Holly
Morris
On 26 April 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s reactor No 4 blew up after a cooling test. The resulting nuclear fire lasted 10 days, spewing
400 times as much radiation as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Today Chernobyl’s soil, water, and air are among the most highly
contaminatedon Earth. The reactor
is at the centre of a 1,000-square-mile “exclusion zone”, a quarantined
no-man’s land complete with border guards, passport control and radiation
monitoring.
But amid the environmental devastation, the human story of Chernobyl is
often lost. That story is embodied in an unlikely community of some 130 people,
known as “self-settlers”, who defiantly live inside the exclusion zone.
But amid the environmental devastation, the human story of Chernobyl is
often lost. That story is embodied in an unlikely community of some 130 people,
known as “self-settlers”, who defiantly live inside the exclusion zone.
Almost all of them are women. About 116,000 people were evacuated from
the zone at the time of the accident, but about 1,200 of them refused to stay
away. The women who remain, now in their 70s and 80s, are the last survivors of
those who illegally returned to their ancestral homes shortly after the
accident.
A new film by Holly Morris and Anne Bogart, screening in London
this weekend, follows the
unlikely group of rebels as they continue to go about their daily lives in the
toxic and lonely environment.
The film depicts the zone’s scattered ghost villages, now silent, eerie
and contaminated. Many villages have eight or 12 babushkas, or babas – the
Russian and Ukrainian words for “grandmother” – still living in them.
One self-settler depicted in the documentary, Hanna Zavorotnya,
explained how she snuck through the bushes back to her village in the summer of
1986. “Shoot us and dig the grave,” she told the soldiers who tried to evacuate
her and other family members, “otherwise we’re staying.”
Why did she choose to live on this deadly land? Is she unaware of the
risks, or crazy enough to ignore them, or both? When asked about radiation,
Zavorotnya replied: “Radiation doesn’t scare me. Starvation does.”
Zavorotnya and the other women lived through Stalin’s Holodomor – the genocide-by-famine of the 1930s that wiped out millions of
Ukrainians – and then the Nazis in the 1940s. When the Chernobyl accident
happened a few decades into Soviet rule, many were simply unwilling to flee an
enemy that was invisible.
As long as they were well beyond child bearing age, self-settlers were
allowed to stay “semi-illegally”. But what about their health? The
complications from an environment laced with radioactive contaminants, such as
cesium, strontium and americium. Health studies vary. The World Health
Organisation predicts more than
4,000 deaths will
eventually be linked to the Chernobyl disaster.
Greenpeace and others put that projection into the tens of thousands.
All agree thyroid cancers are sky high, and that Chernobyl evacuees have
suffered the trauma of relocated peoples everywhere, including anxiety and
depression.
Radioactive contamination from the accident has been deadly, but the
trauma of relocation is another fallout of Chernobyl. Of the old people who
relocated, one Chernobyl medical technician, whose job is to give annual
radiation exposure tests to zone workers said: “Quite simply, they die of
anguish.”
Other babushkas have said: “If you leave you die”; “Those who left are
worse off now. They are all dying of sadness”; “Motherland is Motherland. I
will never leave.”
Radiation or not, these women are at the end of their lives. But their
continued existence and spirit indicate the transformative connections to home,
and about the strength of self-determination. They are unexpected lessons from a
nuclear tragedy.
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