The young democracies which arose from the ashes of the Marxist-Leninist experiment have witnessed political, economic and social revolutions.
The medical consequences are still felt today by children in Ukraine and Belarus, many of whom are consigned to the care of under-financed charities for the afflicted of families who cannot afford to pay for expensive treatments the memory of Chernobyl is a thing of flesh and blood. Taking what they could carry upon their backs, they said farewell to the homes of their ancestors and departed upon the evacuation busses. Tens of thousands of families were displaced and dispossessed by the accident, afflicted by thyroid cancer and innumerable other health problems. The disaster saw the Soviet Union’s claim over technological mastery become a thing without substance, dispersed into the winds along with the toxic radioactivity that was choked out by the flames at Reactor IV. To those in the post-Soviet sphere the Zone is a site of near-religious veneration, a mythical topos of mourning and regret a petrified memorial to the passing of political modernity.
Disaster tourists (the author sadly amongst their number) return from expensive, government-sanctioned tours armed with anecdotes of urban decay to sober and delight their friends. To Western eyes the disaster is an abstract thing, fodder for sensationalist documentaries or dinner-party polemics about the terrible price of Communist government. The contemporary world is alien to that which produced the Zone, but for many who lived through or suffered the consequences of the event it remains pregnant with meaning and sorrow. Today the threat of nuclear Armageddon has been supplanted by the neurotic fear of traveling on the wrong airliner at the wrong time, the bearded suicide bomber taking over from the crypto-Red as the great bogeyman of the Western psyche. The vast Soviet Empire crumbled, as all imperial edifices must with it vanished the client states that Moscow used as a defensive bulwark against invasion from the West, thus bringing a new European geopolitical order into being. Those three decades since the disaster inaugurated a period of change perhaps unprecedented in the history of mankind. In the West, the thirtieth anniversary of the Chernobyl Disaster has passed with the usual photo-galleries and retrospective articles providing for the amusement and education of chattering classes while in Kiev candles were lit in solemn commemoration of an unparalleled national catastrophe.
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