Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
clothes—are nowhere near as scary or stylish as gamma rays. We walked off to another part
of the market, the annoyed vendor calling after us in protest, “But beta is the best!”
Another man had been eavesdropping and now approached us. He knew of a better place
to find radiation detectors, he said, just a five-minute walk up the street. He would be happy
to take us there. We left Karavayevi Dachi behind and made our way up a tree-lined street
of brick apartment blocks.
Our guide's name was Volod. A middle-aged man with receding hair brushed straight
back, he wore a beige coat over a striped beige shirt and beige jeans, and didn't seem to
have much more of an idea than I did of where we were going. Our five-minute walk grew
to fifteen and then twenty minutes, and I became progressively less convinced that we were
detector-bound.
Striking up a conversation, we soon learned that Volod had been a communications of-
ficer in the Soviet army during the 1980s and had worked in the Exclusion Zone for two
weeks, starting a month after the accident.
I asked him if he had received a liquidator's certificate. The “liquidators,” in the creepy
argot of the accident, were the thousands of workers, mostly soldiers, who had spent
months razing villages to the ground and covering them with fresh earth, washing off roads,
even chopping down and burying entire contaminated forests. The destroyed reactor had
coated the landscape with radioactive dust and peppered it with actual chunks of nuclear
fuel hurled clear by the explosion. It had been critical not to leave all that waste out in the
open, where it could be tracked out of the zone or blown into the air by the wind. The li-
quidators' job was to clean it all up.
Many liquidators received high doses of radiation, and in consideration for their work,
they were given special ID certificates that confirmed their status as veterans of the disaster
cleanup. They were entitled to certain benefits, including special healthcare and preferen-
tial treatment in the housing system, but these benefits varied depending on each liquidat-
or's dosage, on how soon after the accident he'd gotten there, and on how long he'd worked
in the zone. A new mess was created—this time governmental. The system was riddled
with loopholes, inconsistent in awarding benefits, and extravagant in its opportunities for
corruption.
Volod told us he had not received a certificate. He hadn't been in the zone long enough,
or early enough, he said. He didn't want to talk about it.
We were a good half hour from Karavayevi Dachi when he cried out. He had spotted the
fabled detector store at last, among a small row of shops on the ground floor of an office
building. We entered at a triumphant stride.
