Pushkin Press
BEFORE 26 April 1986, living near the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Chernobyl (nicknamed Atomic City) or in the nearby workers’ city of Prypyat was highly desirable. There was a new restaurant, supermarket, large playground and immaculate flats, all of which marked it out as one of the Soviet Union’s more prosperous areas. It was so desirable that newspapers ran adverts from people looking to exchange their flats for one there.
Then the explosion at Reactor No. 4 turned the plant into what Ukrainian writer Markiyan Kamysh calls a “poisonous emerald in the precious crown of [the region of] Polissya”. This is one of many striking images in his recently translated book, Stalking the Atomic City: Life among the decadent and the depraved of Chornobyl (Ukrainian spelling).
His father, a civil engineer and a commander at the plant, helped limit the damage after the explosion Kamysh, born a few years after the disaster, counts himself among the generation raised in its immediate aftermath.
Advertisement
Soon after the disaster, an exclusion zone was established by the Soviet armed forces, initially covering an area of 30 kilometres radius, and designed to restrict access, reduce contamination and allow for scientific and environmental monitoring. Today that zone spans 2600 square km.
Stalking the Atomic City covers the years from 2010 to 2022, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and describes the time Kamysh spent exploring and escorting illegal tourists (the “stalking”of the title) around rusted industrial buildings and abandoned villages.
For him, the exclusion zone is a “land of tranquillity and frozen time”, and he recounts his 1100-plus trips under the barbed wire in vivid detail. Eluding the security patrols, he passes nights marvelling at the lynx that have made their dens in derelict buildings, or transfixed by the crumbling plant, whose antennae resemble “thirty Eiffel Towers”.
He meets “haggard drunkards” looking to loot any food stocks and scrap thieves scavenging for clocks to sell at Kyiv’s flea market. Other figures are more marginal, including “swamp ghosts” drawn to a desolation “on par with Antarctica”, who the author observes while brewing tea made from thawed slush.
If the safety of the plant was questionable before the accident, the exclusion zone of Kamysh’s account is at least as precarious. Guards rarely fire warning shots; Kamysh’s relationship with them varies from amiable to cartoonish. He writes of “swimming” through waist-high snow to reach safety, crossing leech-infested ponds – and of his fear of encountering his tour groups on some future chemotherapy ward.
After vowing to settle in Kyiv, Kamysh soon feels the call of the wild, which he likens to the “post-expedition syndrome” that befalls returning archaeologists. As he journeys back into the exclusion zone, he finds the way nature is recolonising it a source of comfort, describing courtyards that resemble rainforests and lightning striking a metal pipe on part of the plant. Elsewhere in the book, photographs show dead wolves rotting on floorboards, brilliant green poisoned swamps and playgrounds where rust from swings has massed in drifts.
In the light of the international focus on Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, Stalking the Atomic City seems timely with its examples of resilience, decay and despair. Kamysh is bitter at some of the more casual, touristic visitors to the exclusion zone. He says the city has been killed twice, once by the disaster, and more recently by people who “shot Prypyat dead with their expensive cameras”.
But he is full of admiration for some. He describes a resident of the exclusion zone in the 1990s who was in his 70s and living without running water, electricity or neighbours, his only companions a two-way radio he used to make emergency contact with a checkpoint – and a rifle.
Perhaps most telling is graffiti Kamysh finds on a collapsing internal wall. In scarlet letters, it reads: “We’ll beat you, Reagan!”
