“Ultimately, the effects of Chernobyl will continue to be felt for countless generations to come–the scars of this disaster will persist for longer now than the sum of all our recorded history up until this point. The disaster itself will become a matter of myth, even before its effects stop being felt…”
-Darmon Richter
The Chernobyl disaster was a cataclysm like no other, an event that, to the ancients, would have almost certainly been interpreted as a manifestation of divine caprice. Among other terrors, the explosion unleashed a cloud of radiation, which–though invisible to the naked eye–caused and is still causing palpable bodily damage to thousands of people. Everything was set alight by human presumption and ambition, aspects of our nature that continue, like the “Dweller on the Threshold” in Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni, to haunt all our endeavours. As Jonathan Schell wrote in “The Terrible Truth About the Chernobyl Disaster” (1986): “Did we think that our political competence had become so great that no crisis could carry us over the brink?…Did we imagine that our technical competence had become so great that we could rely on it never to break down?”
Today Chernobyl and its Exclusion Zone are an interplay of light and shadow, a space not only of monumental ruins and dark histories, but also of gentle rebirth and untold beauty. Few have had the opportunity to thoroughly investigate Chernobyl’s wonders, but our old friend Darmon Richter, the photographer and adventurer behind The Bohemian Blog, is one of those few. His new book, Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide aims to show people a more realistic side of the Zone. “It explores what’s really going on there now,” he told us, “outside of the tourism bubble.”
We caught up with Richter to learn more about his many adventures inside one of the world’s most interesting and alluring locations.
The Custodian: How long have you been interested in Chernobyl and why did you decide to write a book about it?
Darmon Richter: Chernobyl occupies a strange place in our culture. Throughout the Cold War period and up to the present day, books and films have imagined the kind of wastelands that would be left behind in the wake of an all-out nuclear war… or some other world-shattering catastrophe. From Planet of the Apes to The Walking Dead, we seem to have a cultural fascination with the post-apocalypse, and the question of what our world would look like without us in it. Before the Chernobyl disaster happened, we already had a template for the Exclusion Zone in our culture, and in many ways, the Zone in Ukraine today has been shaped by our preconceived notions of the atomic wasteland. For many contemporary tourists Chernobyl is more than just the place itself, but rather it becomes the realisation of a kind of geographical bogeyman.
Like a lot of other visitors, it was this idea of exploring a post-apocalyptic landscape that first drew me to Chernobyl, when I visited in 2013. My group tour, like almost every tour there since, focused on the disaster and the places that most clearly showed its effects. But over subsequent visits I came to see more of the Chernobyl region, and the more time I spent outside of those tourism hotspots, the more I came to see it as a place of life, not death. It wasn’t just the sight of nature reclaiming these built environments, but more than that I began meeting the people who now continue to live and work in Chernobyl. The Exclusion Zone is vast, and tourism represents just one tiny aspect of its human activity. In fact, that tourist experience in Chernobyl almost presents a kind of illusion… a tour through an abandoned Soviet world, while all around it, unseen by the tourists, thousands of people commute daily into the Zone for work. Far from abandoned, this place today is a hive of human activity.
So the book – Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide – evolved from this idea of showing people the ‘real’ Chernobyl. It explores what’s really going on there now, outside of the tourism bubble, and looks at how pre-disaster cultural tropes of the “nuclear apocalypse” served to shape (often, quite inaccurately) our widely-held perceptions of the Chernobyl Zone today.
C: What was it like attending a rave on the edge of the Exclusion Zone?
DR: That whole event actually felt very… wholesome. It was organised by a collective of Chernobyl enthusiasts, people who regularly sneak into the Zone illegally. They set it up in a village just outside the border, a place that was never officially evacuated, but has nevertheless suffered a gradual decline over the years since the disaster, with only a handful of residents remaining today. The old village hall had two dance floors, one upstairs and one down, powered by generators and set up with a makeshift bar. In the late afternoon, early evening, while DJs were still sound-checking, I wondered what the remaining villagers would think – but the response was really positive, as it turned out. Elderly villagers came out to see what was happening, mingling with the crowds and serving cups of tea to ravers.
The crowd seemed to be a mixture of Chernobyl people – friends of the organisers – and the regular Kyiv rave crowd, who I think had tagged along specifically to see the DJs. Meanwhile, further down the road through the village, past the graveyard, a footpath led over the threshold into the Zone, and all night party-goers were wandering in and out of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, as techno beats reverberated through the forest. A surreal experience, to be sure – but like I said, it felt somehow very wholesome too. Different crowds of people, young and old, villagers and visitors from the capital… all mingling, drinking, dancing. I heard the same sentiment again and again, from DJs and local residents alike: that it just felt good to be bringing some life and fun back to this place.
C: Have you ever had any paranormal or anomalous encounters while on-site? Have you met anyone who has?
DR: Radiation poses an intangible sort of threat to our existence – you cannot see, taste, touch, hear or smell it. During the evacuations in 1986, some locals were even hesitant to leave their homes, on account of this alleged invisible danger. Many of them instead turned to older systems of belief in an attempt to make sense of what had happened.
There’s a passage in the Book of Revelation that warns: “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” (Revelation 8:10–11, King James Version)
“Chornobyl,” in Ukrainian, is another name for the plant they call “polyn” – and which in English, we know as part of the wormwood family. Even today, there are many Orthodox Christians in Ukraine who believe this disaster was Biblically foretold. One local priest claims he saw an omen of it ten years earlier, in 1976, when the Virgin Mary appeared to him in clouds above Chornobyl (the Ukrainian spelling), casting handfuls of the wormwood plant over the town. Another supposed warning came in the form of Halley’s Comet, which since the Dark Ages has often been considered a harbinger of doom… and whose 76-year orbit happened to pass by the Earth only days before the Chernobyl disaster.
Following the disaster there were reported sightings of UFOs as well. One senior Soviet dosimetrist–Mikhail Varitsky, a respected figure – claimed to have seen a strange craft floating over the power plant during the unfolding disaster. He says it projected some kind of light beam onto the burning power plant, and immediately after that his radiation readings dropped down “from 3000 to 800 milli-roentgen per hour.” Years later, in 2002, the Russian newspaper Pravda ran a story on Chernobyl UFOs, for which it collected together many more alleged sightings that occurred in the following years. The conclusion they suggested was that intelligent extra-terrestrial beings were looking out for us… that they had intervened in the aftermath of the disaster, and prevented the situation from growing worse (a genuine concern at the time–considering three more reactors sat immediately alongside the one single reactor that went into meltdown).
There are plenty of other stories people tell too–strange things living in the forests, or conspiracy theories about Soviet mind-control machines. Another myth was doing the rounds about something like a Ukrainian “mothman,” that was warning Chernobyl’s residents about their impending doom in the run-up to the disaster–though I never found any corroboration for that story locally, so I have a feeling it was perhaps a more recent invention. Whether or not people choose to believe such tales is entirely up to them… but for me, it’s the phenomena as a whole that’s interesting. The residents of the Chernobyl region lived through famine, war and massacre in the 20th century – real horrors in human form, which needed no explanation but cruelty. In the wake of an invisible radio-ecological threat however, all manner of imaginative explanations began to emerge, as normal people tried to make sense of an extraordinary situation.
C: You told me that, in the course of your travels, you spent some time on an island with a group of ex-Soviet scientists who debated ancient mythology and modern physics. Prometheus was mentioned. Can you tell me more about this experience?
DR: The city of Pripyat was founded in 1970 as a home for the workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. As a new Soviet city it featured no churches, no synagogues, and no religious dedications of any kind – save for just one mystical reference, a statue of the Greek Titan Prometheus. In the book I dig pretty deep into this, explaining how Karl Marx himself identified the socialist movement with Prometheus. In Marx’s interpretation of the myth, stealing fire from the gods and giving it to mankind became a metaphor for seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie. After the disaster, and the evacuation of Pripyat, this six-metre bronze Titan was relocated to a new site just outside the power plant, where it now watches over the busloads of engineers arriving for work each morning. I started asking people I met what they thought of it… what the symbol of Prometheus meant to them. This becomes a recurring theme throughout the book, and the various personal interpretations I collect seem perhaps to reflect deeper readings of the disaster as a whole… from the gift of power, to themes of hubris and punishment.
Following this line of investigation to a kind of thematic conclusion, in the final chapter I travel out to the Greek islands to discuss science and mythology with a group calling themselves the “Pythagorean Institute of Philosophical Studies for the Immortality of Man”. The Greek press have taken to calling them “the Immortals” though, owing to their views on the future of human evolution. This group was formed in the Soviet Union, or rather during and immediately following its collapse, when numerous scientists and researchers came together to question where things went next…how to make sense of the promise of nuclear science in a post-Chernobyl, post-Soviet world. They ended up establishing a base on the very southernmost tip of Europe, the Greek island of Gavdos–where today they write and debate, and hold seminars and retreats. Meeting them was a fascinating experience. Their interests broach fields such as ancient mythology, numerology, transhumanism, and of course, nuclear science… a subject in which many of the group are highly qualified and experienced professionals.
Ultimately, the effects of Chernobyl will continue to be felt for countless generations to come–the scars of this disaster will persist for longer now than the sum of all our recorded history up until this point. The disaster itself will become a matter of myth, even before its effects stop being felt… and so mythology becomes a guiding theme throughout the book, from its early discussions of Prometheus in the Soviet Union, to a treatise on nuclear futures from ex-Soviet scientists living amongst the ruins of Ancient Greece.
C: What’s next on the horizon? Any future projects you’d like to share with us?
DR: I feel like I haven’t quite closed this chapter on Chernobyl yet–but I’m close. Over the course of my 20-or-so visits, I have taken tens of thousands of photographs of the Exclusion Zone. A couple of hundred of those made it into the book. So I probably have a few more galleries still to share before I’m completely done, for example looking in detail at the Soviet-era art and mosaics of the Zone, its war memorials, and so on. But for the most part I think this book represents the culmination of everything I have learned over the course of a seven-year Chernobyl fascination, and there’s a terrific sense of closure about releasing it into the world.
Like many other people I’ve been grounded for the duration of 2020–this is now the longest I’ve spent in just one single country, for a decade. I have a feeling that travel won’t exactly return to normal for a while yet, and so the situation has motivated me instead to revisit other projects that I’ve worked on in recent years… rather than rushing out again to take new photos of new places. I don’t exactly know what the result of that will be yet. I am sitting on a vast trove of words, photos, pictures and audio here, fragments of journeys, memories, conversations… so as much as I’m looking forward to new travel once the pandemic is over, 2020 has taught me some valuable lessons in reflection and introspection, and I might yet find that my next book is already hiding amongst my dusty hard drives here.
Want more stories? Check out our spin-off project, Godfrey’s Almanack.