PHOTOS-The Women living in Chernobyl's Toxic Wasteland
 

Decades after Chernobyl's nuclear disaster, despite the severely contaminated ground, government objections and the deaths of many fellow 'self-settlers’, a community of determined babushkas remains.


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Hanna Zavorotnya, 78, survived the Nazi military occupation of Ukraine Photo: RENA EFFENDI/ INSITUTE

Telegraph UK

Outside Hanna Zavorotnya’s cottage in Chernobyl’s dead zone, a hulking, severed sow’s head bleeds into the snow, its gargantuan snout pointing to the sky in strange, smug defeat.

The frigid December air feels charged with excitement as Hanna, (above) 78, zips between the outlying sheds wielding the seven-inch silver blade that she used to bring the pig to its end.

'Today I command the parade,’ she says, grinning as she passes a vat of steaming entrails to her sister-in-law at the smokehouse, then moves off again. In one hand she holds a fresh, fist-sized hunk of raw pig fat – there is no greater delicacy in Ukraine – and she pauses now and then to dole out thin slices to her neighbours.

'I fly like a falcon!’ says Hanna, shuttling at high speed back towards the carcass. Indeed, falcons – as well as wolves, wild boar, moose and some species not seen in these environs for decades – are thriving in the forests and villages around Chernobyl. One particular falcon, however, has not fared so well. A large grey and white specimen, it is strung up, dead, chest puffed and wings outspread against the slate sky, above Hanna’s chicken coop as a warning to its brethren. 'He came and ate my chicken, so I beat him with a stick,’ she says.

Even though this falcon may not have survived, Hanna and her neighbours have – against all odds and any reasonable medical prediction. Twenty-six years ago, on 26 April 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s Reactor No 4 blew up after a routine test, and the resulting fire lasted 10 days, spewing 400 times as much radiation as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.


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Matrena Olifer, 72, lives alone in her house in Gornostaypol village. 'Why should I be afraid of radiation? It does not bite!’ she jokes. Photo: RENA EFFENDI/ INSITUTE

The government (then Soviet) declared the area that lay within an 18-mile radius uninhabitable and resettled 116,000 residents with a pension, an apartment and sketchy information about the health risks that lay ahead. In the ensuing months and years, these first resettlers were followed by a few hundred thousand more, all displaced, most from the land where they’d grown up. But Hanna, who had been forced out in the first group, did not accept that fate.
Three months after being relocated, she returned with her husband, her mother-in-law and a handful of other members of their collective farm. When government officials objected, she responded, 'Shoot us and dig the grave; otherwise we’re staying.’
Hanna was among some 1,200 returnees, called 'self-settlers’, most over the age of 48, who made their way back in the first few years after the accident, in defiance of the authorities’ legitimate concerns. For despite the self-settlers’ deep love of their ancestral homes, it’s a fact that the soil, air and water here in what is now known as the Exclusion Zone, or Zone of Alienation, are among the most heavily contaminated on earth.
Today 230 or so self-settlers remain, scattered about in eerily silent villages that are ghostly but also somehow charming. About 80 per cent of the surviving self-settlers are women in their seventies and eighties, creating a unique world of babushkas, to use a Russian word that means 'grandmother’ but also refers to 'old countrywomen’.
Why would the babushkas choose to live on this deadly land? Are they unaware of the risks, crazy enough to ignore them, or both? These are reasonable questions for Westerners who might stand in a grocery-shop aisle debating whether to pay the extra £2 for organic almond butter. The babushkas see their lives, and the risks they run, decidedly differently.


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Nadejda Gorbachenko, 80, lives a few metres away from the barbed wire of the Exclusion Zone. She often goes through a hole in the wire to collect mushrooms and berries for her own consumption. 'When I see police, I hide in the bushes. Nobody will stop me’. Photo: RENA EFFENDI/ INSITUTE

When Reactor No 4 blew up, roughly 30 per cent of the initial fall-out hit Ukraine and parts of western Russia, and 70 per cent landed downwind in Belarus. The gamma radiation was death-dealing: some 30 first responders were incapacitated immediately and expired within weeks. But the explosion’s long-term effect on the surrounding area was harder to quantify.
'Unlike the ground-zero fall-out from a nuclear bomb, which can be measured out “circularly” with a compass, radiation from a nuclear fire such as Chernobyl lays waste in a spotty, inconsistent manner,’ explains Anna Korolevska, the scientific director of the National Chernobyl Museum. Which villages got doused? Which did not? Dosimeter readings, which indicate accumulated radiation exposure, varied wildly, and sometimes the Soviet authorities took bribes to alter them.


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Nadejda Tislenko, 71. When this widow met up with the reporter and photographer she immediately called a neighbour, saying, 'Hurry, quick, come over. There’s interesting people here, and they’re not missionaries!’ Photo: RENA EFFENDI/ INSITUTE

What is clear about nuclear contaminants (cesium, strontium, plutonium and others) is that they enter the food chain through the soil, that they spread via wind and fire and that their effects are cumulative and linked to, among other things, increases in foetal mortality and cancer.
In some cases, the contaminants stick around for thousands of years. After the accident, cows ingested grass tainted with radioactive iodine-131 (radioactive milk largely accounts for today’s sky-high thyroid-cancer rates in the area). As the 'invisible enemy’ enveloped the spring countryside, the babushkas may or may not have noticed that the birds fell silent and bees ceased flying, but they were alarmed when emergency workers made them dump their cows’ milk.
Maria Urupa, 77, was thinking about her cow when the soldiers arrived to evacuate her village of Paryshev. 'I planned to take my cow and hide in the basement,’ she says. Instead, she and her neighbours were relocated to a hurriedly constructed housing project outside Kiev, on land where many people had died in the 1930s during the Holodomor, the massive genocide-by-famine that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin instigated in order to subjugate Ukraine and move peasant farmers on to state farming collectives or into factories.


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Maria Urupa, 77, on her porch in Parishev village. When the authorities evacuated the village days after the accident, Maria’s first thought was to hide in the basement with her cow. On her return to Parishev after a few months, all the animals had been killed. Photo: RENA EFFENDI/ INSITUTE

According to recent estimates, between three and-a-half million and five million Ukrainians died during this period, and many of the babushkas lost their fathers. Some almost died themselves since, during the Holodomor, starving villagers sometimes resorted to cannibalism, slaughtering one child to save the rest. Three months after moving there, Maria and her family returned to their home in the Exclusion Zone.
When I meet her, she’s standing on her porch in sub-zero weather, looking healthy and stout, wearing a cotton housedress and a threadbare sweater. Maria recalls the day that Soviet troops, under orders from Stalin, marched on to the Urupa family farm.
'They took away two bulls, two pigs and all the potatoes,’ Maria says. 'My father was working for the church, which was not allowed then.’ When her father asked if he could keep a few potatoes, the soldiers threatened to kill him if he tried, saying, “Your soul will fly away, and we’ll wrap your guts around the telephone wire.”’
After Stalin came the Nazis, who slashed their way across Ukraine in the 1940s, raping and killing. About 10.5 million Ukrainians died during the Second World War. Having survived all that, the babushkas were not inclined to cut and run after the Chernobyl explosion created invisible threats in the air, soil and water.
Hanna, who as an infant was nearly eaten by her family during the Holodomor, says it succinctly: 'Starvation is what scares me. Not radiation.’Most of the babushkas share the belief that 'if you leave, you die’. They would rather risk exposure to radiation than the soul-crushing prospect of being separated from their homes. 'You can’t take me from my mother; you can’t take me from my motherland. Motherland is motherland,’ says Hanna.


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Maria Vitosh, 86, says, 'A pigeon flies close to his nest. I would never leave my home.’ She receives a monthly government pension of 800 hryvnia (about £60). Her son lives in a neighbouring village and worked in Chernobyl for 12 years after the accident, planting trees. Photo: RENA EFFENDI/ INSITUTE

One refrain I heard often was, 'Those who left are worse off now. They are all dying of sadness. ’What sounds like faith may actually be fact. According to reports by the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Children’s Fund, many of those who were relocated after the accident now suffer from anxiety, depression and disrupted social networks, the traumas of displaced people everywhere.
And these conditions seem to have health effects as real as those caused by radiation. The journalist Alexander Anisimov, who spent his career studying the self-settler community, claimed that the women who returned to their ancestral homes in the zone outlived those who left by a decade.
No health studies have been done, but anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the babushkas die of strokes rather than any obvious radiation-related illnesses, and they have dealt better with the psychological trauma. Toxic levels of strontium and cesium in the soil are real, but so are the tug of the ancestral home and the health benefits of determining one’s own destiny.
East or West, pig fat or organic almond butter, few would deny that being happy helps you live longer. At first, of course, the main victims were those who were initially exposed to extreme doses of radiation. After the first responders were felled, the Soviets deployed robots to put out the fire, but radiation levels were so high the machines went berserk.
The government then sent in a phalanx of human beings, dubbed liquidators, the translation of a Russian word that can also mean 'cleaner’. Galina Konyushok, now 71, was called to duty as a liquidator almost immediately. She worked in a nearby bread factory at the time of the accident and was charged with driving to the town of Chernobyl every day to pick up wheat so the government could feed the people working the disaster.
Of course, the wheat itself was highly contaminated. Sitting today with three babushka neighbours in a kitchen bright with the reflection of the snow outside, Galina, who has thyroid cancer, looks strong and healthy. She lives in the town of Zirka, a few hundred yards outside the Exclusion Zone, whose boundary is demarcated by a chain-link and barbed-wire fence.
Although it would be a stretch to call the babushkas a sisterhood, a deep camaraderie connects these women who have spent their entire lives in the area. They help one another at slaughtering time. They visit each other’s homes (on foot; they do not have cars) to play cards and gamble. 'But not for money. I keep telling them, the more you play, the more your brain works,’ Galina says, laughing.
They joke about moving in together if heating-gas prices get too high (they are on fixed, modest government pensions), but emotional attachment to their homes runs too deep for that; home is the entire cosmos of the rural babushka.
They have electricity, but most villages in the zone have a single phone; nobody has running water. Those with a television might sit with needlework to watch a soap opera after the chickens are fed and the wood is chopped. When asked about the dearth of men, Galina responds, 'The men died, and the women stayed. I wish I had a husband to quarrel with!’
In a corner of Galina’s house, beneath a bright window, stands the bed where her husband died 17 years ago (after making her promise never to leave their home). Galina’s exquisite embroidery gives warmth and colour to the three-room house where she’s lived for 52 years and raised four children.
On a small table, a dozen or so medicines, an identification card and a blood-pressure machine tell a more sombre story. An ID reading 'disabled, first group’ indicates her liquidator status and her thyroid cancer. She waves away the medicines, as if to shoo off their significance, and shows me a piece of fabric embroidered with the message, 'Bring happiness and health to my motherland.’


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Galina Konyushok, 71, formerly a 'liquidator’ of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, now lives alone in Zirka village. She knits and makes traditional folk patterns and images of Christ on Ukranian cotton fabric. Photo: RENA EFFENDI/ INSITUTE

'I’m not afraid of anything anymore. It’s difficult to be old, but I still want to live,’ she says. Findings about the long-term health effects of Chernobyl are controversial and contradictory. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that more than 4,000 deaths will eventually be linked to Chernobyl, and it reports that thyroid-cancer rates have shot up in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, largely among those contaminated in the weeks immediately following the accident.
However, WHO now considers the psychological impact to be at least as detrimental as the physical. Being depressed and unmotivated, pursuing an unhealthy lifestyle and clinging to a victim mind-set, it says, has proved to be the worst fall-out for the 'Chernobylites’. Other organisations, such as Greenpeace, contend that Chernobyl is responsible for tens of thousands of illnesses and deaths, even though these cannot yet be scientifically linked to the accident.
All agree it will be generations before the consequences of Chernobyl can be fully understood. For now, the women’s spirit shines amid the bleak dead zone. Flashing a glint of gold from her lone tooth, Hanna reveals she has saved another pig to slaughter.
'I only think of the good things in life,’ she tells me, rolling on to the balls of her feet. 'Come back tomorrow,’ she says, holding up a chunk of thick pig fat. 'We’re going to party.’
All ages are correct from the time of the interviews. Holly Morris is currently making a documentary, The Babushkas of Chernobyl. A version of this article appeared in MORE magazine

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