Fallout

photo by Jo Hyde

‘All we Chernobyl people are distressed for the people suffering from the Fukushima NPP’, a friend from Ukraine wrote to me a few days ago. Natasha was about seven in 1986, when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. She hardly remembers anything about it. Yet she still considers herself one of the ‘Chernobyl people’.

According to a UN report being widely quoted in the media at the moment, the total number of deaths that can definitely be attributed to the Chernobyl meltdown is twenty-eight. These were all emergency and plant workers involved in the immediate clean-up. A further fifteen people later died of thyroid cancer, out of over six thousand reported cases of the illness in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia after 1986.

These figures are being used to argue that nuclear power, while not perfect, is a valid answer to our energy needs, is indeed the only large-scale option open to us since it is so vastly less environmentally damaging than coal-fired power stations, and while alternative methods are still so undeveloped.

When I accompanied a UN mission into the Chernobyl exclusion zone several years ago, what really struck me was how little these experts seemed to know. It was all “We think… we expect… we can’t actually predict…” There was nothing to compare Chernobyl with; nothing like it had ever happened before. As the report itself admits,

‘…it is not possible to state scientifically that radiation caused a particular cancer in an individual. “This means that in terms of specific individuals, it is impossible to determine whether their cancers are due to the effects of radiation or to other causes, or moreover, whether they are due to the accident or background radiation.”

And because of “unacceptable uncertainties in the predictions,” the Committee decided not to use models to project absolute numbers of effects in populations exposed to low doses, the report said.’

Such an admitted lack of knowledge can be used to argue both ways. The cases of cancer and other illnesses can be probably attributed to Chernobyl radiation – or probably not. Who knows?

And what many quoters of this report have ignored is this, what seems to me crucial sentence in the summary:

‘…the severe disruption caused by the accident resulted in “major social and economic impact and great distress for the affected populations”.

It is so misleading to judge the scale of a disaster only by the number of deaths it (probably) directly caused. What about all those pregnant women forced to have abortions in Ukraine because they were told they might give birth to monsters? What about all the families who left everything they possessed behind and could never go back for it? The children sent away from their parents for months, like my friend Natasha, to safer southern regions? All these people who still, twenty-five years on, call themselves “Chernobyl people’.

My neighbour in Kiev was a telephone operator in 1986. She remembers the calls pouring in to rich and important people that she had to route on 26th April: get away, get out, leave everything, leave – and meanwhile not a single word about what it all meant or might mean to her and the other operators, the ordinary people no one cared about. Like everyone else without government connections, she stayed in Kiev with her family and went out into the streets for the Mayday celebrations less than a week later.

The fallout from the Chernobyl disaster was, and still is, utterly unpredictable. Those children sent abroad through the Chernobyl children’s funds and exposed to Western ideas. People like my neighbour, or the emergency workers dosed only with red wine and vodka to counter the radiation, shown so graphically how little the authorities cared for them.

A few years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone has now become an incredibly rich nature reserve where scientists are still trying to work out the long-term results of radiation on the flora and fauna. They still don’t know, they might never know. And Pripyat, the evacuated town where my friend Natasha lived as a little girl, is now a sort of disaster theme park, a vast art installation labelled: Abandoned Town After The Apocalypse. Things Left Behind.

(You can see it in the background picture heading this blog).

I don’t know what the fallout from Fukushima will be. I don’t believe anyone knows. And I too feel for all those suffering from this and from the earthquake in Japan; a terrible natural disaster compounded by human short-sightedness and error.

In the headlines again for the wrong reasons

I know nothing about snooker and care about as much. What I want to know is, why did this have to happen in Ukraine? Did snooker world champion John Higgins fly out to Kiev specially to discuss match-fixing with people who, he claims, scared him so much he would agree to anything they asked? Oh, and he seems in fact to have no idea what country he was in anyway: in his own words “I didn’t know if this was the Russian mafia or who we were dealing with. At that stage I felt the best course of action was just to play along with these guys and get out of Russia.” So we’ve established the man’s a moron, if not actually crooked.

When I was working as a journalist in Kiev, me and my colleagues used to joke that if Ukraine got into the international news, you could guarantee the story would involve sex, the mafia or some kind of bizarre disaster or fatality. True to form, this story appears to combine at least two of those, and Mr Higgins has fallen for, or fallen back on, the same old media stereotypes.

We joked, but it annoyed and depressed me, and still does. Ukraine has become the country people go to to behave badly, whether it’s to be a sex tourist, drink too much, set up a sleazy news story or make dishonest deals that can break a sport and a reputation.

PS – I do realise I’m completely missing the point of this story and probably no one else will have even noticed where the discussion took place…

Taking it for granted

It’s been a long time since I’ve lived in the UK, and I am frequently taken by surprise by affairs in my native land that everyone else takes for granted. For example, voting. It turns out (of course I should have known this) that all you need to vote in Britain is a name registered at an address. It doesn’t need to be your name and address, because no one will check it.

I’ve clearly lived too long in countries that do not take democracy for granted, because this fact absolutely amazes me.

In Ukraine and Russia, you have to take your passport to the polling station to be allowed to vote. These countries of course have a venerable history of mass election fraud. It was Ukrainian/Russian writer Nikolai Gogol who coined the phrase ‘Dead Souls’: in his eponymous book, these are serfs who still exist on registers despite having died, and which the main character ‘collects’ in order to create an entirely fake existence as a wealthy serf-owner.

‘Dead souls’ is now a common phrase in Russian. Dead souls are deceased citizens still on election registers who manage to vote, or living people whose votes are cast by someone else, or even non-existent people invented in order to create an entirely fictional electoral majority. It’s claimed that in the 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections, there were up to three million false or dead soul votes.

Sixty-one percent of registered voters used their ballots in the last UK general election. That means there were just over seventeen million potential dead souls. Anyone inspired by, for example, the post-Soviet idea of democracy, would not have had to invent people, or bring them back from the dead, to get a majority. They would just have had to take advantage of the apathy of seventeen million people.

I had to leave the UK and live abroad to come to appreciate Britain’s tradition of democracy and civil liberties. Sure, there are many things wrong (as there are many things wrong with the way we use that word ‘democracy’). But the fact that we are still so confident of our basic honesty and our right to be heard or to keep silent that we will take our ballot papers on trust is at once wonderful – and strangely depressing.

In Ukraine, even with the passport system, no one can assume that their vote is not going to be cast by someone else. In Britain, we just can’t quite be bothered to either use the voting system as it is meant to be used, or even to exploit its potential for abuse.

A pretence that no one pretends to believe

It’s a horrible irony even for a country that abounds in horrible ironies. Ukraine has voted, in a presidential election deemed free and fair by foreign observers, for the very person it rose in revolution against just over five years ago.

Back then, for half the country at least Viktor Yanukovych was a symbol of stupidity and brute force, of unwanted Moscow interference and Soviet-style mass fraud. Since then he has hired Western PR experts to clean up his image, but the slogan under which he has been elected this time round is a humble and domestic one enough – A Ukraine for Human Beings.

If we consider the last ninety years (the last nine hundred…), it’s fairly clear that the territory that’s now Ukraine has a pretty poor track record for respecting human beings, and in that light, Yanukovych’s election promise seems, well, unpromising.

Yet more unpromising is the geographical picture of the election results, splitting Ukraine precisely in half – East for Yanukovych, West for his opponent Yulia Tymoshenko. Just the same as five years ago. I think President Yushchenko, elected after the Orange Revolution,  failed in many ways, but the failure to even slightly unite his country ranks as his biggest.

So is everything the Orange Revolution stood for truly dead and buried? Before November 2004, everyone in Ukraine knew perfectly well that protesters drummed up to take part in political demonstrations were being paid. Voters were paid, or coerced (like prison and hospital inmates instructed by guards and doctors who to vote for). But it was impossible to get anyone involved to admit this openly, on camera or in writing. It was like the old Soviet jokes, where people picked apart the façade of the system they were living under, but only in the relative privacy of their kitchens, and only under the relatively safe guise of humour.

Post the Orange Revolution, and the protests that people joined genuinely, requiring no payment other than the chance to actually have their true opinions heard – that changed. People were no longer afraid to speak publicly about bribery and coercion. They felt free.

That was a wonderful fact; a real, true sea change.

And yet in Kiev and elsewhere, month after month and year after year, in support of whichever oligarch or party can pay for them, marches and tent camps have gone on, full of people who are being paid to be there. Everyone knows they are being paid. Participants openly tell the TV cameras how much and by whom. The demonstrations are a pretence that no one even pretends to believe anymore.

So what the hell is the point of having them? There is no point, unless to keep a floating population of unemployed and students occupied and away from protesting something they actually do care about and that might actually change things.

The Orange Revolution, I think, did alter an important thing inside people’s heads. It brought confidence and a sense of freedom, of being able to speak out. But that has yet to translate into any new way of running the country. Politicians still fall back on the same old bullshit, voters fall back on the same old weary cynicism. This time around, Ukrainians voted in a free and fair election. These days they joke in public. But that doesn’t make the jokes any less bitter.

Telling the winter away

It’s Russian Orthodox Christmas, and Russian Orthodox winter weather. I love weather this cold. It’s so perfectly clean and sharp and uncompromising. It’s too cold for the snow to melt into slush, only to harden into slick grey rivers of ice. When the sun sets the snowy fields seem to glow pink from the inside. The moon turns them absolute, pure blue.

It’s weather as it should be, as it is on the Christmas cards, in the fairy tales. When there is a warm house to come home to, hot crumpets and ginger tea; when father Frost, cracking his long fingers, wraps abandoned Marfa in furs and sends her home to her wicked stepmother with gifts of silver and gold – then it is more than bearable.

This is what Orthodox Christmas is like now in a tiny Ukrainian village, in temperatures lower than this, in a house pretty much identical to one built a hundred years ago, to a house in a Russian fairytale:

No sign of kolyadki (carols) or Christmas. The only people on the street are waiting for the bus, which trundles through all lit up and steamy-windowed and crammed with passengers in fat padded coats, like a little travelling fragment of civilization that all too soon passes on and leaves behind the introverted houses and empty ice-blown street and silent woods under their weight of snow. A wicked wind blowing, loaded with snow as fine as smoke, and yet there are drifts already piled knee-deep in corners. The cottages are curled in on themselves, doors and windows firmly closed, and I suppose inside them everyone is curled up on their Russian stoves like bears hibernating, waiting out the winter.

Baba Lena falls asleep at 6pm, so she can get up at an unmentionable pitch-black 3am to chop the pumpkin for the goats and feed the chickens who live in the hallway for the winter, fat and roosting in the darkness. She dreamed of piglets three days before we arrived, and guessed from it that she would be getting visitors. A frivolous dream for such a hard place as this. So we are the three little pigs.

The day slips past with excruciating slowness. The light outside the frost-patterned window turns briefly blue. Then night comes and with it the feeling that it’s time for bed – but it’s only five o’ clock. Reading even the best book palls. There’s nothing on the two channels the ancient TV picks up except glossy adverts for things so irrelevant to the village as to be incomprehensible – flights to distant countries, mobile phones, sanitary towels for immaculate young women in airports, bars, sparkling gyms. There is nothing to tidy, nothing to cook. The pack of cards contains only thirty-two cards. There are coloured chalks but no paper. You think of knitting socks, playing at riddles, of knotting rag rugs or stitching the embroidered linen sheets and towels that will one fine day be your dowry.

Outside, up and over the hill the winter and the woods stretch forever, inscribed with the paws of fox and hare, the dainty slots of deer, wide-spaced hoofs of elk, a crowd of cloven prints from galloping wild pigs.

Baba Lena tells us the story of the maddened elk that chased a hunter right into the village street before expiring on the doorstep of the korchma (pub). We are sitting on the stove top, luxuriating like Ilya Muromets in glorious soporific warmth, and this is how to get through the awful hardship of winter, this is what the winter is for: telling tales of devils and witches and wild beasts, bold black-browed girls and brave Cossacks, the unspeakable exploits of the neighbours and the village headman who once upon a time met Catherine the Great on her way to Crimea…

The last visible dog

There are lots of things, however contradictory, I knew I’d been missing about Ukraine. The chaotic, comprehensive markets, with their mountains of fabulous fruits and vegetables. Mushrooming in the forest. Ukrainian villages. Overnight trains. Three a.m. street singers of folk songs. Babushky on the benches outside the tower blocks, noting and commenting on everyone who goes in or out.

But when I arrived in Uzhgorod bus station, after six months away, I was greeted by something else I hadn’t even realised I’d been missing.

Ukraine’s homeless dogs. There are thousands of them in every town. Stray and semi-stray mongrels, they are generic Dog. They look like cartoon dogs, lounging in the dust, curled up comprehensively with their noses tucked in their tails, trotting about self-possessedly, waiting at red lights to cross the road. They don’t rely on anyone. Except for the puppies, which would still like to make friends with people, they get on with their own business and hope for a little help, a little tolerance, not too much interference. Like Sharik from Bulgakov’s A Dog’s Heart, if left alone they are probably better creatures than the system we live in makes of us.

It’s a thoroughly irresponsible view, I’m sure. No doubt they are a danger and a nuisance. Their lives, I expect, are nasty, brutish and short enough. I do know that the Ukrainian authorities’ way of dealing with them doesn’t really bear thinking about.

But that’s like most of the things I miss about Ukraine. They are awful and wonderful at once. They should probably be done away with to make the country more modern, efficient, wealthy, humane, European. But I selfishly hope they never vanish.

PS Anyone recognise where the (not entirely relevant) title is from?

Make do and mend part II

Illegal still for home-made vodka (samogon), Ukraine

Lost in time

Sometimes, on a still, silent, out-of-season day in Crimea, the past feels close enough to touch, as close as the next range of mountains looks in these astonishingly clear late Autumn afternoons.

I’ve been staying in South-West Crimea, and yesterday I climbed up to Shuldan cave monastery, where brother Anatoly lives in a way that can scarcely differ from that of the monks here a hundred or five hundred years ago.

From the caves I looked out over the hills down towards Sevastopol, and the cliffs by Balaklava, and the sea glittering silver. It’s a view, give or take a few factory chimneys and roads, which I guess a soldier in the Crimean war a hundred and sixty years ago would perfectly recognise, were he lucky enough to get away from fighting and cholera and make it up here, to fresh air and peace and brother Anatoly offering words of wisdom like pearls not to be cast before swine.

Still day-dreaming about Crimean war soldiers escaping from the battlefield, I walked on towards Eski-Kermen cave city (of which mediaeval travellers recorded that no one knew who built it or even what it was called…) I was climbing down into a valley when someone called out to me “Halt! Who goes there?”

Round the next outcrop of rock I came across peaked white tents, stacks of straw bales, and what seemed to be a heap of dismantled cannons.

“Have you been sent from the Spanish camp?” inquired a soldier in white breeches and blue coat, with white cross belts and gold buttons. Behind me, the sound of a musket being fired.

“Um, no…” said I, feebly, thinking that history had taken a step a little too close…

The soldier’s uniform was fifty years out of date for the Crimean war, and the Napoleonic war re-enactors (as they turned out to be) were preparing for a geographically inaccurate battle between French and Spanish. They weren’t particularly pleased to have me, in my hiking boots and rucksack, intrude on their fantasy, although they were impeccably polite. “Where are you from, sudarynya? England? And you’re travelling quite alone? Prikol’no.”

I didn’t say that they were intruding on my fantasy of the Crimean war, and that surely finding a whole camp of people dressed up in Napoleonic uniform in a remote valley usually inhabited only by horses was a good deal more prikol’no (funny). Anyway there was something inexpressibly charming about being addressed as sudarynya, like a lady in a story by Lermontov or Pushkin, in such unlikely surroundings.

I left them to their dreams and walked on busy with my own, hearing the whispers of the soldiers and settlers, the monks and wine-makers; the Tatars, Karaims, Khazars, Goths, Greeks, Genoese, Russians, Ukrainians… all the people who jostle so closely in the history of Crimea.

Make do and mend

home-made road sign, Ukraine

I’m always impressed by Ukrainians’ ability to mend things that are broken. Cars, computers, clothes, washing machines, shoes, toys… if they can’t fix it personally, for sure they will know where to go to get it fixed. A British friend of mine in Kiev complains that they mend things – cars, for instance – that shouldn’t be mended, and that end up being a danger to all concerned. Being myself less than a fan of Western throw-away culture, I prefer to concentrate on how they fix things that theoretically can’t be fixed, somehow heroically overcoming the modern curse of built-in obsolescence.

Ukrainians are master menders. So why is it, I wonder, that they are unable to mend their country? Ukraine seems to go on lurching from crisis to crisis, somehow not quite collapsing but never being fixed, and the Ukrainians I know are just throwing up their hands, rolling their eyes, shrugging – or not even bothering to do that anymore; just keeping their heads down and suffering.

I suppose you could say Ukraine is like one of those cars my British friend complains about, that should have been scrapped years ago but that somehow keeps going, cobbled together with wire and string and God knows what else, presenting a danger to its menders and to everyone else.

Or you could say that Ukrainians have been stuck with some factors of built-in obsolescence – a bloody history of endless invasion, occupation and repression, a problematic geographical location between Europe and Russia, a confused cultural identity – and have achieved the impossible with them, fixing something that theoretically can’t be fixed. It might not work quite as well as a new model briefly would, but that it works at all is a testament to the heroic perseverance and ingenuity of the master menders.

The taste of spring

In Ukraine it’s birch sap collecting time. All through the forests there are glass jars and earthenware jugs propped at the base of the trees, filling with the essence of spring.

“It’s running well,” says the man I meet in the wood, hammering hollow elder-wood spouts into the white tree trunks to channel this unstoppable flow.

Fresh from the tree, it tastes like the most delicious water you could dream of. A little bit green, a little bit gold; eversoslightly sweet, a tang of moss and mould and earth and promise. It runs and runs like magic.

The birch sap’s flowing the same way blood runs faster now that the sun’s shining and the world’s turning and summer’s coming.