Into the Zone: the Ruins of Chernobyl

Into the Zone: the Ruins of Chernobyl

The facts about Chernobyl are well known: early in the morning of 26 April 1986, a series of explosions destroyed the building and reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear station. The enormous quantities of radioactive material that were released contaminated vast geographical areas from Belarus to Sweden. A 30-km exclusion zone was set up around the site and all inhabitants, including the 49,000 people that lived in the purpose-built town of Pripyat were evacuated. Today, people are slowly returning to villages and farms in the zone, but Pripyat still stands empty.

I visited the zone in October 2007; first to the reactor itself and then to the ruins of Pripyat. Even if one is used to visiting ruins – as I was – touring Chernobyl and Pripyat is a deeply unsettling experience. In the West, ruins on this scale usually only present themselves in fictive representations: that is, in literature and film and not in the flesh, so to speak. Experiencing the ruins of Chernobyl invites thoughts about the value, or otherwise, of industrial ruin; their unprecedented scale invites an altogether different meditation on the ruin of the city as a whole and perhaps, too, of civilization itself.

Monumental Ruin: the Reactor

Chernobyl’s damaged reactor is approached through a car park where cleaners sit smoking as if in any other office environment. For visitors, the reactor is described in a purpose-built building housing a small exhibition and a prominent electronic radiation meter on the wall. Although the reactor is barely 100 metres away, the blinds are shut and the story of the reactor is described through a model that opens up to reveal the ruin it conceals, rendered in painstaking detail: from the reactor core, whose 2000-ton lid was blown off and into the side walls of the building; to the improvised methods of salvage, such as these wooden palettes holding up a ceiling. If architects’ models offer an imagined future constructive process, this model presents the very reverse: a constructive rendering of past destruction that is now, and will always be, hidden.

Yet, this model of ruin is also counterbalanced by the present status of the reactor as monument or sarcophagus, as it is commonly known. In order for the safe decay of the huge quantities of radioactive material inside the reactor, a protective structure will need to be in place for at least 10,000 years. This sarcophagus currently consists of giant slabs of concrete mounted in haste by robots and helicopters in the months after the accident. Gaps have opened up and the roof is not fixed down, being simply laid on the top of the walls. The danger of collapse has led to a new ‘final solution’ to house the sarcophagus, a 20,000 ton steel arch that is being constructed over the existing structure; but this process of repair and re-housing will have to continue long after all our present monuments become ruins. The reactor is, in effect, an ironic ruin and monument: according to Peter Gould, ‘the pyramid of our technical age, a symbol of our achievements to the thousands of generations to come’.

Petrified ​R​uin: Pripyat

The strange mixing up of conventional notions of ruin and monument experienced at Chernobyl are further complicated by the ruined town of Pripyat, 1km northwest of the reactor. Founded in 1970 to house construction workers and staff of the Chernobyl power plant, Pripyat was designed as an exemplary socialist town and represents the realisation of the ideal modernist city blueprint, albeit within a strictly socialist context. It is important to emphasise Pripyat’s model status because its ruins are set against the now eternal reactor sarcophagus seen from every rooftop of the town’s buildings; once again, conventional architectural roles have been reversed: the ruin becomes a model; the model becomes a ruin.

If one is a lover of industrial ruins, walking through the empty, decaying buildings of Pripyat might seem to represent an opportunity for extreme pleasure. So, for example, I felt a pleasing surprise in the arbitrary arrangements of once ordered things – broken strip lights in a supermarket; or the sudden reappearance of utopian objects from the past – socialist icons left in a room in the palace of culture; or the excess of meaning generated by inexplicable objects and juxtapositions – rusted hat stands alone in a decaying room. For Tim Edensor and others, such experiences are potentially transformative, ‘suggesting new forms of thought and comprehension, and … new conceptions of space that confirm the potential of the human to integrate itself, to be whole and free outside of any predetermined system’. Yet, such positive assessments of industrial ruins tend to present them as alternative spaces within the ordered, modern city. It is one thing encountering an industrial ruin in the midst of the ceaseless life of the city; it is quite another if all is ruin, if there is no counterbalancing order at all.

As I proceeded through Pripyat, the sense of ruin quickly became overwhelming: the strange beauty of peeling walls in corridors soon became simply a reminder of the vastness of all that is not seen; the decay of the conventional architectural signs of civilisation – hospitals, schools, supermarkets, hotels – a wearisome succession of incommensurable losses. And the decay seen is not what it seems: not a product of the return of natural processes of decomposition, but from two decades of systematic looting; a consequence of the residents being forced to leave all their belongings behind when the town was evacuated. Finally, juxtapositions of objects were unbearably poignant – children’s toys left on the decaying remains of a merry-go-round; or simply sinister – a rusty gynecological chair and gas mask in the grounds of the hospital.

Indeed, for the ‘voices of Chernobyl’ – those who experienced the accident and its aftermath at first hand – the site represents something much more than a technological ruin: for one witness ‘Chernobyl was a way into infinity…it shattered existing boundaries’; for another ‘the World no longer seemed eternal as it had done before … we had been deprived of immortality’. For many Chernobyl represented the end of communism, even if its final collapse was delayed until 1991. Before Chernobyl they were protected by the Soviet state apparatus; after it, they were forced to become individuals again, left alone in their own private zones. The sense of Chernobyl as both technological and cosmic catastrophe is embodied in the experience of the spaces of Pripyat and more specifically, in the ‘city-like’ quality of it. With its endless blank corridors, disorientating repetition, and the evidence of violent human agency at work in its spaces, Pripyat is more ruined city than collection of industrial ruins, inviting meditation on loss on a cosmic scale.

The City in Ruins

Since the rise of the modern industrial city in the nineteenth century, visions of its ruin have functioned as a counter-current to the dominant discourse of progress and improvement. Indeed, the ruined city has become a standard trope within literary and particularly filmic post-apocalyptic visions. Within these visions, one theme has come to define the city’s quality of emptiness: the uncanny. First associated with the Roman city of Pompeii, which was excavated in the early nineteenth century, the uncanny came to signal a city that was literally buried alive, with traces of everyday life surviving with a startling immediacy; its homely spaces – streets, shops and houses – now, according to Sigmund Freud, ‘petrified in dead immobility’.

Pripyat has been dubbed by at least one commentator the ‘modern Pompeii’. Pripyat is uncanny because it is a familiar place in which one feels homeless – helpless in the face of forces beyond one’s understanding. It is this sense of helplessness that links the experience of Pripyat with our present-day concerns about the possible future ruin of our cities, whether forced upon us by climate change or other hostile forces. In this context, helplessness may then be conceived as a positive, life-enhancing response to the inevitable and even, according to Richard Sennett, a quality of being that stimulates an enhanced awareness of others. If the voices of Chernobyl and Pripyat are to speak to us clearly, they must do so through the ruin that bears witness to them, and through the pain that defines their own continuing helplessness and the solidarity created when that pain is acknowledged and shared – ‘our only capital’ according to one witness. In this sense, ruins become the foundation on which to build the future.