For centuries, Polissia was perceived as poor, illiterate, and backward—at least in the view of the government officials occasionally sent there by distant capitals. It was a picturesque periphery that was never at the center of much of anything and produced nothing and no one of note. Except for Jews and Germans—whose ethnic identities were distinct—the region was peopled largely by Slavs who were rather vague about whether they were Poles, Ukrainians, or Belarusians. Usually they just called themselves tuteshni, or “locals,” even after Soviet bureaucrats assigned them with standardized—and, in many cases, largely arbitrary—ethnicities in the 1920s.

Getting assigned an ethnicity was, nevertheless, benign compared to what came afterwards. In 1932-1933, the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin deported the so-called kulaks, who were basically any peasants who were not poverty stricken. Forced collectivization herded those who were left into state farms and an artificial famine, which killed up to 10 million in Ukraine, broke the resistance of those who refused. A few years later, ethnic Poles were declared enemy agents of interwar Poland and deported to the Soviet interior as were Germans accused en masse of spying for the Nazis. Then the Holocaust wiped out much of the Jewish population of the German-occupied USSR, including the Jews

of Chornobyl—home to a rabbinical dynasty that today attracts occasional Hasidic tourists disappointed to find that the Soviets long ago paved over the old Jewish cemetery with a parking lot.

Despite the repression and upheavals, however, most rural people had lived in Polissia for generations. After Chernobyl, many were reluctant to leave behind their land and their livestock, fowl, and pets because of some invisible radiation that few of them understood. There were many incidents of people, especially the elderly, hiding in cellars, haylofts, and forests to avoid evacuation. Two old women spent a month in Pripyat after its evacuation, living on canned food and bottled water before being discovered and resettled.

The zone’s barbed wire perimeter didn’t prevent the rural folk from sneaking back to their old homes. Told that they would be gone for only three months, some began returning in the summer and fall of 1986 to tend their involuntarily abandoned cows, pigs, and ducks. And they kept coming even after all the contaminated animals were removed or slaughtered. After some attempts to make them leave, zone authorities decided to let people over the age of 50 stay—but only in the Ukrainian part of the zone. Their numbers have been declining steadily.

Called samosels, which means “squatters” or, literally, self-settlers, they are the zone’s only permanent residents.

But they are far from its only people.

The bridge from the town of Chornobyl crosses the Pripyat River a few miles south of the defunct nuclear plant’s cooling pond, where the river channel branches out and braids around islands and swamps on its way to the archipelago of tiny islands at the delta. A ribbon of brilliant sapphire reflecting the sky in its main channel, the Pripyat seemed to fragment into shards of mirror that gleamed amid the textured emerald of the swamps.

I was driving a carload of visitors on a warm June day, though it wasn’t exactly clear who was tagging along with whom. Rimma Kyselytsia of Chernobylinterinform was our guide, but I think she learned as much from her guests on that trip as we did from her. Wayne Scott was an American birding enthusiast and naturalist. Kate Brown was an assistant professor at the University of Maryland–Baltimore

and the author of A Biography of No Place, an affecting history of the Polissia region. I wanted to visit with some samosels and my plan was to take the road I had not yet traveled on the left bank—namely, the one that led southeast to the Kiev Sea.

While we waited in the car for the guard at the Paryshiv-2 checkpoint to open the gate, one of the stray dogs that seem to attach themselves to all Chernobyl checkpoints waggled submissively for affection. It was a skinny bitch whose hanging teats indicated a litter of puppies not far away.

Wayne pointed out some black storks circling over the trees in the distance. Although they are far more common on the Belarus side of the zone, black storks have also been appearing in Ukraine. Unlike their white cousins, black storks like the wild country of forests and swamps where human intrusions are rare. Before Chernobyl, there were no black storks in the area at all. They appeared after the evacuation, and their Ukrainian population had grown to about 40 in 2000.

For someone like me, who enjoys birding but can only identify most species if the bird sits still, in good light, for several minutes—and that’s with the help of a handbook—Wayne’s ability to do so quickly from a distant silhouette was a useful skill in a traveling companion.

The village of Paryshiv was about half a mile from the checkpoint, on a pale yellow patch on the radiation maps. Twenty-two people lived there—making it moderately populated as zone places go. Aside from Savichi in Belarus, a sizable settlement of 120 people that includes 12 children, and the town of Chornobyl, where up to 150 people live depending on the season, zone village populations range in size from 2 to 50.

Paryshiv looked largely abandoned when we stopped there. The old cottages visible from the road were rotting. Roofs had collapsed, breaking floorboards, and vegetation had begun to blanket the sharp edges. Some buildings could barely be seen through the thick overgrowth. Kate clearly wanted to explore, but whenever she went too close to some shaky-looking structure, Rimma pleaded with her to stop, with me chiming in my own concerns.

“I wasn’t going to go inside,” Kate tried to assure us. But she went a lot closer than I would have. The ground in the abandoned villages is deceptively solid, concealing overgrown manholes, wells, rusty nails, and other treacherous things that can easily do you bodily harm. I was

picking up some extra lifetime radiation doses for my story. I had no intention of risking broken limbs or tetanus to boot.

Kate was apparently an intrepid, Indiana Jones sort of professor. But she deferred to our concerns and asked if we could visit the village graveyard.

Polissian graveyards are not always easy to find since they are usually tucked in the woods. Rimma suggested we go four miles to the next village, called Ladyzhychi, where the cemetery was right off the road.

“I read about some cemetery that’s full of Smirnov surnames,” said Kate on the drive there.

That sounded familiar to me. “That’s not from that Chernobyl biker chick Web site, is it?” I asked. In the spring of 2004, a Kiev woman who claimed to ride around the zone alone on her Kawasaki motorcycle created a Web site that captivated the chattering classes on the Internet.

“Yes, it is,” said Kate, prompting Rimma to interject vehemently.

“That story is a lie! She never rode a bike here. She came in one of our cars and with her husband! She just carried a motorcycle helmet around and he took all the pictures.”

It was such a strange thing to lie about. But in the spring and summer of 2004, a number of marketing and entertainment enterprises decided to exploit Chernobyl’s inherent spookiness. For example, opening scenes from Necropolis, the fourth installment of the Return of the Living Dead movies, were filmed there—despite the protests of the zone administration, which didn’t like the associations it provoked. People I talked to suspected that the filmmakers paid some hefty bribes in Kiev.

In general, the number of zone visitors has been increasing steadily, pretty much in direct proportion to falling radiation levels. In 1995 about 900 people visited in the entire year. In 2004 there were 2,600 visitors, and these were just the delegations of scientists, officials, and journalists. If you include evacuees and their relatives, 30,000 people visit the Ukrainian zone annually.

There are no figures for the Belarusian reserve, which doesn’t keep track of visitors.

The number of pure tourists has been growing too, and a 2002 United Nations report suggested encouraging “ecological tourism” as a way of bringing money to the region. Concluding that after 15 years,

“Chernobyl”—and all that the word entails—was no longer an emergency requiring urgent measures to help victims, but had entered into a 10-year recovery phase during which the victims should be helped to feel empowered and in control of their lives, the report urged the governments of the affected areas to help people learn to live safely—and even profitably—in radioactive environments.

This seeming contradiction provoked a lot of derisive commentary. But after nearly two decades of decay, environmental radioactivity has fallen to less than one percent of the total amount released. Since nearly all of this is in the soil rather than on surfaces, external radiation doses are no longer very high, even in regions that were highly contaminated in 1986.

Ladyzhychi, like Paryshiv, was on a yellow patch. After we pulled up in a shady spot outside the graveyard, Wayne went off to look for birds while the rest of us explored the cemetery.

Judging by the tombstones, the village had been populated entirely by people whose surnames were Melnychenko. I stopped by a handsome black granite tombstone marking the grave of Mykola Melnychenko, who died at the age of 69 in 1997. He was buried next to his wife Katerina, who died two years later. It wasn’t clear if they had returned to live in the zone or were just buried there. Many evacuees asked to be buried in their native villages.

Coincidentally, Mykola Melnychenko was also the name of the ex-bodyguard who taped Ukraine’s President Leonid Kuchma vulgarly ordering his underlings to intimidate a muckraking journalist whose headless body was found in the fall of 2000. The worst political scandal in Ukraine’s history, “Tapegate” exposed all the ugliness of a corrupt regime whose misuse of power and public funds was a big reason there was no money for Chernobyl works and research.

An old, rotting oak had what looked like a log strapped to one of its branches. Actually, it was a wild beehive that had been abandoned by its bees. Someone had sawed above and below the hive in its original tree home and then brought the hive-in-a-log—called a bort’—to a more convenient location. Cemeteries were a popular place to put the wild hives because they were accessible yet quiet.

Wild beekeeping, called bortnytstvo in Ukrainian, is the most archaic of apiary arts. In predisaster Polissia, the methods had changed little since the tenth century, when one of the region’s main exports

was honey shipped down the Dnieper River to Byzantium. In general, Polissia was a very archaic place well into Soviet times.

Aside from about a hundred graves, the cemetery contained several empty bort’, what seemed to be about a zillion mosquitoes, and a pile of rotting baskets and tools. Kate picked up a wooden rake and I switched my dosimeter to measure beta radiation. It beeped out a digital display of 150. This meant that a square centimeter of the rake was shooting out 150 beta particles per minute. The maximum safe limit was 20. The rake wasn’t exactly “hot.” In Chapter 3, for example, Igor Chizewsky had shown me animal skulls emitting several thousand beta particles. But it was “warm” enough and Kate quickly put it down.

Our explorations were interrupted when Wayne showed up in what appeared to be police custody. A militiaman had found him wandering around alone in the village and had tried to ask him what he was doing there. Wayne spoke no Ukrainian or Russian, but he had somehow persuaded the policeman to follow him to the cemetery so that we could explain his presence.

Radioactive birdwatching was clearly a new idea of fun for that particular officer of the law (and not only him, I’m sure), but he accepted it cheerfully enough when Rimma showed him our program which set forth, in black and white, that one of the activities we had permission for was “birdwatching in various zone locations.”

After he left, Rimma said: “There are all these rumors about the zone being a refuge for criminals and fugitives. But look, Wayne couldn’t even wander alone for more than 15 minutes without getting caught.” But Wayne also lacked the language and cultural skills to bribe the militiaman had he been so inclined.

Nevertheless, the Ukrainian tabloid press frequently made sensational—and unconfirmed—reports about the zone being an international transit point for illegal trafficking, a place for growing radioactive marijuana and opium poppies, a dumping ground for the corpses of murder victims, and God only knows what other illicit activities. In March of 2004, zone militia mounted a special operation to search a dozen ghost villages for a fugitive who had been wanted for months. He was finally apprehended in Tovstiy Lis, an abandoned village bordering the highly contaminated western arrow of debris from the initial explosion.

The fact that there are no border patrols on the Belarus-Ukrainian border also makes it a tempting place for illegal immigrants. In 2001,

nine people from Afghanistan were detained illegally while trying to cross the border in Ukraine; they planned to settle in Kiev.

Because there aren’t enough people to police them, large swathes of land are essentially lawless. This doesn’t mean that they are crawling with criminals; it just means that no one necessarily knows what’s happening in much of the zone at any given time.

Although zone officials maintain that the crime rate is lower than that of similarly sized territories in Ukraine, looting has been a problem since the evacuation, and little of value is left in the zone’s villages and towns. Just six months after the disaster—when things left behind were very radioactive—two men were arrested for robbing Pripyat apartments of televisions, cameras, towels, cigarettes, candy, and food that they tried to sell without getting it checked for contamination. Scrap metal scavengers together with poachers—especially fisherman, whose fishing poles make less noise than hunting rifles—are the greatest crime problem.

Another form of illegal activity is simply being in the zone without permission. During a routine two-day inspection of the Ukrainian zone in the autumn of 2004, militia found more than 40 illegals, including two poachers who shot a moose. But trespassing alone carries no penalties, not even a fine. Violators merely get tossed out. In 2004 a man tried to avoid his alimony payments by hiding in Pripyat. Instead of expelling him, zone officials decided it would better to give him a job so that he could make his alimony payments.

Undoubtedly, other unauthorized people have also lived in the zone’s abandoned villages and towns, though no one knows exactly how many or when—unless they are caught or die there and their bodies are found, like the anonymous old man whose drowned body was found in the Pripyat River, when it flowed through the village of Otashiv in the summer of 2003. He is buried in the Chornobyl town graveyard, together with about 15 other anonymous bodies found since 1986.

The zone’s vagrants are a bit like virtual particles—the highly energetic subatomic particles that come in and out of existence but only for the tiniest increments of time. They can’t be detected and, in a sense, escape reality’s notice. But it is easier for zone vagrants to elude detection in the summer. In the winter, it’s impossible to survive without fire, and the smoke can be seen from a distance.

After leaving the cemetery, I checked my map to find the village of Teremtsi perched on a peninsula right on the Pripyat delta. It was the village that escaped drowning when the reservoir was filled in 1968. Beyond it there was nothing but the shallow waters of the artificial Kiev Sea. It was literally the end of the road and everyone agreed that it sounded like a good place to visit.

Teremtsi boasted 37 inhabitants in 2004, placing it among the zone’s most populous villages. The samosel population has been dropping steadily since the postevacuation high of 1,210 people in 1987. In 1995 there were 820 people. On an average day at the start of the third millennium, about 300 people permanently live in the zone. Though some have moved away, most have died.

Few of those who remain want to go anywhere. In 1999, when there were more than 600 samosels, nearly 100 of them wanted to relocate—but when their new accommodations were built, most refused to move. When questioned again five years later, only 4 out of nearly 400 people said they wanted to be relocated outside the zone. From a different perspective, in a 1996 poll the vast majority of evacuees over the age of 50 who had remained in their new locations wanted to return to their homes in the 30-kilometer zone.

Although they were told that it was not a safe place to live, the samosels just kept coming back—sometimes avoiding checkpoints altogether. Zone officials did consider relocating them forcibly, but the prosecutors—with the support of Ukraine’s Supreme Court—refused on the grounds that they had a constitutional right to live where they wished. So they exist in a shadowy state of semilegality.

Their villages are not supposed to get any public works—because officially, no one lives in them. But because people do, in fact, live in them, the administration can’t just leave them on their own completely. So it maintains the roads that lead to their villages, delivers pensions and mail, ensures that there is at least one phone in case of emergencies, and checks the food they grow for radiation levels.

Once a month, residents can take a bus to Ivankiv to buy a piglet at the market or some new shoes. Traveling medical brigades give them checkups, while they get treatment for more serious illnesses at the special Chernobyl clinics and hospitals in Kiev. On major religious holidays, the administration buses them to the zone’s sole working

church. In a way, Chernobyl pensioners get better care than many of their counterparts outside the zone.

In contrast to Ukraine looking through its bureaucratic fingers, Belarus completely banned unauthorized habitation. But it did allow legal settlement in two villages on the radiological reserve’s borders. Tulgovichi, the very radioactive place I visited in Chapter 3, was one of them. The other was Savichi. In Belarus there are no samosels because squatting is not tolerated the way it is in Ukraine.

The road ran parallel to the delta and its watery islands and swamps. When Wayne spotted a white egret, I stopped the car so that he could set up his telescope on the shoulder for a better look. The perfect bird for my birdwatching skills, the egret obligingly stood motionless amid the reeds for the five minutes we all took turns peering into the telescope.

Back in the car and driving east on a gutted asphalt road, past marshes and thick forests of old-growth trees, Kate pointed out an old wood cabin deep in the swamps. It was a khutir, or independent homestead, which had been quite common in Polissian parts until well into the Soviet era. Spaced widely apart and often accessible only by wooden bridges or pathways known only to the swamp dwellers, the khutir helped Polissians avoid forced collectivization longer than other regions of Ukraine. If they didn’t want to give up their livestock and crops to the Soviet tax collectors, they just hid in the forests and swamps. Their knowledge of the fruits of the forest also helped them survive the artificial famine.

“It looks like there should be a footbridge leading to it,” said Kate.

I turned onto a forest path that looked as though it led there. But it was overgrown and the bushes threatened to scratch the car, so I backed out onto the main road, thinking that a UAZ jeep would have been handy for the journey. It would have been even handier after the paved road ended and was replaced by a trail of deep, loose sand gouged into gullies and trenches by passing vehicles—like an exhaust-belching truck we saw hauling deadwood. It scraped the bottom of the car as we bounced and bumped for what seemed like forever.

“Just don’t stop,” Wayne advised. “Keep up the momentum or we’ll get stuck in the sand.”

It was too late to turn back and probably impossible without getting bogged down. So I pushed ahead, clutching the steering wheel

with sweaty hands while trying to ignore the alarming clinking and clunking from below that seemed to signify that I was leaving behind a trail of car parts in the sand.

“Now, try to tell me that that Internet biker chick could ride a motorcycle here,” I joked after we finally emerged back onto the road. It was potholed, cracked, and buckled. But it was paved and we could finally move faster, crossing paths along the way with a snake, a hedge-hog, and a roebuck that gleamed like copper in the sun. The meadows, forests, and swamps were rich in marsh harriers and lapwings, yellowhammers, and hoopoes that Wayne identified with a quick glance or a few notes of birdsong.

Soon we passed the sign for Teremtsi. Most of the village was a crumbling collection of vegetation-choked cottages, but a handful of houses displayed signs of habitation: freshly chopped wood, tidy yards, flocks of chickens, geese, and ducks. Motrona Ilyenok and her husband Oleksi lived in one immaculately kept household.

Oleksi smiled a shy welcome when we knocked on his gate and walked into the courtyard. All of the walkways were lined with flagstones and bordered by a wattle-and-daub fence with ceramic pitchers draining on the posts. It was a classic image from Ukrainian rural culture whose kitsch versions decorate the “retro” restaurants of traditional ethnic cuisine that have become extremely popular in Kiev. Kitsch, however, was garish, while all the handiwork in the Ilyenok’s household was in a palette of gentle pastels. It was like entering a beautiful but faded photograph.

Motrona invited us inside their spotless, two-room cottage. It was fully furnished and decorated with cross-stitch embroideries, icons, and framed photomontages of family and friends from years past. Their neighbor Maria Chala was visiting. Unlike the Ilyenoks, who lived in Teremtsi year-round, Chala stayed with her children in Kiev in the winter and went to the village in the summer time. Her Teremtsi home was more like a dacha, or country home.

The Chernobyl zone probably sounds like a bizarre place for a country home. But Teremtsi was actually in a clean area. My dosimeter displayed a microroentgen reading in the single digits—even lower than the streets of Kiev. In fact, Teremtsi was just outside the geometric borders of the 30-kilometer zone, although it was within the administrative borders of the Zone of Exclusion and Zone of Unconditional (Mandatory) Resettlement. The latter was a larger region that provided

what would be a perfectly circular border with a more jagged and meandering outline. On the radiation maps, Teremtsi was a light shade of green. Less than two curies of cesium-137 sprinkled every square kilometer of it in 1986.

“We never should have been evacuated,” said Motrona.

Radiologically, that may have been true. Yet maintaining utilities and services for a single village at the end of a road that runs through a radioactive zone makes little sense when all of its residents are poor and public services must be subsidized.

The pull of the land may seem surprising, given its radioactivity. But Ukrainian evacuees—especially those over the age of 50—suffered much higher stress than the samosels. People who had lived their whole lives in their own wooden cottages in the cool, lush forests of Polissia suddenly found themselves crowded together with several other families in shoddy, hastily thrown up housing in muddy villages on the steppe or on the outskirts of towns and cities. Often they didn’t feel very welcome, since locals considered the evacuees competition for jobs and living space. Or they were afraid of them for being radioactive.

Like all of the zone’s residents—both permanent and occupational—the people of Teremtsi are living models of the health impact of chronic internal and external irradiation. They and their surroundings are repeatedly poked and prodded for chemical, sanitary, microbial, and radiological studies.

To check their internal cesium levels, zone residents go to the same polyclinic that I visited in Chapter 4 and sit in the same chair to measure the gamma rays they are emitting. Strontium-90 is measured in urine, which gives an indirect estimate of how much is left in the body. Plutonium inhalation is estimated on the basis of the amount of air inhaled per day, the number of hours spent outdoors annually, and the average amounts of the isotope that get kicked up in the air. Based on these estimates, samosels inhale so little plutonium that it doesn’t even influence their doses.

Despite the clean surroundings, the Ilyenoks don’t grow any of their food and buy everything from the zone administration’s shops-on-wheels that visit each of the zone’s populated villages twice a week, selling produce as well as uncontaminated bread, grains, macaroni,

canned goods, sugar, tea, candy, and other merchandise that the samosels can’t make themselves.

The Ilyenoks are unusual. Poverty forces the vast majority of zone residents to grow and gather nearly all that they eat, which gives them most of their radiation dose. They consume cesium and strontium with vegetables, fruits, meat, and fish caught in zone waterways. But their internal doses from the cesium-137 are about four times as high as those from strontium-90.

The average samosel’s radiation doses are double or more the maximum doses allowed for the general population. On average, half of that dose is from external radiation and half is from internal. The amounts and types of radionuclides that get into zone residents’ bodies—and, thus, the size of their internal doses—depend entirely on what they eat. The Ilyenoks, who don’t eat anything in the zone, probably have low internal doses. Samosels who don’t eat any game or fruits of the forest, but who do eat local produce, will get half of their internal dose from milk and a third from meat and eggs. But it’s important to point out that 40 percent of the internal radiation is of Chernobyl origin. The rest is from natural radionuclides.

A similar picture is true of the several hundred thousand people who continue to live on the highly contaminated lands outside the zone, where radioactivity is between 15 and 40 curies per kilometer—far higher than in Teremtsi—and where radionuclide levels in milk and meat exceed permissible limits from 5 to 15 times. In such regions, which should have been evacuated but haven’t been, poverty-stricken fatalists have the highest internal doses, while people who feel in control of their lives and who have the resources to buy uncontaminated food can reduce their Chernobyl doses to virtually zero.

After the accident and throughout the 1990s, the Ukrainian government used active measures to reduce consumption of contaminated products. But since 2000 the budget for such countermeasures has been reduced practically to zero. Bureaucratic infighting is one problem. The Ministry of Agriculture has the radiological infrastructure in the countryside, but the Ministry of Emergencies is in charge of distributing Chernobyl-related funding and it doesn’t give any to the agriculture ministry.

After leaving the Ilyenoks, Rimma and I followed Kate up a hillside of tall grasses to another occupied cottage. But in contrast to the Ilyenok’s

immaculate house and yard, it was a shack where weeds choked the yard and a few chickens pecked at specks on the ground. Indoors, there was almost no furniture except three beds, a deep pile of dirty rags on the floor, and an overturned basket covered with a towel to warm some chicks loudly peeping away inside.

Though I mistakenly erased the family’s name from my digital recorder, in my notes I referred to the elderly woman and her two adult sons as the “drunks in Teremtsi.” The men were in their mid-forties, but their faces were ravaged by drink. Smoking smelly Soviet-brand filterless cigarettes on a bench in the yard, they looked older than their mother. The scene reminded me of the Nikolai Shamenkos, the elder and younger, in Tulgovichi in Belarus.

With perverse pride, their mother told me that they grow all their own food and also gather berries and mushrooms in the forest.

I didn’t know if they were apathetic, fatalistic, hungry, or just foolish. But people like this get 90 percent of their internal dose from the wild foods. Those doses are twice as high in the autumn as in the spring because the fruits of the forest are most popular in the fall. Despite constant and persistent warnings not to, more than half of the samosels do eat wild foods. And the reason can’t be only hunger. Zone workers, who get free meals, also like to do some illicit fishing or mushroom hunting. A sign at Chernobylinterinform warns employees about levels of radioactivity in fish and mushrooms from different zone locations. But either from apathy or from fatalism, some people insist on ignoring the warnings.

To be sure, few go to highly radioactive places like the buried village of Yaniv in the 10-kilometer zone to collect mushrooms or berries whose cesium levels are in the hundreds of thousands of becquerels—except, perhaps, to study them. Mushrooms in cleaner parts of the zone are less radioactive. A sample of Paryshiv porcinis contained 900 becquerels of cesium per kilogram. Nevertheless, the maximum allowable limit for cesium in a kilogram of mushrooms is 500 becquerels. For strontium-90, the maximum ranges from 5 to 20 becquerels, depending on the type of food, because of the radionuclide’s greater health risks compared to cesium-137.

Food preparation can affect its radioactivity. Drying foods concentrates radionuclides. If a kilogram of fresh blueberries contains 20,000 to 30,000 becquerels, air-dried blueberries contain more than 10 times as much (350,000 to 450,000).

Cooking, on the other hand, leaches out radionuclides. Boiling mushrooms in salt water for just five minutes reduces their cesium levels by 70 percent, while 20 minutes of boiling will reduce it by 90 percent and more. So, a kilogram of raw porcinis containing 49,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium will have only 3,400 left after boiling. It probably won’t have much in the way of nutrients or taste left either, but that’s a different matter.

Nevertheless, 3,400 becquerels is too high to be safe.

But how safe is safe? The answer goes to the heart of the debate over the health effects of low, but chronic, radiation doses. There is little debate that high doses have what are called “deterministic” effects—in which the same harm occurs in all individuals who are exposed to a certain dose. If you and I are exposed to a full body dose of 500 rem, we are both certain to, at the very least, develop acute radiation illness. But low levels of radiation have so-called stochastic effects, which is a fancy way of saying “random.” A single alpha or beta particle or gamma ray can damage a single cell; this could lead to disease or have a hereditary effect, or it might have no effect at all. There is no way to predict which will actually happen.

It is similar to the principle that it is impossible to know when a particular radioactive atom in a bunch of radioactive atoms will decay, but it is entirely possible to know when half of the bunch will decay. Stochastic health effects can’t be predicted individually, but they can be predicted statistically and epidemiologically.

The main sources of these statistical predictions are the studies of 87,000 Japanese atomic bomb survivors. Among them, an increase in leukemia was observed only a few years after A-bomb exposure. Decades later, excess cases of solid cancers were seen in lungs, breast, and thyroid, although radiation evidently does not increase the risk of cancer of the prostate, pancreas, uterus, or kidney. More recently, noncancerous illnesses such as heart disease have also been linked to radiation exposure.

From the atomic bomb survivors, scientists developed risk factors that were supposed to predict the number of “extra” cancer cases that would occur when a large population was exposed to a certain total amount of radiation, which is known as the “collective dose.” The formulas estimating from 1.25 to 2.3 extra cancers for every 10,000 rem were behind the confusing and alarming predictions of thousands of

“extra” Chernobyl cancers that scientists bandied about soon after the disaster. While the Soviets predicted 6,500 extra cancers among the 75 million people who lived in the European part of the Soviet Union most affected by radiation, and other experts predicted twice that number, all agreed that those “extra” cancers would be impossible to detect against the background noise of 9.5 million non-Chernobyl cancers in that same population. With the exception of thyroid cancer, as we shall see, proving that any particular cancer was related to Chernobyl is practically impossible.

But many of the initial predictions turned out to be simply wrong. Despite virtually universal expert expectations based on A-bomb research, there has not been any statistically detectable increase in leukemia—even among the 800,000 cleanup workers, or “liquidators,” who were exposed to the highest radiation levels and whose health has been followed closely since the disaster.

This may be in part because many people who were granted liquidator status, and the perks that come with it, never actually worked at Chernobyl. Indeed, poverty led many people to claim Chernobyl benefits with no factual reason for doing so because official recognition as a victim meant access to income and health care. And many of those people really do believe that all of their medical problems, real or imagined, are results of the disaster. The exaggerated awareness of ill health and sense of dependence has created what some experts call the “Chernobyl accident victim syndrome.”

Given more than 40 types of Chernobyl benefits, some residents of contaminated areas in Belarus can be eligible for quite large sums of money. For example, working single mothers raising children under the age of three in contaminated districts get about $30 a month—which is around one-third the average Belarusian wage and which may help explain the rise in birth rates in contaminated regions.

It may also have something to do with the rise in infant mortality in contaminated regions in the late 1990s—contrary to the trend of lower infant mortality in the rest of the country. More study is needed to figure out if this is due to radiation, poor health, and poor social services in contaminated regions or to the outmigration of educated young people. But the system of Chernobyl benefits gives single women who may lack the education, health, skills, or desire for parenting an incentive to have children and raise them in contaminated lands.

Nevertheless, most of the benefits are a pittance. In Belarus a person living in a contaminated area gets about $1.50 a month to buy clean food. The sums are so small because Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine continued the Soviet practice of giving everyone a little bit for their exposure to radiation risks rather than providing more robust compensation to people who develop actual health problems. With a total of nearly 6 million Chernobyl victims in various categories (Table 1), these puny payments add up to enormous totals.

It is a stupid system that encourages allocating scarce resources not on the basis of medical need but on the ability of a person to get registered as a victim. It also makes it difficult to perform long-term health studies since the victims’ registers are clogged with fakes who skew results.

In any case, another possible explanation for the absence of leukemia is that it is incorrect to extrapolate health effects from the atomic bomb doses. Those were instantaneous and large—from hundreds to thousands of rem.

But with the exception of hundreds of firefighters who received bomb-magnitude doses, the vast majority of people affected by Chernobyl were exposed to chronic, low-level, long-term doses.

Although estimating doses in hindsight is notoriously difficult, es-

pecially low doses with no immediate health effects, one way to do so is to look for free radicals in the crystal lattice of tooth enamel. Radiation exposure creates carbon dioxide radicals out of certain impurities in the crystal. Unfortunately, a tooth must be sacrificed to do the test.

Based on these and other methods, the average evacuee from the 30-kilometer zone was exposed to an estimated 12 rem, while the vast majority of liquidators’ exposure didn’t exceed 25 rem. Other sources estimate the average evacuee dose at a much lower 4.5 rem. But whatever the actual figures, which are unlikely ever to be known, not only are they much lower than the doses in Hiroshima, but they were delivered over a more protracted period.

Unfortunately, there is no universal agreement on the nature and scale of health risks from such low and chronic doses. Some scientists maintain that there is a threshold dose, below which there will be no damage to health. A few even claim that low doses can have a salutary effect on health on the theory that something that’s poisonous in large doses—such as table salt, magnesium, cobalt, or radiation—is absolutely necessary in small amounts.

The mainstream view is that there is no harmless amount of ionizing radiation. No matter how small the dose, all it takes is for one quantum particle to hit a molecule of DNA to cause a mutation that can lead to stochastic health effects. But at doses of less than 100 rem over a lifetime, such effects will be impossible to detect statistically. So, if you and I are each exposed to 43 microrem of radiation—the hourly average in the town of Chornobyl—there is no way of knowing if either of us will develop cancer and, if we do, whether that cancer was caused by the radiation, the fact that I was a pack-a-day smoker for more than 20 years, or the fact that you were an airplane pilot whose exposure to cosmic rays was much higher than that of a fearful flier like me.

Moreover, it seems impossible to tease the health effects of radiation out of the tangle of poverty, alcoholism, smoking, poor diet, and other factors that plague public health in places in the former Soviet Union that were unaffected by Chernobyl and that have made life expectancy—especially among men—the lowest in Europe.

It is also difficult to compare Chernobyl populations, who are poked and prodded annually, to members of the general public who don’t undergo regular screening. According to some studies, for example, liquidators have higher rates of heart problems than the popu-

lation at large. This could be because they inhaled the more short-lived radionuclides such as barium, cerium, and ruthenium that were more abundant during the cleanup period. Their accumulation in the lungs would have given higher radiation doses to the heart and breast—which may explain anecdotal evidence of an increase in breast cancer in young women and women who were breast-feeding at the time of their exposure.

However, critics of such studies say that the proper people with whom to compare liquidators are those who get the same amount of medical screening because such tests will turn up heart problems that would otherwise never get diagnosed. The same is true of breast cancer rates in affected areas. Breast cancer screening was barely practiced in Soviet times. Mammograms are rare to this day.

With hyperbolic interest groups trying to either exaggerate or downplay the disaster’s effects, it’s little wonder that Chernobyl’s long-term health effects remain so controversial, allowing the nuclear industry to claim limited consequences while some politicians, activists, and victims claim a profoundly negative impact on health. The conflicting information provokes such mistrust that in 2002 the United Nations proposed creating an independent Chernobyl Research Board to design and assess research.

Journalists, both domestic and foreign, fuel the fire with their macabre tendency to focus on sensationally deformed children even if they were born far from Chernobyl and their maladies cannot be traced to the disaster. In fact, the descendants of A-bomb survivors have shown no increase in congenital deformities and the same is true of Chernobyl survivors. What deformities occur are those that, sadly, occur in any population.

The sins of the other side are more difficult to demonstrate because they are less graphic and dramatic. But nuclear proponents’ assertions that the only proven health impact has been an increase of childhood thyroid cancers are also misleading.

Unfortunately, there have simply been too few properly designed, impartial medical studies to prove much of anything about the disaster’s long-term health impact. One thing is certain, however. The nuclear industry—both in Ukraine and internationally—has done little to advance Chernobyl health research. In fact, even after the disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was quite a profitable enterprise until it was shut down in 2000. Throughout the 1990s, the

company town Slavutich spent lavishly on festivals and free concerts with expensive foreign performers.

In all that time, however, the plant did not provide a penny for cleanup works, scientific research, health care, resettlement costs, or compensation in connection with the disaster. Nor did it pay anything for the administration of the exclusion zone.

In sharp contrast to the matriarchy of samosels, men dominate the zone’s working population. Women have made up no more than a third, and usually significantly less, since the disaster.

The zone’s labor force is a demographically unique group. Since it is not a permanent population, there are no birth statistics and no natural population growth—with one exception. In 1999 a baby girl was born to zone workers who set up housekeeping in an abandoned house in Chornobyl because they had no other place to live. Since pregnant workers are not allowed to work in the zone, the woman hid her condition until the very last moment and gave birth at home with her partner’s help. As of 2004, however, five-year-old Maria was fast approaching school age and the unique little nuclear (as it were) family was waiting for the government to provide them with housing outside the zone.

Little Chernobyl Maria, as she became nicknamed, was blithely unaware of the controversies and arguments her very existence sparked among zone workers. Though outsiders were touched by Maria’s story, most people in the zone thought that the little girl’s parents were exploiting her to extort bigger and better housing, especially after they turned down an apartment in a small town nearby and insisted on a place in Kiev. Certainly, they were exposing her vulnerable growing body to more radioactivity than could possibly be good for her, even if it was to cesium and strontium rather than the radioactive iodine that caused an epidemic of thyroid cancers in Chernobyl’s aftermath.

In direct contrast to the experts’ overestimating the dangers of post-Chernobyl leukemia, they certainly underestimated the threat of thyroid cancers. Indeed, when reports of a rise in thyroid cancers first surfaced in 1991, the international community initially treated them skeptically. It was thought that extensive screening programs in Ukraine and Belarus were simply leading to earlier detection. The can-

cers, said the experts, were surfacing too early since the latency period for childhood thyroid cancer was believed to be 10 years; prior to Chernobyl, there had been no reports of thyroid cancers earlier than 5 years after exposure.

But those predictions were based on very limited studies. Prior to Chernobyl, the largest study of childhood thyroid cancer involved only 58 patients.

Childhood thyroid cancer is an extremely rare disease, so any increase in the number of cases is noticeable. In the decade before the disaster, there were a total of seven cases in Belarus. But between 1986 and 1998, there were more than 600. Most of them were concentrated in the Gomel and Brest regions, although no one has yet figured out why there are more cases in Brest than in Mogilev, which was much more contaminated. It could be because iodine deficiency was more prevalent in Brest, which lies near the Polish border. In the USSR, stable iodine was added to bread rather than salt, but a resurgence of endemic goiter in Belarus indicated that iodine supplementation had come to an end in the early 1980s.

Whatever the reason for the geographic anomaly, accusations that the thyroid cancers could have been averted if the Soviets had systematically distributed stable potassium iodide (KI) tablets after the disaster may not be entirely true. Taken before exposure, or within hours afterwards, KI protects against packing the thyroid with radioactive iodine. But taken too much time after exposure, KI may actually “lock in” the radioactive isotope and accentuate the dose. In fact, KI may itself be carcinogenic.

The best solution probably would have been to distribute powdered milk, so that children would not have consumed the radioactive milk from cows grazing on grasses coated with radioactive iodine. One study in the Bryansk region of Russia found a direct link between a child’s consumption of milk and dairy products in the first few months after the accident and the risk of thyroid cancer. The more milk, the higher the dose of radioactive iodine and the greater the risk to the child.

As of 2002, about 1,800 cases of childhood thyroid cancer had been traced definitely to Chernobyl. About 60 percent of cases were in Belarus, 40 percent in Ukraine, and 3 percent in Russia. Conservative estimates of the total number of thyroid cancers that will occur over the lifetimes of people who were children in 1986 is between 6,000 and

8,000 in the three countries. Although thyroid cancer can be treated, all of these people will need to take thyroid hormones their entire lives and be under constant medical supervision.

Other than dose, a child’s age is a very important factor. The younger the child in 1986, the higher was the risk of developing thyroid cancer. By 2001 the cancer risk in children who were older than 10 appeared to be tapering off, while it continued to grow for those who were younger than 5. In children born after the disaster, thyroid cancer incidence is similar to predisaster rates. It is likely that the coming decades will also see an increase in other solid cancers; however there is no consensus about the number of cases or types of cancers that will occur.

Cancers are not the only health problems, although tracing the causes of noncancerous illnesses to radiation is more controversial. The congenital heart disease that was the heartbreaking subject of the Oscar-winning documentary Chernobyl Heart is one example of a disease whose occurrence cannot be linked definitely to the disaster, although it might be.

Also, high rates of respiratory illnesses in contaminated regions may be due to long-term exposure to low doses of cesium-137, which lowers the number of T-cells and other immune cells in children. Such immune deficiencies have come to be called “Chernobyl AIDS” since AIDS also destroys T-cells. Some similar studies have been criticized because they compared public health in Chernobyl-affected regions today with the same regions prior to 1986, which failed to account for the myriad other social, economic, and political factors influencing public health in the former Soviet Union.

The plight of Chernobyl’s children has created an international humanitarian industry, whose value has yet to receive detailed study. Perhaps the highest profile are the voluntary initiatives supporting “health holidays” for Chernobyl children in other countries such as Cuba, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. The United Nations called them “possibly the largest and most sustained international voluntary welfare program in human history.” A total of several hundred thousand children have taken part since the accident, though there is no consensus in the international health community as to the claimed benefits of “detoxification.”

While most programs’ promotional materials are rather fuzzy on

the details, the general idea seems to be that by spending a summer in a noncontaminated environment, the children have an opportunity to cleanse their systems of radionuclides. But while this may be true of cesium, which can be cleansed from the body in three months, it doesn’t work for strontium built up in bones or for the radioactive iodine that is long gone but whose health impact is the greatest. In fact, since most health holidays don’t last more than two months, there isn’t even enough time to clean out cesium.

Unfortunately, many of these well-intentioned programs are fueled by bad or simply misleading science. For example, the Chabad Children of Chernobyl project claims to be saving the lives of children from thyroid cancer by “evacuating” them for permanent residence to Israel. Leaving aside the hyperbole of using the word “evacuate” many years after the disaster, Chabad goes so far as to maintain that children born after the disaster have higher rates of thyroid problems than those who were children at the time, which is just blatantly false. Nevertheless, Chabad is hardly alone in trying to garner support for its activities with misleading pseudoscience. Nearly all of the Children of Chernobyl public relations materials do the same.

One problem is the dilute definition of “Chernobyl children.” Chabad—which finds the kids by running radio ads offering to take Jewish children to Israel for free education and medical care—says that “any child living within the Chernobyl area is eligible. Sick children are given priority, but every child living within the contaminated area is considered to be at high risk.”

If the “Chernobyl area” includes lands contaminated by at least one curie of cesium for each square kilometer, their population totals 4.5 million people, including about 1 million children. In a world of unlimited resources, it would perhaps be right to treat all of these children as equal victims. But in the real world it seems profoundly unfair. A child living in an area contaminated with 1 curie is simply not at the same risk as one surrounded by 39 curies. But Chabad and the health vacation charities make no distinction between them. They also make no distinction between children who are exposed to radiation and those who have actually suffered health effects.

Since this is pretty much the same philosophy that the Soviets used in distributing Chernobyl compensation, the result is the same as well—everyone gets a few pennies, which means that there is a lack of funding to help the truly ill.

The people who take children on health vacations or help them immigrate permanently to Israel are clearly well intentioned and charitable. But it seems a monumental waste of money that could so much be better spent on basic medical infrastructure in the affected areas (and in monitoring the proper use of the money, to which too little attention is paid). It also has untoward psychological effects, since their well-intentioned hosts often treat the children as victims and expose them to a standard of living they have little hopes of acquiring at home.

Most Chernobyl charities also engage in less expensive but more effective forms of aid such as delivering medical supplies, sponsoring families, and funding local nurses, although the health holidays remain popular.

Here are a few facts and figures:

• What the Irish Chernobyl Children’s Project spent on health vacations in 1991: $10 million

• What Chabad has spent on resettling 2,000 children to Israel: $30 million

• What Ukraine spent on health care for Chernobyl victims in 2000: $6 million

• What the average Belarusian earned in 2000: $700

• What the average Ukrainian earned in 2000: $1,000

• What it costs to provide one Belarusian child with a health vacation in California: $1,200.

A young doctor when she was sent to Chernobyl in 1986, Olia Senyuk thinks that she lost her thyroid gland to cancer as a result, although the prevailing medical wisdom is that radioiodine poses dramatically lower risks to adults’ thyroids than to children’s. Children are considered more vulnerable because their thyroids are smaller than adults’, and therefore a greater proportion of the gland is exposed to radiation. But studies of liquidators—including doctors like Senyuk—show increased incidence of thyroid problems, although this could be an artifact of screening turning up diseases that might have otherwise been missed.

In general, the health of liquidators is worse than that of the general population, though it is difficult to separate the effects of radiation from depression, alcohol and tobacco consumption, and other

factors. Liquidators, for example, have among the highest rates of suicide in Ukraine.

Their children may also be at higher risk, but the evidence is ambiguous. In one study, children conceived within two months of their fathers’ work on the cleanup had a higher frequency of certain genetic mutations than those conceived after four months and more. But this has not yet had an evident impact on their health. Experiments with mice suggest that leukemia risk can skip a generation, but there has been no evidence of this in the children of Chernobyl liquidators.

Rimma Kyselytsia introduced me to Senyuk in a laboratory tucked into a corner of one of the zone’s scientific centers. The necklace scar plainly visible above the collar of her blue blouse didn’t seem to trouble her, nor did the fact that she was still working in the zone 18 years later, studying the DNA in the white blood cells known as leukocytes donated by people who work at the Sarcophagus covering the ruined fourth reactor. She told us that chronic exposure to low doses of radiation has effects similar to those of aging and that Shelter workers get cardiovascular diseases at a younger age than the rest of the population.

“People who have accumulated large radiation doses have more sensitive DNA that breaks at lower radiation doses than those required to break the DNA of people who have accumulated smaller doses,” she said. “At the same time, the people with large doses have DNA repair mechanisms that are, in a sense, well trained. So, even if their DNA breaks more easily, it is also repaired more easily.”

Senyuk’s confident contention is not exactly conventional wisdom in radiology circles, but it is not far-fetched either.

Nevertheless, a cell’s DNA mechanics can make mistakes, especially if both strands of the DNA molecule are broken rather than just one strand. If these mistakes occur in the so-called junk DNA that makes up the vast majority of the human genome, nothing may happen because junk DNA doesn’t hold the codes for anything useful. If the mistake is in a gene, which codes for proteins—the building blocks of life—the result can be a defective protein. If the mistake happens in the tumor suppressor gene TP53, the result can be cancer because TP53 codes for a protein involved in apoptosis, which makes damaged cells die before they cause trouble. If the protein is defective and the damaged cells live, they can go on to become malignant. This, at least, is

what has been observed in rodents. There is little direct evidence about how radiation causes tumors in people.

In this light, it was all the more surprising to hear Senyuk say that Sarcophagus workers, who have higher radiation exposures than just about any other professional category in the zone, are generally in better health than people who work in less radioactive areas. “People now working at the Shelter have undergone selection,” she explained. “Weaker people either died or their health worsened so that they can no longer work in the zone. The ones who remained are more radiation resistant.”

When it comes to radiation, not all of us are created equal. About half of the population is average, a quarter is very sensitive, and the other quarter is very resistant. A dose that will not have any effect on the average person can have a negative impact on the very sensitive, while a dose that damages an average person, will not harm a radiation-resistant one. Senyuk was working on developing supplements called radioprotectors to strengthen radiation resistance in the weak by increasing the dose needed to elicit an effect.

Before we left, Rimma asked if hay fever could be caused by radiation exposure. For the first time in her life, Rimma developed hay fever and high blood pressure that spring.

“Sure,” said Senyuk. “Allergies, diabetes, general malaise, and fatigue.”

“Then I want to volunteer for your experiments, too,” Rimma said firmly, promising to call Senyuk soon to pick up whatever concoction she was testing at the time.

Nevertheless, the connection between low doses of radiation and medical conditions, such as allergies, that can have a multitude of causes is difficult to prove.

The zone is a strange place on an average day, but one of its most bizarre sights can be seen only on the Sunday after Easter. And it is bizarre precisely because—at first glance, at least—it seems so normal. The town of Chornobyl is crowded with people, you can hear voices other than your own in Pripyat, and there are actually other cars on the roads. About half of the zone’s 30,000 annual visitors come at this time.

It is also the only time of year when you can see teenagers in the zone, though children are snuck in occasionally to visit with their samosel grandparents.

Exceptions to the rules are made on the Sunday after Easter because this is when everyone traditionally goes to the graveyards for lunch (and many, many drinks) with the dead. A vestige of pagan ancestor worship, masked with a thin veneer of Christian ritual, the holiday is known as provody or “bidding farewell.” I had attended my share of Ukrainian-American provody in the United States, but always found it exceedingly weird to see people laughing, picnicking, and drinking on graves—at least when I was sober. Impaired sobriety does much to get into the spirit—so to speak—of things.

I had no hopes of impairing my sobriety on provody in the zone since I was behind the wheel. It was a gorgeous, sunny day in mid-April. The air carried notes of early spring as I drove with open windows along the cracked and potholed road that led from Chornobyl to the western border of the 30-kilometer zone. Usually, it is advisable to keep windows closed. Although a moving car stays ahead of the dust it kicks up, it gets enveloped in the wake as soon as it stops. But it had rained the previous day and there was no dust.

My Chernobylinterinform escort for that day was Serhiy Chernov, a gruff, mustached, 40-something dressed in the usual camouflage. We were on our way to Lubianka, a village on the floodplain of the Ilya River. Before the evacuation, it was home to 700 people. In 2004 there were 17. But on provody there were likely to be many more people visiting the cemetery. Of the Ukrainian zone’s 15 inhabited towns and villages, Lubianka was one of the most contaminated—though in Belarus, Tulgovichi was much “hotter.” Colored orange on the radiation maps, each square kilometer of Lubianka was contaminated with 20 to 50 curies of cesium-137 in 1986. The Ilya, a small tributary of the Uzh River that originates in the swamps of Belarus, was the most strontium-contaminated waterway in the zone in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, although the river’s current had largely cleansed it.

After driving for about an hour, we crossed a bridge over the Ilya and turned onto the gutted and gouged dirt road that led into Lubianka, passing a pasture of cows and horses. Lubianka had more livestock than any inhabited village in the zone. Of the zone’s population in 2004 of 41 cattle, 17 lived in Lubianka. Nearly 30 pigs, 6 horses, and 11 goats were also scattered among the zone’s samosel households.

Our plan was to find Lubianka’s “mayor,” Oleksandr Tkachenko. Serhiy had met him a year earlier when a group of latter-day Cossacks visited Lubianka to paint its World War II statue, chop wood for the winter, and proclaim Tkachenko the mayor. Tkachenko was also unusual in that he was one of the very few zone residents who was male, working age, and sober. Two-thirds of the zone’s population is women, nearly all of them pensioners. Most of the men are elderly as well, although the handful of younger ones are troubled in one way or another, like the drunks in Teremtsi.

After parking in a clearing where only birdsong broke the silence, we passed some decrepit and overgrown cottages before coming upon the Tkachenko’s green plank fence. Two paper handbills warned residents that spring was a dangerous season for fires. The gate was open and, ignoring the barking gray mongrel chained in the yard, Serhiy called Tkachenko’s name.

His wife, Maria Shevchenko, emerged from the house, wiping her hands on a smudged apron, and Tkachenko soon followed. She was short and plump. He was tall and lean. And they were just preparing to walk over to the graveyard but graciously agreed to show me their homestead (Plate 6).

After leading us through a yard of cats, chickens, and rusty metal sheds, they showed us the small plowed field where they grow nearly everything they eat. My dosimeter displayed levels around 25 to 30 micros. This was on the high side. Most zone residents live on land where background readings don’t exceed 20 microroentgens an hour.

A square meter of Lubianka soil contains as much as 400,000 becquerels of cesium, 125,000 becquerels of strontium, 4,000 becquerels of plutonium isotopes, and almost as much americium. Only two other inhabited places are dirtier: Zalissia, just outside the town of Chornobyl, where the cesium content per square meter of soil is as high as 330,000 becquerels and the strontium content is even higher than Lubianka’s. Radiation exposure runs up to 50 microroentgens an hour in places.

But Novoshepelychi, the sole inhabited place inside the 10-kilometer zone, exceeds all permissible limits. Ukrainian law mandates resettlement from places contaminated with 555,000 becquerels of cesium, 111,000 becquerels of strontium, and 3,700 becquerels of plutonium in a square meter of soil. That amount of Novoshepelychi soil contains

up to 1.7 million becquerels of cesium, 750,000 of strontium, 13,000 of plutonium, and nearly as much americium!

From 1987 to 2000, Novoshepelychi was the site of an experimental farm where scientists bred cattle from a bull nicknamed Uranium that had escaped the evacuation of livestock after the disaster and was captured together with three dairy cows: Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Uranium was the grand sire of four generations numbering 200 descendants before he died in 2001 at the age of 15.

Sava Obrazhei and his wife Olena had returned to their old home in Novoshepelychi and asked for a job tending the cattle, which the scientists agreed to because none of them had any intention of living in the highly radioactive village full-time. But when the farm moved to less contaminated land, the Obrazheis were left without jobs or electricity. The zone administration had decided that it was too expensive to maintain electric lines to villages with only one or two people, so it encouraged lone residents to move to other zone villages with more people. But the Obrazheis refused to leave and had been living without electricity since 2001. They were by no means poor, however, at least by zone standards. Compared to the average monthly pension of about $20, the Obrazheis were wealthy, together receiving $150!

I had visited them in 2002, just a few weeks after one of their adult sons was attacked and drowned in the Sakhan River that runs alongside their lands, probably a victim of poachers or outlaws. Another son had been killed a year earlier under still more mysterious circumstances. Most people thought it very strange that they stayed on after such tragedies. But Sava and Olena continued to plant vegetables in soil where Geiger counters measured more than 130 microroentgens an hour—even hotter than Tulgovichi in Belarus.

After the brief tour of their land, the mayor and his wife invited us inside their modest cottage. Typical of zone dwellings, it had one story and two rooms that smelled a bit musty. The small windows let in little natural light, which was also blocked by the budding fruit trees in the yard. But it was very clean and decorated with colorful blankets and pillows that Maria embroidered in the winter, when there was no fieldwork to be done. I didn’t ask why there was a small inlaid wood portrait of Lenin on the television and a religious icon on the wall above it. Their ideologically eclectic décor was their own business.

Like most zone residents, the couple cooked and heated their home

with wood-burning ovens that didn’t do a very good job of keeping them warm in winter because the cottages are not well insulated or sufficiently winterized. A zone home’s average winter temperature is 15°C (59°F).

Of course, Wormwood Forest wood contains cesium and strontium. But the radionuclides are spread through the large volume of the wood. When it is burned, however, the part left behind as ash is about 10 percent of the original volume—yet it contains the same amount of radionuclides. This concentration of radioactivity is what makes wood ash one of the most dangerous sources of exposure for zone residents. The maximum permissible limit of beta radiation is 20 beta particles emitted from a square centimeter in a minute. A square centimeter of ash in zone stoves emits from 28 to 315 beta particles per minute. In Lubianka the rate is as high as 47 beta particles per minute.

Since zone residents use their stoves all the time—for cooking year-round and for heating in colder seasons—they are vulnerable to breathing in particles of ash, which can lodge strontium in their lungs. If it gets on their clothes or in their shoes, it can expose the skin to radiation.

Getting dirty with contaminated soil and ash is why samosels themselves can be sources of radiation. A square centimeter of the average zone resident’s skin and clothes emits 22 beta particles per minute, but this is an average. Some zone residents exceed it; others don’t. The rates have also decreased significantly in the nearly two decades since the disaster. In 1989, residents of a village at the Pripyat delta that was a shade less contaminated than Lubianka wore clothes that emitted 60 beta particles a minute.

Carrying plastic bags of food and drink, Tkachenko and Shevchenko piled into the back seat of my car and directed me onto a path of packed sand that we bumped along for a few minutes before coming upon dozens of cars and buses at the foot of a hill.

After parking the car near a grimy old bus, I followed my passengers up the path to the cemetery and pulled out my dosimeter. It quickly beeped out a reading of 100 microroentgens on the path before dropping down to around 50 when we turned onto grass. While my companions unpacked their brunch on a picnic table near a Tkachenko family gravesite, I made my leave to wander around with my notebook and dosimeter.

There was nothing about provody in the zone that was not strange. More vehicles were parked by the Lubianka graveyard than I had seen in all of my zone visits combined. Although there were some old wooden crosses that had rotted at their base and fallen over on the ground, most of the grave markers were Soviet-era crosses made of welded pipe. All of them were dressed for their annual party with wreaths of plastic flowers, ribbons, and colorful scarves that gave the cemetery a festive air.

There were easily 150 people in the cemetery, and the droning sounds of distant conversation and laughter gave it a sense of life that was missing in the village itself. Some people sat right on the graves, but larger families usually gathered around picnic tables, making sure to include the dead by spreading a tablecloth over the grave and piling it with the deceased’s favorite foods as well as the occasional bottle of vodka and shot glass. But even on graves whose overgrowth of weeds and crumbling markers indicated an absence of recent visitors, someone had placed a single candy.

Seeing me with a dosimeter and an evidently lost look, Nadia Artemenko invited me to join her and her sisters who had been evacuated to a village just outside the 30-kilometer zone’s border. But when that village proved none too clean, they were moved to another village, also named Lubianka, south of Kiev.

The sisters had come to the original Lubianka on a bus provided by the zone administration to visit the grave of their mother, who died in Lubianka in 1989. Her grave was blanketed with ground-hugging evergreen rosettes that symbolized eternal life. The plants were piled with pink and white plastic lilies, and a collection of gardening tools used to tend to the grave lay in a pile nearby.

“My mother came back here from the evacuation two years before she died,” Nadia explained to me, tucking a wisp of white hair back under her red paisley kerchief. “She wanted to die in her home.”

I barely sat down before the women started plying me with food: a fried drumstick, roast pork, sausage, homemade apple cider. Although I wasn’t hungry, it is rude to refuse food, so I accepted some cider—which was quite good—and a chunk of sausage.

The same thing happened with every group I visited: offers of food mixed with so many tales of death and loss, evacuation and fear, that they all began to run together—the man whose wife died in a plane crash soon after they were married; the young nephew who died of

cancer; the fathers, brothers, uncles, and cousins who died in World War II. But no one to whom I spoke had lost anyone as a direct result of the Chernobyl disaster.

Trying to avoid any more food that it would be rude to refuse, I looked for someone who was doing something other than eating and came upon Motrona Shevchenko weeding her parents’ graves inside a wrought iron enclosure. The graveyard was full of Shevchenkos and Yushchenkos, with a smattering of other surnames. Evidently, Motrona was a popular name for women in Polissia. I’ve never met a Motrona in Kiev, but I had already met two in the zone.

Under a black kerchief, Motrona’s face seemed frozen in sadness and she started to cry as soon as I asked her if we could talk.

“The whole family gets together for provody,” she said, gesturing at the 15 people gathered around an adjacent picnic table. “It is a time of joy that we’re together, and sadness for those no longer with us.”

Her face streaked with tears, she continued puttering around the graves and I tried to leave her alone with her grief, but she couldn’t let me go without feeding me. Despite my protests, she stuffed a cellophane-wrapped chocolate cake in the deep pocket of my camouflage jacket.

Not wishing to intrude on any more private rituals, I found an empty picnic table and sat there to make notes. It was almost three o’clock and the distant buses were honking that it was soon time to leave. Paraska Shevchenko, a spry 74-year-old, carried a tattered plastic bag full of leftovers from her provody lunch and put it on the table behind me while she stopped for a rest. Like everyone in Lubianka, Paraska had been evacuated to Lubianka-2.

“But I sneaked back in to work on my garden,” she confessed. “We had already done our spring planting and I wasn’t going to just leave everything untended.”

Paraska noticed my dosimeter beeping by my side. “What’s it say?”

I showed her the digital display reading 59, 66, 50.

“Is that milli,” she asked.

“Micro,” I responded.

“That’s nothing,” she said with a dismissive wave.

Paraska motioned at the graveyard. “Had you come here for provody in the early years after the evacuation, this place would have been much more crowded. But many people have died.”

She sighed. “And there are those who want to forget that they were ever here.”

The distant honking continued and Paraska left to catch the bus. People were drifting slowly out of the graveyard. Car doors slammed and engines revved amid the sounds of parting and farewell. Soon enough, the only sounds in the graveyard were the wind in the pines and the spring song of chaffinches.

Thinking that my escort, Serhiy, might be worried about my whereabouts, I wandered over to Tkachenko’s table, where I added Motrona’s chocolate cake to the mortuary feast.

The mayor and his guests were among the last people left, except for two militiamen who had been standing outside the cemetery since we arrived. The zone administration always makes sure that the fire department is on alert and that there are law enforcement officers at all of the graveyards. Past cemetery revelers started several provody-related fires.

Tkachenko poured Serhiy a shot of his home brew for the road (or, as they say in Ukraine, “for the horse”). Because samosels make their moonshine from sugar, which they purchase from the mobile shops, it is usually not a radiation concern—though the taste reminds me of my college chemistry lab. But when Tkachenko explained that his secret ingredient was birch sap, I was glad of my designated-driver status. A popular beverage in Ukraine, birch sap also concentrates radionuclides. A liter of the stuff in one 2003 sampling contained 1,800 becquerels of cesium. Birch sap, together with things such as nuts, falls under the “other” category in Ukraine’s list of radioactivity limits in different foods. The maximum permissible cesium level in a kilogram or liter of “other” is 600 becquerels.

Meanwhile, Shevchenko busied herself setting out eggs, cucumbers, and slices of bread. After refusing so much food during my provody mingling, I was actually hungry but wary about the source of the victuals. While the cesium in Lubianka’s homegrown produce usually doesn’t exceed permitted radioactivity levels, milk and eggs do. Indeed, in 2002, cesium levels in Lubianka milk were almost seven times as high as the maximum allowable limit of 100 becquerels per liter. They were the highest of any inhabited place in the Ukrainian zone, although Tulgovichi in Belarus probably held the record. Moreover, if the permissible level of strontium-90 in a kilogram of vegetables is 20 becquerels, Lubianka’s measured as much as 90. But Lubianka is

not the leader when it comes to strontium in vegetables. This honor goes to the village of Zalissia, just outside the town of Chornobyl, where some vegetables measured 420 becquerels of strontium.

Seeing my hesitation, Shevchenko told me that all of the food was store bought: “It’s too early in the season for our own produce.” Thus assured, I munched on a cucumber spear and listened to Tkachenko complain to Serhiy about his zone permit, which identified him legally as a resident of the town of Ivankiv, about 10 miles south of the zone.

“That’s insulting. This is my home. Why don’t they just write ‘resident of Lubianka’?” he asked adamantly and then, flashing his gold-faceted smile, added: “Or better yet, ‘mayor’.”

None of us had a ready answer. The samosels pose one of the zone’s most vexing problems, but they are a problem that will most likely go away with time. Sadly but inevitably, they are simply dying off.

While my hosts packed up the remains of the picnic, I decided to take one last stroll around the graveyard. Motrona was tidying the graves of some other Shevchenkos, but there were almost no other people left. As I wandered around the festooned and forlorn gravesites, listening to frogs trilling in a nearby swamp and the croak of a great reed warbler, it occurred to me that when the last Motronas die and there is no one to remember the zone’s dead, nature will still sing their requiem. The thought was both sad and comforting.

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