Vodka
By Serge Schmemann | The New York Times | April 27, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/opinion/27thu4.html?th&emc=th
The huge volume of recollections, photographs and documentaries
dedicated to the anniversary of Chernobyl speaks to the
extraordinary force that catastrophe still has 20 years later.
That's not surprising: commemorations of great disasters are a way
to pay tribute to the victims and the heroes, to learn to live with
nightmares and fears. They are occasions to try to understand why
such things happen, to ensure they won't happen again, to ask what
our reactions revealed about us. The greatest catastrophes take on a
personality, a name: Bhopal, Oklahoma City, 9/11, the tsunami. These
names and others have entered the language as symbols of apocalyptic
tragedies.
Each disaster has its own unique attributes. Chernobyl, for me,
stands for a fear that many have described in recent days, a fear of
an evil that cannot be seen or fathomed. I was a reporter in Moscow
at the time and lived through the anxiety and questions that gripped
us all in the hours, days, weeks and even months after we got the
first word of the disaster, one paragraph from Tass that still ranks
as one of the great understatements of all time: "An accident has
occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as one of the reactors
was damaged."
That's all. Unlike most of the natural or manmade threats we
confront, this one had no face, no presence, no visible menace.
There was no black thundercloud firing bolts of lightning, no
powerful wind bending trees to the ground, no huge building
disappearing into a vast cloud of dust. There was only the knowledge
that a great, invisible, mysterious killer had been loosed on the
world.
The actual fire at Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl power plant in
Ukraine had been put out long before we even learned that it had
happened. And it was one of the finest springs in memory in Ukraine,
Belarus and western Russia, whose beauty belied the fear that the
air, the ground and the leaves could be burning and altering our
very genes.
My recollection of my first visit to Kiev, about five weeks after
the accident, was of a wondrously clear sky and chestnut trees thick
with blooms and of wet streets continuously washed by water
trucks, of playgrounds without children, of empty streets at 9 p.m.
when the main evening TV news show began, or when the wind suddenly
shifted and blew from the direction of Chernobyl. Orange signs on
main routes pointed to "Chernobyl" to guide the convoys of trucks
bearing equipment to the reactor. Wet carpets were laid out in
hotels and public buildings for people to clean their soles, and I
found myself obsessively washing my hands and my hair to clear away
what people came to call "the dust."
Word went out that vodka and wine could help, and people drank all
they could get their hands on. Geiger counters appeared everywhere
the police ran them over tires at checkpoints outside Kiev;
technicians in white coats ran them over cucumbers at the farmers'
market. When I returned to Moscow, my wife made me take off my shoes
and clothes in the entrance hall, before I got near the children.
She secretly threw the clothes away. Though the washing may have
been useful, all these measures seem, in retrospect, to have been
more of an effort to give the invisible, pervasive enemy a form, so
we could believe we were doing something against it.
Everyone was hungry for information, but for a long time there was
pitifully little. The accident occurred in the second year of
Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership, before his new policy of openness
had fully taken hold. The Kremlin reacted initially with its usual
snarling secrecy, saying as little as possible and blaming the West
for raising a "hullabaloo around the accident." Whatever scraps that
could be gleaned spread instantly, and everyone soon became an
expert on dosimeters, permissible exposure, gamma rays.
We know a lot more today about Chernobyl and about nuclear power. We
know why the reactor blew, and we know how to make nuclear plants
that are far safer. But we still don't know the full toll of
Chernobyl, nor what to do with that deadly ruin and its cracked
concrete "sarcophagus," nor what harm it may still be
causing. "Chernobyl" remains what it became 20 years ago, the name
of a horror that doesn't show itself .
--
This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected]
If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
- Visit your group "ZESTGlobal" on the web.
- To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
