big enough to cover St. Paul’s Cathedral in London or Notre Dame in Paris.

  Three kilometers away is Pripyat. Unlike the town of Chernobyl no one is allowed to live here. Even if you have seen pictures or film of this abandoned town, which once housed 49,000 people, nothing can prepare you for the reality. Trees and undergrowth are slowly taking over this utterly silent place. Wide roads have become narrow as earth encroaches. As Pripyat was a new town, founded in 1970, it was all blocks of flats and large municipal buildings. In the school, books and toys and everything else you might find there lie scattered on the floor or on the shelves where they were left. It is extraordinary that in buildings with smashed windows open to the elements, everything has not rotted or simply been blown away. In the kindergarten in Kopachi, one of only two buildings not to have been bulldozed here after the explosion, a letter on the floor reads:

  Application

  I request that you admit my child Kostuchenko Maryna Mykolayivna, born 28.08.1982 to kindergarten from 01.03.1984.

  The letter paper is decorated with a little print of a statue of a lady wearing a flowing gown. Nearby are metal bunk beds for the children’s naps and an official portrait of Konstantin Chernenko, the virtually forgotten, grizzled old Soviet leader who led the Soviet Union from February 1984 until his death thirteen months later. In the center of Pripyat, by the decaying dodgem cars, is a Ferris wheel which was due to be officially inaugurated a few days after the disaster. Today fans of the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R., in which you can fight human mutants in Pripyat, make pilgrimages here, and the uninitiated, thinking they are about to have their photo taken underneath it, are doused with rainwater as the lowest carousel is swung above their heads.

  Across the street you can climb to the roof of a sixteen-story building and see a city slowly disappearing amid a sea of trees, almost like a lost Inca city in the jungle. You can wander in flats and see the beds and furniture people left behind on the day they were evacuated. Everywhere there are piles of pipes and electrical fittings. Some of the metal has been taken out legally, but much has been cut out by looters who then for some reason abandoned their hauls. Some of this is due to corruption. When exclusion zone bosses change, some looters may lose their protection, which is then bestowed on others.

  From the top of the blocks you can see the plant and the colossal Duga-3 military radar. It is a complex structure divided into two separate vast metal grids which look like some extraordinary art installation. Together they stretch 2,460 feet from end to end, one part is 480 feet high and the second is 295 feet. This was a Soviet “over-the-horizon” system designed to give early warning against incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles. It was one of two; the second was in eastern Siberia. Because it transmitted a strange tapping sound that interfered on certain radio frequencies which could be heard in the West, it was dubbed the “Russian woodpecker.”

  Today the massive structure stands on sandy ground surrounded by trees. As it was a super-secret military object, even people in Pripyat did not know what it was, although from top-floor apartments they could see its wall of steel pipes, cones and wires. They dubbed it the “modern macaroni factory.” Maps made out that the site was an abandoned camp of the Communist Party’s Pioneer youth organization or, alternatively, the KGB let slip that it was some sort of experiment in housing technology.

  The Duga-3 radar in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. May 2015.

  You can climb to the top, or as high as you dare, and hear the strange rushing noise the wind makes as it blows through the antennas. From a distance it sounds like the din of traffic. In the abandoned military buildings around it lie the remains of ancient pieces of electrical equipment and walls decorated with murals of a fantasy future in which cosmonauts are building a circular space station that recalls the one from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, made in 1968. Now the radar is slated to be dismantled and sold for scrap. It would be a tragedy if that happened. Like everything else in the zone, it is a historical monument to what feels here like a vanished civilization, a kind of Ukrainian Pompeii. That is worth more than its scrap metal value.

  Opera house. Lviv, July 2013.

  One of the best places to think about Ukraine’s past and its relationship with the present is Lviv. Its center is a fabulous collection of gothic, renaissance, baroque and classic nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian styles, the buildings increasingly restored to their previous glory. It takes no imagination to see how this city was once part of the same cultural space which stretched from here to Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, which in some respects it resembles.

  It would not be true to say that Lviv’s history was more traumatic than that of many other places in Ukraine. Lviv, however, is different in the sense that historically it was an important and cosmopolitan city which, until it became part of the Soviet Union, was connected, both as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and then as part of Poland, with the main currents of European life. Today, some of its history weighs very heavily on Ukraine, because of what really happened, what people believe happened, what people are told happened and what is forgotten.

  Elsewhere I have not enumerated the different names of each place in every language but with Lviv I will, because some readers may recognize it by one of its other names. The name means “city of lions” and the lion is the city’s symbol. Lviv is what this city of a million people is called in Ukrainian. In Rus
sian it is L’vov, in Polish Lwów, in German Lemberg and in Yiddish either Lemberg or Lemberik. During the Austro-Hungarian period, which lasted from 1772 to 1918, the city, the heart of eastern Galicia, was officially known by its German name. From 1918 to 1939 it was the third-biggest city in Poland. Then it was taken by the Soviets, followed by the Nazis, and the Soviets returned in 1944. Like Thessaloniki in Greece and Vilnius in Lithuania, it is one of those European cities whose population today is so different from what it used to be that few people who live here nowadays can say that their families lived here before 1945.

  In 1931 about half the population of the city was Polish, roughly a third was Jewish and 15.9 percent was Ukrainian. In the previous decades those proportions had fluctuated, but not very dramatically. In eastern Galicia, though, the ethnic makeup of the towns was not the same as in the countryside and region in general. Here some 60 percent of the population was Ukrainian, and only a quarter Polish. Jews made up most, but not all, of the rest. After the war, virtually all of the Jews had been wiped out and then, in the period to 1947, the vast majority of the Poles were “repatriated” to Poland because Lviv and eastern Galicia had become Soviet again. The word “repatriation” was Orwellian, of course, because these Poles were being sent to places they had not come from. Fear was a big motivating factor: many of those who had survived the war and arrests and deportations during the first Soviet occupation did not want to risk staying in the USSR. In the villages many left because they were afraid of attacks by the nationalist partisans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and there were also tales of NKVD, ministry of interior troops, pretending to be UPA fighters to intimidate people in order to prompt them to go.