WE LEFT FOR Pripyat, the eerie, empty city once home to fifty thousand, just down the road from the reactor. There is none like it on earth; if a neutron bomb is ever detonated, Pripyat gives a good idea of what it would look like afterward.
Almost the entire Chernobyl community of workers, from control room engineers to workers in the reactor core to cleaners to bookkeepers, lived in Pripyat—a fairly typical Soviet-style town of high-rise prefabs, a central square, and the requisite Soviet House of Culture—until Nina Melnik’s announcement that the entire population had an hour to pack and get out.
A Ferris wheel stands in the center, finished so soon before the accident that it was never switched on. Rimma and our driver allowed me to wander around alone in the silence of the city. I walked up to the “new” cinema near the central square, as if still waiting for showings of the latest 1986 Hollywood knockoffs. I peeked into the local post office, where someone had rifled through piles of undelivered letters. Inexplicably, a dusty but glowing lightbulb hung from the ceiling, evidently never switched off or having burned out. There was not a single human being in the city, and a total silence prevailed.
“People are allowed to come back once a year to visit their old apartments, and it’s very emotional,” Nina said to me. She pointed out that scavengers had stripped out many of the appliances, even though they were likely contaminated with all manner of radiation. Thieves had even scavenged parts from cars that had been hastily buried in pits around the city after the disaster, stripping out everything from seats to engines to presumably contaminated wiring harnesses.
We visited the mini-museum at the power plant dedicated to the history of the calamity—a shrine to the heroes, from technicians to hundreds of firefighters—who fought the radiation fire after it broke out on the morning of April 26, 1986. Those at the plant during the explosion or others first on the scene were the first to die of radiation sickness.
“Why do you do this?” I asked Rimma, regarding her life choice as a Chernobyl guide. Her English and her intuition were so sharp that she probably could have landed work anywhere.
“I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world,” she said. “We are a tight community, and those who are here want to be here.”
WE DEPARTED THE information center and picked up Nina Melnik at her pristine house. We set off again, this time for a village in the zone named Opachichi. We passed over rolling hills in the twilight, meeting not a single car, not a single pedestrian, not a single sign of life until we reached a house where dim light shone through the windows. There were chickens pecking about in the icy yard.
Ninety-year-old Anastasia Chikolovets and her eighty-nine-year-old husband, Kolya, met us at the door like long-lost friends. We entered a single room, where some soup was warming on an old stove, and the elderly couple began the ritual of taking care of a rare guest to the now practically abandoned village.
Anastasia asked me to help her, motioning toward a shed outside in the cold. We opened an enormous old steam trunk. Inside was a huge glass jug that looked as if it could hold ten to twenty gallons of liquid. It was Anastasia’s homemade moonshine, made from fermented leftover bread. I lifted the thing out of the steam trunk, and we laid it on the frozen ground, pouring the hooch into a smaller jug that we took back inside the house. I quipped about imbibing potentially radioactive moonshine, and both she and her husband laughed at me. “At our age, who cares about radiation?” Anastasia piped up happily. “It doesn’t matter. We’d rather die here on our own land, whatever the reason.”
She poured the bread moonshine into small shot glasses and the toasts began.
Anastasia recalled the recent history of Opachichi, where they had lived since 1946, seven years before the death of Stalin. Before “the accident,” as everyone called it, there had been twenty thousand people living here. Now there were twenty. No post office, no stores.
She talked endlessly, and joyously, of their decision to return from the antiseptic apartment they’d been given in another Ukrainian city after being forced to leave the “forbidden zone” around Chernobyl, despite the total lack of services and the abandoned aura of the place.
As she ruminated about their choice to live in practically complete isolation in Opachichi, Anastasia continued to pile the table with salo (cured Ukrainian pork fat), pickles, and fish.
“How do you know what’s safe to eat and what’s not?” I asked.
Anastasia ignored the question, but Rimma answered for her: Nothing was allowed to leave the exclusion zone, period. For the workers like her, everything was required to be shipped in from the outside—from bottled water to canned tuna to ice cream.
“The fish in the rivers here have all been studied. Certain types, depending on their fat composition and physiological characteristics, don’t show any evidence of radionuclide accumulation,” she explained. “Others do. We know precisely which ones are safe and which are not. Berries and mushroom picking—that’s strictly forbidden.”
For me, it was surreal, watching humans adapt to the consequences of how their own technology had poisoned the land for generations. I tried to come up with a picture and ended up thinking of fish trying to discern which worms concealed a fisherman’s lethal hook and which were harmless.
Anastasia, wearing an old cooking apron and a tattered blouse, stirred the soup in a big pot. She was tired of talking radiation. Kolya turned the knobs on an old radio and finally found some Ukrainian pop music to add some entertainment.
We downed shot after shot of the bread moonshine, making toasts to the delights of the semilegal life in the radiation zone. Anastasia showed practically no signs of inebriation; Kolya, in contrast, slowly moved over to the metal-framed bed and slumped up against the wall after his sixth shot, which must have been close to 120 proof.
“I’ve always been able to outdrink him,” she said, laughing.
Nina Melnik, meanwhile, had gone to visit acquaintances in one of the only other inhabited houses in the village. Now she was back, taking off her boots just outside the door, slapping them together to shake off the perfectly pristine snow, and rejoining the party.
Nina, the woman who had announced the 1986 disaster to her townsfolk in Pripyat, now led us in the singing of traditional Ukrainian folk songs, the content of which I could not precisely understand because of the differences between their Ukrainian and my Russian. Then, after a long, last toast of the bread-based moonshine, we parted company with Anastasia and Kolya. Given their ages, I knew I’d never see them again.
As we drove along eerily deserted roads, Nina sang the entire way back to her house, through the blackness along the zone’s snow-covered roads. She continued to explain her decision to live in Chernobyl, and to lead the effort to protect the rights of those who wanted to do the same.
“Without land under his feet, a person has no essence. Here there is everything. A forest, a river. My great-grandfather lived on this land,” she said proudly.
A child was born in the forbidden zone that year, and everyone living there celebrated, without a thought about cesium, plutonium, or strontium.
THE ROAD TO THE SCHOOLHOUSE
2004
It was early morning on September 1, 2004. I had come back after one a.m. the previous night from covering a suicide bombing by a pro-Islamist insurgent at a Moscow Metro station. A woman had blown herself up in the entranceway of the busy Rizhky (Riga) station near the city center, taking the lives of nine others with her. A week earlier, two more “Shahidki,” aka “Black Widows” (female suicide bombers), boarded two separate southbound planes in Moscow’s most elegant, newest, and supposedly safest airport, Domodedovo. Their large, fluffy dresses concealed powerful suicide bombs. They detonated them only minutes apart, blowing the Tupelev-134 planes into pieces as they disintegrated on air traffic controllers’ screens. I got the obligatory two-thirty a.m. phone call from Washington to try to explain it all live on NPR’s All Things Considered to host Robert Siegel, and although to me it was obvious what
had occurred—midair suicide bombings—we had few details to go on at such an early stage. Three weeks before that, another suicide bomber had attacked a Russian military hospital outside Chechnya, killing thirty-five. Another three weeks prior, a Chechen woman had detonated herself at an outdoor rock concert, killing another fourteen. (The organizers kept the rock concert going for several hours more despite the carnage, either because of the fact that some of the revelers were too oblivious—thanks to inebriation, the earsplitting sound of the music, or the enormous size of the venue—or because of a kind of classic Russian fatalism.)
So we knew something terribly ominous was up when the sketchy news came through on Russian state TV, early on September 1, that gunmen with some connection to the Islamist insurgency had entered a school in southern Russia, close to Chechnya.
September 1 is a special day, a festive holiday marking the first day of the academic calendar, when children dress up in their Sunday finest and parents accompany them for song, pictures, and celebration.
I was scheduled to leave that evening on a vacation to the United States and had been up packing a suitcase. It was the middle of the night in DC; no one would be answering the telephone. But it was obvious that this was something extremely serious, so without consulting with DC, I decided to stay behind and get to the town, now forever freighted with that infamous name Beslan, in Russia’s North Caucasus region.
After a three-hour drive from Nalchik, I arrived with Boris Ryzhak, our NPR office manager, who helped me lug our gear around and guard it and who would double as an additional soundman. We arrived in the town of low-slung homes just before midnight. Beslan School Number 1 was not even visible through the swell of police and terrified townsfolk, whose relatives, friends, or children were trapped inside with the gunmen. After hastily attaching a car battery to our satellite telephone and going on the air live, we spent a couple of hours slumped over in the backseat of the car, waiting.
When morning came, it was clear that little was clear. Russian officials claimed that in addition to around two dozen gunmen, there were 354 people inside the school. And because Russian government media outlets were reporting that disinformation, many world media outlets were simply repeating it. Although something was very wrong with this depiction, the government was able to sustain that lie for another day or so before the real numbers of hostages became clearer.
Near the back of a city administration building, angered relatives confronted defensive local government officials. I listened carefully as the relatives insisted there were more than 1,000 hostages inside, not the 354 the officials were claiming.
The government gave very little away in terms of information. It was said most of the terrorists were from Chechnya—as well as a group of Ingush. It later turned out that there were also two Ossetians and, somewhat ironically, three Russians. The government claimed that the terrorists were making no coherent demands, though that also turned out to be a blatant lie. The demand had in fact been much the same as in previous terror attacks masterminded by chief terrorist Shamyl Basayev, who would later take credit for this one as well: that Russia fully withdraw from Chechnya and accept it as a neutral, independent state. This had been the case with previous major hostage takings in Russia—at Moscow’s House of Culture of State Ball-Bearing Plant Number 1 theater in 2002—which I had also covered, as well as the 1995 Buddyonovsk hospital raid, which I detailed earlier in this book.
After herding the over 1,000 hostages into a sweltering gymnasium, the terrorists immediately executed several male hostages—either deemed physically fit enough to put up resistance, or ones they somehow identified as members of the Russian armed forces, former or current, perceived or not.
Time seemed to stand still throughout the next day, September 2. By this time the truth stated to emerge that more than 1,100—not 354—hostages were inside the schoolhouse. Relatives of those inside, some of whom I knew personally from years of working in the region, continued to descend on the scene, inconsolable. Russian Special Forces units, poorly disguised, moved in, going back and forth around some of the high walls leading to the school, along with young Interior Ministry troops, who were busy building sandbag barriers outside.
It was confirmed that the hostage takers were denying food—but much more important, water—to their captives, and that the young children inside the sweltering gym, who were desperately thirsty in the one-hundred-plus-degree Fahrenheit temperatures, were urinating into plastic bottles and passing them about to share.
• • •
ON SEPTEMBER 3 at about one p.m., the end commenced. In need of more minidiscs to record with, I had just started to walk back to the house where we were renting rooms from a local family when an enormous explosion shook the ground. To this day, theories abound: that either the Russians fired on the building with rockets or grenade launchers to end the siege; that the terrorists had accidentally detonated the booby-trapped bombs they had rigged up in the school gymnasium; that some armed local partisans started shooting in the direction of the school, and that the hostage takers, sensing the building was being stormed, began shooting back. A long gun-battle broke out between the terrorists inside and Russian forces, who investigations later confirmed had used tanks and flamethrowers in the assault. The rooftop of the school caught fire, the flaming beams eventually caving in, incinerating dozens of children, their parents, and teachers—together with some of the terrorists—still being forced to lie prone or stand in the gymnasium.*
By now the relatives had gone from inconsolability to hysteria, left to only wonder and hope their loved ones would survive. Ambulances inched toward the smoking school, but there were not enough of them, and the “rescue” was chaotic. I ran across a street to get closer. We started seeing injured, dead, or dying people being hauled away in the backseats of regular passenger cars. The firing between the Russians and the terrorists became more intense, bullets now flying inches above our heads. I lay flat to the ground with Natalie Nougayrède of Le Monde, and Paul Quinn-Judge, then of Time magazine. I was slightly elevated above Paul, and as the bullets whisked about, he calmly looked me in the eyes and said: “Not many people are going to get out of there alive.”
During a lull, we moved toward the perimeter wall in front of the school. We were pinned down again as nonstop volleys of AK fire rang out from the building, bullets again whizzing over our heads or ricocheting wildly between the walls and adjacent buildings. Then the dead and injured started to flow out. A teenage girl, delirious but seemingly physically uninjured, ran to the safety of the crowd of relatives around the administration building near the school, oblivious to the back of her hair—mashed down with the brain matter of another hostage who had obviously not gotten out alive.
Slowly the shooting slowed. Then it gradually stopped. It was clear that most of the terrorists had been killed or, as some theories have it, escaped. Former hostages who had escaped the carnage ran from the still-smoldering building or were carried away, many in evident shock.
I approached one disoriented and wailing teenage boy, who asked to use my cell phone. He was filthy. He had been a hostage, as was his sister, but in the chaos he had lost track of her. She had still been somewhere in the gym as it erupted in flames, and he was sure she had died. Using my phone, he called her, punching the buttons on my cell phone repeatedly. He hit the redial button over and over, each time getting the same message: “This number is either switched off or out of service.”
I felt inhuman with my large reporting microphone, not able to find the words to ask him to describe what life in the hell he’d escaped from had been like. Feeling at best an interloper and at worst a tragedy speculator, I put my equipment away. There was no prospect of comforting him with anything I could say or do, and any news value to be derived was either too callous or too voyeuristic for me to gather or to be interested in. After a few more fruitless cell phone calls, he sprinted away in tears.
I went back to my transmission gear, which was ly
ing on the ground in front of the local administration building. An editor from NPR in Washington called saying there were reports that dozens of bodies were lying outside the school, victims, evidently killed on the first day of the siege, when the terrorists had executed a number of young men, most of whom they believed to be Russian servicemen. “Go and check,” he said.
It was not that quite that easy—near-delirious Russian Special Forces surrounded the school, letting almost no one pass. New reports of victims and myriad gory details were coming in faster than water pouring over a dam. Moreover, the phone was ringing off the hook with requests from various NPR desks demanding news.
“Get to the morgue” was the next set of instructions from the NPR foreign desk. I didn’t actually need such directives; it was a natural next place to go and I was already on my way.
There was not much of an actual morgue in Beslan, simply a hospital where the small basement morgue had overflowed as the first bodies were brought in. The rest were laid down in a courtyard, mostly children, who would turn out to be 186 out of the at least 334 victims, many badly burned. Relatives searched frantically. On one plastic sheet the bodies of two boys lay together, looking like twins, their father or a relative embracing each one by one and putting them down again. I asked no one any questions, just listened. Many of them screeched uncontrollably, livid with President Vladimir Putin, whom they accused of not having done enough to avert bloodshed.
My office manager, Boris, a deep, emotive six-foot-two man with three children, broke down and wept openly as we exited the makeshift morgue. I bit my lip and walked on.
The electrical power in Beslan went out that night, and we were barely able to assemble our story for All Things Considered on car batteries before transferring the sound and tracks to Washington. I then downed about seven beers and pretended to sleep, eyes wide open.
The next day was a Saturday; it was not until Sunday that we were allowed into the school. Once inside, we found bone fragments everywhere, and in one room, a skull fragment, hair follicles intact, stuck to a wall belonging to a female suicide bomber who had blown herself up or set off her explosives by mistake.
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